Advanced materials, photonics, metamaterials, graphene, composites, semiconductor materials, battery materials, and next-generation manufacturing innovations from India.
IIT Madras-founded Discovered Materials has raised $9 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed India Partners, with Y Combinator and Peak XV also participating, to build AI agents that discover new materials and speed their adoption into semiconductor chips — starting with thermal management.
Manik Gupta
Author
An IIT Bhubaneswar–led international team has synchronised more than 100,000 nanoscale spintronic oscillators in about 45 nanoseconds, a Nature Nanotechnology result that advances the hunt for energy-efficient, brain-like computing hardware.
Manik Gupta
Author
Tulon Materials has raised ₹10 crore in a seed round led by investor Karthik Sundar Iyer, with Valour Capital participating, to commercialise a proprietary process that upcycles complex plastic waste into high-value chemical resins for paints, inks and adhesives.
Manik Gupta
Author
IISc researchers have built a porous, beehive-like crystal whose magnetism can be switched on and off reversibly — by heat, light, pressure or passing gases — near room temperature, a long-sought goal with uses in memory, quantum hardware and sensing.
Manik Gupta
Author
Gurugram-based recycler Karo Sambhav has raised ₹56 crore in a pre-Series A round led by Zerodha's Rainmatter — its first outside capital in nine years — to scale 'urban mining' of critical minerals from India's e-waste. The bet ties a circular-economy business directly to India's National Critical Minerals Mission.
Manik Gupta
Author
ISRO has started its CE20 cryogenic engine in 'bootstrap' mode, with no auxiliary start-up system, for 10 seconds under vacuum, a feat it believes may be a world first for a gas-generator-cycle cryogenic engine. The payoff: lighter rockets and the multiple in-flight restarts that multi-orbit and deep-space missions demand.
Manik Gupta
Author
On its 24 December 2025 LVM3-M6 mission, also ISRO's 100th orbital launch, ISRO debuted electromechanical actuators on the giant S200 solid boosters, replacing hydraulics. The switch trims inert mass and adds an estimated 150 kg of payload, part of a steady upgrade path on India's heavy-lifter.
Manik Gupta
Author
MosChip Technologies has delivered a custom 28nm system-on-chip to ISRO's Space Applications Centre for the NavIC navigation programme, completing silicon bring-up of an end-to-end turnkey ASIC, a step toward low-power, mass-market NavIC receivers designed in India.
Manik Gupta
Author
On 3 September 2025 ISRO's LPSC opened an Integrated Titanium Alloy Propellant Tank Production Facility at Tumakuru, bringing in-house a specialised metallurgy, electron-beam-welded, lightweight titanium tanks, that only a handful of global suppliers could previously deliver.
Manik Gupta
Author
DRDO's Solid State Physics Laboratory has developed home-grown processes for 4-inch silicon-carbide wafers and gallium-nitride HEMTs and MMICs up to X-band, with production established at GAETEC in Hyderabad, a wide-bandgap milestone that underpins AESA radar, electronic warfare and satellite communications.
Manik Gupta
Author
On 27 January 2026 ISRO hot-fired a sub-scale LOX-methane thrust chamber whose chamber and injector were entirely 3D-printed, reaching 56 bar with stable combustion. It is an early step, but it points at two futures at once: methane as India's reusable-rocket propellant, and additive manufacturing as the way those engines get built.
Manik Gupta
Author
