Capital 2B: the $75 million bet on India's deeptech founders who are 'too early'

Most Indian VCs will tell you deeptech is 'too early'. Capital 2B was built on the opposite bet: that backing founders at the science stage, when the world still calls them too early, is exactly how the biggest outcomes in Indian venture will be made.

Launched in 2022, Capital 2B is a $75 million fund dedicated to tech and IP-led businesses. Its backing tells you a lot about the quality of the company it keeps: the fund counts Info Edge and Temasek among its investors, two institutions that rarely lend their names to a fund unless the team behind it has serious operating depth.

The partners bring exactly that. Vibhore Sharma, a self-taught technologist who rose to become the chief technology officer of Info Edge India, leads the fund's technology vision, while Amit Behl, an IIM Calcutta alumnus with close to two decades across private equity and venture capital, brings the investment rigour. It is an operator-investor pairing purpose-built for a category where judging whether the technology will actually work is the hardest part of the job.

Capital 2B writes its first cheques at the pre-seed, seed, and Series A stages, with ticket sizes ranging from $200,000 to $3 million. The fund deliberately aims to be the first institutional investor on a startup's cap table, and positions itself to keep backing winners through the growth journey with patient capital rather than chasing quick exits.

The fund's investment focus falls across four segments: anything that makes a platform or product more intelligent, in software or hardware; enterprise and consumer apps; developer tools and infrastructure; and emerging technologies. The firm's own description of its edge is that it sits 'where science becomes engineering, as computation reshapes the physical world, biology becomes programmable, and materials unlock new capabilities'. If you are building at that intersection, you are squarely in their strike zone.

The portfolio is already showing the range of that mandate. It includes Matter Motor Works in electric vehicles, MetaMorphoSys in digital insurance, Manastu Space in green propulsion and space tech, Castler in fintech infrastructure, Ahammune Biosciences in healthtech, alongside bets like Beatoven.ai, Blubirch, Botsync, Leumas, HyperNorm AI and Kloudlite. The fund aims to build a concentrated portfolio of around 20 to 25 startups.

What sets Capital 2B apart, in Vibhore Sharma's own words, is operational experience: helping deeptech founders get product-market fit right, sharpen go-to-market strategy, set up organisational structures, scale operations and, crucially, raise the next round. Deeptech startups notoriously struggle to raise capital after Series A, and having an investor that explicitly signs up for that hard part of the journey matters.

For founders, the practical takeaway is straightforward. If you are building a company rooted in science and technology, with real intellectual property and problems that matter rather than incremental software, Capital 2B wants to meet you early — ideally before anyone else institutional does. Come with an original insight, a view on why the timing is right, and evidence your technology works.