Yali Capital has emerged as one of India's most significant dedicated deep-tech venture funds. The firm closed its maiden fund at Rs 893 crore (approximately $104 million) in July 2025 — exceeding its target corpus of Rs 810 crore, which included a Rs 310 crore greenshoe option. The oversubscription signals strong LP confidence in India's deep-tech opportunity.
The fund's thesis is precise: back founders building world-class technology companies across semiconductors, defence, robotics, artificial intelligence, smart manufacturing, and life sciences. Chip design is a primary focus area — a notable bet given India's ambitions in semiconductor design and manufacturing. The firm invests in companies building from or for India with a global outlook, seeking exceptional teams solving hard technical problems with defensible intellectual property.
Yali Capital invests across Pre-Seed, Seed, Series A and Late-Stage — unusual breadth for a deep-tech fund, allowing it to support companies from lab to scale. The firm conducts rigorous technical and commercial diligence, reflecting the reality that deep-tech investing requires evaluating both scientific merit and market viability. This is not a spray-and-pray seed fund; it is a concentrated, high-conviction investor.
The fund is structured as a SEBI-registered Category II AIF with a GIFT City feeder vehicle for offshore capital. Its LP base is a who's who of Indian tech and finance: Infosys, Qualcomm Ventures, Tata AIG, the DPIIT Fund of Funds for Startups (managed by SIDBI), the Self-Reliant India Fund, and Evolvence. Individual LPs include Kris Gopalakrishnan (Infosys co-founder), Gopal Srinivasan of TVS Capital, and Utpal Sheth of RARE Enterprises. Lip-Bu Tan, Chairman of Walden International and one of the semiconductor industry's most respected investors, serves as an advisor — a strong validation of the firm's chip-design thesis.
Yali Capital was founded by Ganapathy Subramaniam (Founding Managing Partner, formerly a partner at Celesta Capital, itself a deep-tech fund) and Mathew Cyriac (General Partner, former co-head of Blackstone India private equity and executive chairman of Florintree Advisors). Karthik Madathil serves as Partner and Sunil Patil as CFO. The team's blend of deep-tech investing experience and large-cap private equity discipline is distinctive.
Notable portfolio companies include C2I Semiconductor (fabless chip design, later acquired by Infineon — a validation of the firm's chip thesis), 4baseCare (healthcare genomics), Perceptyne (robotics), and PointAI (GenAI, described as an "AI Partner to Aditya Birla Fashion"). In September 2026, Yali Capital co-led an $85 million round in Ultraviolette Automotive (electric motorcycles) alongside TDK Ventures — one of the largest deep-tech rounds in India that year.
Why it matters for founders
If you are building deep tech — semiconductors, defence systems, robotics, frontier AI, or life sciences — from India, Yali Capital's Rs 893 crore fund is one of the few domestic pools of capital designed specifically for you. Their technical diligence is rigorous, so come with defensible IP, a world-class team, and a clear path to global markets. The Lip-Bu Tan advisory relationship and Qualcomm/Infosys LP base mean portfolio companies get strategic doors opened, not just capital.