Fresh investments and rising founder activity suggest India’s defence-tech ecosystem is entering a new phase as younger entrepreneurs step into military innovation.
For nearly 25 years, Ritesh Bawri lived the life that millions of ambitious Indian men aspire to live. He was a fourth-generation business leader running multiple ventures. He was financially independent. He worked long hours, travelled constantly, and treated his body the way high-performers often treat their bodies—as a vehicle for achievement, not as something requiring maintenance. Food was functional. He ate standing in the kitchen, quickly, without thinking about nourishment. His diet was mostly processed carbohydrates: sandwiches, pizzas, several cups of coffee a day. Quantity mattered more than quality. Exercise was not part of his life. Sleep was irregular. Stress was unmanaged.
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In 2017, Archana Surana stood in her kitchen in Bengaluru and did something that millions of Indian mothers have done before her. She read a food label. Not casually—not the way a hurried shopper scans the front of a package for the words "natural" or "healthy"—but forensically, the way a mother reads a label when she has begun to suspect that the food she is serving her child is not what it claims to be. Her daughter was 11 years old. The tomato ketchup the child loved was loaded with sugar, preservatives, and artificial colours. The sauces that made dinner appetising were thickened with modified starches and stabilised with chemicals she could not pronounce. The snacks that filled the gaps between meals were engineered for shelf life, not nutrition. "I realised that I was surrounded by food that lacked natural goodness," she told Flipkart Stories. "The idea for the brand grew from a personal need for wholesome, clean, truly healthy nutrition. As a mother, it was concerning. I wanted food I could confidently serve to my children and help other mothers struggling with the same."
Gaurav Gupta was one of the architects of India's food-tech revolution. As a co-founder of Zomato, he spent more than a decade building the infrastructure that turned a restaurant-discovery website into India's largest food-delivery platform—a company that now serves hundreds of millions of users across multiple countries, that went public in 2021, and that fundamentally changed how India eats. He was, by any conventional measure, extraordinarily successful. He was also, by his own quiet admission, falling apart.
In 2022, Akhil Iyer was 24 years old, a chemical engineer with an MBA who had spent two years at Morgan Stanley. His girlfriend—now wife—Shriya Narayana was 24, a journalist with a degree in economics and political science from the University of London who had spent years telling other people's stories for a living. They were young, educated, and on trajectories that made their parents proud. They had never run a restaurant. They had never managed a kitchen. They had never stood behind a counter at 6 a.m., watching the first customers of the day decide whether the food they were about to eat was worth the money they were about to spend. And they had an idea that everyone told them was insane.
Punit Agarwal was 39 years old, a computer engineer by training who had spent the better part of his career in his father's metal fabrication business. The work was stable, profitable, and deeply monotonous. Every morning, he walked into the same factory, managed the same processes, and left with the same quiet dissatisfaction that had been accumulating for years. "That work is obviously very monotonous," he told The Better India. "It didn't let me explore creative avenues, or do something that I could put my heart into." He was not poor. He was not struggling. He was something that the Indian economy rarely acknowledges: a successful man who was quietly, persistently unfulfilled.
Years ago, fresh out of school, Noorudheen Kuttaloorpari found one of his greatest joys in visiting his father's coconut plantation in Malappuram. Every day, he would water the plants and marvel at the lush greenery and the sprawling paddy fields nearby. The abundance of nature filled him with pride, and he naturally assumed that the plantation was a source of prosperity. Then reality struck. The price of a coconut barely touched ₹6, while the cost of cultivation was ₹7. The plantation was running at a loss. "This wasn't just our story," Noorudheen wrote years later. "It was the story of countless farmers in the region. Those who worked tirelessly to create the lush, green landscapes were struggling to make ends meet."
For nearly two decades, Prathima Viswanath had one job that mattered more than any other: feeding her daughter. Not just any food—the right food. Nutritious, homemade, capable of surviving long journeys without spoiling, and portable enough to be carried across continents in a travel bag. Her elder daughter was a competitive tennis player, and Prathima had spent years accompanying her to tournaments across Africa and Asia. She had watched other mothers struggle with the same impossible equation: how do you feed a travelling athlete food that is neither fried nor oily, that meets caloric requirements, that tastes like home, and that does not require a kitchen to prepare?