Avaana Capital

Choose the right route

• Building deep tech and want candid feedback on one question: Avaana Office Hours. You bring a single strategic question and get 30 minutes one to one with the investment team.
• A DPIIT-registered startup building frontier innovation: the Startup India Grand Challenge, when an edition is taking applications.

How applications work

• Office Hours: apply through the online form linked from the Office Hours page. Check that page for the date of the next session.
• Grand Challenge: the 2025-26 edition has no live application link on Avaana's own page, and the sources disagree on whether it is upcoming or has already closed. Watch the Grand Challenge page for the next intake rather than relying on an old link.

How selection works

• Grand Challenge: the platform describes four steps: applications, screening by subject matter experts, jury evaluation and a finale.
• Office Hours: Avaana's page does not publish selection criteria.

What helps

• Register with DPIIT before you apply to the Grand Challenge. The platform says it calls for DPIIT-registered startups.
• Make your one question specific for Office Hours. The format is a single strategic question, so a focused ask uses the 30 minutes well.
• Match the edition's theme. Past editions focused on climate tech, then frontier tech, then deep tech.

Avaana Capital is an investment firm with offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru. Its team pages describe backing early-stage deep tech ventures, and it manages the Avaana Climate and Sustainability Fund. Beyond investing, Avaana runs two programmes that founders can apply to directly: the Startup India Grand Challenge, which it co-runs with Startup India, and Avaana Office Hours, a one-to-one session with its investment team.

How the Grand Challenge works

The Grand Challenge is a recurring startup challenge. Avaana hosts the platform pages, publishes the application process and lists the jury for each edition. Three editions are named on its pages. The 2023-24 edition focused on climate tech. The 2024-25 edition, on frontier tech, was also co-branded with NITI Aayog's Atal Innovation Mission and was framed around India's Viksit Bharat 2047 vision. The 2025-26 edition focuses on deep tech.

The platform describes four steps: applications, screening by subject matter experts, jury evaluation and a finale. It says the challenge calls for DPIIT-registered startups building breakthrough frontier innovation. Winning and participating startups are described as gaining access to grant support and to partner benefits, such as cloud and software credits with technical support. The 2023-24 edition named Google and Amazon Web Services as credit partners, and the 2024-25 edition named MathWorks.

Avaana reports 400+ applications for the 2023-24 edition and 550+ for the 2024-25 edition, with 40+ and 50+ partnerships enabled respectively. Across editions it reports about 1,000 applications and 100+ partnerships. Its statistics block counts two editions hosted, while its edition list names three, with the latest marked as upcoming. These are Avaana's own figures.

The 2025-26 edition

The status of the Deep Tech Innovation 2025-26 edition is not the same everywhere. Avaana's challenge page lists it as upcoming, with no dedicated edition page and no live application link. Our catalogue holds a call for it that closed on 23 February 2026. Fortune India reported that Avaana and DPIIT launched a third deep tech challenge with a new research-stage track. Check the official page before relying on any one of these.

Avaana Office Hours

Office Hours is a platform for deep tech builders to brainstorm openly with the Avaana investment team. Each session is one strategic question, 30 minutes, one to one. Avaana reports that it has engaged 200+ founders across 6+ editions. Founders apply through an online form linked from the Office Hours page.

Who can apply

Avaana's pages do not publish a formal eligibility checklist for Office Hours beyond being a deep tech builder. For the Grand Challenge, the platform's stated requirement is DPIIT registration. Neither programme publishes a stage taxonomy, so judge fit from the sector and the ambition of what you are building.

The portfolio

Avaana's portfolio page reports aggregate impact across its portfolio companies: 70+ patents filed, 36,000+ jobs created, 20,123,202 lives impacted and 5 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions abated. These are Avaana's own undated figures for its portfolio, not for the Grand Challenge or Office Hours.

Who runs it

Anjali Bansal is Avaana's Founding Partner. Its team page says she is an independent director on the boards of Tata Power, Nestle and Maruti Suzuki, sits on the review committee for NITI Aayog, on the Advisory Council of ONDC and on the board of GIFT City. Swapna Gupta appears as a Partner of the Avaana Climate and Sustainability Fund on its jury lists.

Avaana also reports ecosystem roles. It says it was appointed to the Expert Advisory Committee for the Startup India Seed Fund Scheme, is a member of the Startup Policy Forum's deep tech advisory board, is a member of the Global Board of the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, and is the first official India partner of Third Derivative, linked to the Rocky Mountain Institute. In January 2025 its newsroom reported a memorandum of understanding with the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade to strengthen India's manufacturing startup ecosystem.

Locations and contact

The Mumbai office is at Lodha Supremus, Dr E Moses Road, Worli, Mumbai 400018. The Bengaluru office is at Kabra Excelsior, 80 Feet Road, Koramangala 3rd Block, Bengaluru 560034. General enquiries go to info@avaanacapital.com.