What I look for in SET founders. At Inflexor we call our focus SET: Science, Engineering and Tech. Some call it deep tech, but that word means different things to different people. A short thread on what matters to me.

Many deep tech pitches spend most of their slides on the science and one on the customer. I'd flip that. I'm not backing a breakthrough for its own sake. I'm backing the advantage it gives a buyer: lower cost, better yield, or something that simply wasn't possible before. If you can't say that in one sentence, the science isn't the problem yet. Founders building on hard science, what's the one line you use to explain why a customer should care?

The best question in a deep tech diligence usually isn't mine. Before I go deep on a company built on hard science, I try to bring in someone who has spent years in that exact field: a materials scientist, a chip designer, a clinician. They often find the real technical risk faster than a generalist investor ever could. Founders, this works in your favour. A sharp expert pushes on the right question early, and the good ones keep being useful long after the money is in. What's the toughest technical question an investor's expert has ever asked you?

The cap table decides this long before the exit. Stacked liquidation preferences, more capital than the business needed, and a sale below the last round's price mean investors get paid back first and founders get nothing. Raise what the business needs, not what the market will give.

A markup is not a return. In Indian venture, a higher valuation in the next round feels like progress. But until someone actually buys the shares, it's an opinion about what the company is worth. LPs can't spend opinions. So I try to think about the exit from the first meeting. Who could realistically buy this company one day? What would it need to look like to list? Is there a path to cash, or only to the next round? Founders, has an investor ever asked you who your eventual buyer is? Did it help, or feel too early?

A patent filing is not a moat. When a deep tech founder tells me their edge is IP, I ask three questions. Does it protect something a customer actually pays for? Would a well-funded competitor have to design around it, or could they simply ignore it? And is the know-how that makes it work written down, or does it live in two people's heads? The IP I value most keeps compounding. Every customer deployment teaches the team something a newcomer can't copy from a filing. File the patents. Then build the part that can't be filed.

Many hard tech decks in India model the product in detail and leave the cap table for later. Before your first institutional round, map the whole journey: the capital it takes to reach a product you can manufacture, the working capital each order will tie up, and how many rounds sit between you and real revenue. Then ask what you'll still own at the end. If the honest answer is too little to keep you going for ten years, change the plan now, not at Series B. Capital intensity isn't a reason to avoid deep tech. It's a reason to underwrite it with open eyes.