CCF Perspective
Beyond Building Startups: Building the Systems That Help Climate Tech Scale
A Climate Collective Foundation (CCF) perspective from a panel discussion on identifying the gaps and drivers for climate tech startup formation and growth at the subnational level, February 2026
Context
The conversation around climate tech in India often begins with startups: how many are being created, how much capital they are raising and which technologies are emerging. But it is worth asking a more basic question first: where are these solutions actually coming from? The answer is not spread evenly. Some states have far more climate tech growth than others, even when they face similar challenges or have similar resources. This raises the real question: what is it about these states that lets innovation take root, and can others learn from it? The discussion on identifying the gaps and drivers for climate tech startup formation and growth at the subnational level, held during Delhi Climate Innovation Week (DCIW) in February 2026, highlighted that while startups are increasingly generating new solutions to address climate challenges in India, the systems needed to support those solutions remain uneven across states.
The discussion convened representatives from Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), Niti Aayog, Telangana State Innovation Cell (TSIC), Government of Telangana, Ratan Tata Innovation Hub (RTIH), Government of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu Infrastructure Fund Management Corporation (TNIFMC), Government of Tamil Nadu and Climate Group.
The Big Idea
The ecosystem has become reasonably good at helping entrepreneurs start, with incubators, challenges and startup programmes generating a steady pipeline of founders. But climate tech faces a harder set of challenges after that: a climate tech founder needs to test a solution in the real world, secure their first customer — which is often governments, utilities or industrial buyers, so sales take longer than a typical startup — navigate government systems, raise patient capital and prove that the technology can work at scale. Until these pathways become stronger, we risk building an ecosystem that is good at generating capable climate solutions but not necessarily at using them.
Three Key Insights
Climate innovation needs an easier path to the first customer
Over the past few years, incubators, challenges and startup programmes have helped generate a pipeline of founders. But climate technologies often need something much harder: a willing first adopter. This is particularly true when the customer is government or industry. Startups can demonstrate a promising prototype but traditional procurement systems often expect years of financial history and prior contracts — the very things an early-stage company does not yet have. Andhra Pradesh’s attempt to create procurement pathways for validated startups points towards an important lesson: if governments want innovation, they may need to redesign the systems through which innovation is purchased.
States can bring the pieces of climate innovation together
Climate technologies face a well-known financing challenge between early-stage development and commercial deployment. But simply adding more capital will not automatically solve this problem. Startups also need technical validation, clearer problem statements, market access, regulatory certainty and mentors who understand the complexity of climate businesses. As one perspective from the discussion highlighted, founders often struggle less with the availability of money than with the lack of a clear strategic architecture around their journey. This is also where state-level institutions can come into play. They are often closer to the infrastructure, industries and public systems where climate problems actually exist and can potentially connect innovators to real opportunities for deployment.
Climate innovation works best when it starts close to the problem
Taking on from the point above, India’s innovation ecosystem remains concentrated in a few major hubs. Yet some of the country’s most pressing climate and environmental challenges are emerging in industrial towns, agricultural regions and vulnerable geographies. This creates a fundamental mismatch. We often expect founders to come to innovation hubs rather than building innovation systems closer to the problems themselves. The opportunity for states is to build locally relevant ecosystems around specific challenges — whether that is water stress, industrial pollution, agricultural resilience, waste or energy access. The future of climate tech may be less about building more hubs and more about building stronger connections between problems, places and innovators.
What This Means for the Ecosystem
For India’s climate tech ecosystem, the conversation needs to move beyond the question of how we can create more startups. A more useful question may be: what does a startup need around it to successfully solve a climate problem? The answer will likely involve a much wider group of actors, each holding a part of the puzzle: government departments that can articulate problem statements and create pathways for procurement, universities that can build the mix of skills needed to address climate challenges, incubators that understand the complexities of climate businesses, investors willing to support longer technology development cycles and communities where solutions are ultimately tested, adapted and adopted.
Open Questions
- Could states line up potential first customers for climate tech startups such as ULBs, PSUs and other public bodies and match solutions to specific problems these bodies face?
- Procurement is usually built to buy tested, proven technology at scale, not to try out early-stage solutions. What would procurement look like if it were designed to pilot promising early-stage solutions?
- If climate tech startup ecosystems need to be built around local climate challenges, how do we build that as an easily replicable system across states?
Where We Go From Here
India’s climate tech story should not end at innovation. The next challenge is adoption, and solving it will require governments, industries, incubators and innovators to build the pathways that take a good idea into the real world. The conversation we need now is not just about how to create the next climate startup, but about how well states can turn fragmented strengths into connected ecosystems so that these solutions can become useful at scale.