The flight from Vienna lands in the early hours. By the time you clear immigration and reach the hotel, the city is already awake — or perhaps it never fully slept. Mumbai has that quality. There is always something moving, building, negotiating. It felt, on this particular trip, like an appropriate backdrop for the conversations ahead.
We were here for TriNano Technologies — a portfolio company we had backed at an early stage — but the visit quickly became something larger: a two-day immersion in what India's solar technology ecosystem actually looks like from the inside, not from a spreadsheet.
The technology, up close.
The morning meeting at TriNano's headquarters started with Dr. Harsh Sethi and Dr. Tanujjal Bora walking us through the technology in detail. I had read the materials. Seeing it presented in person, with the team who built it, is a different experience.
The core proposition is deceptively simple: a nanocoating — less than 400 nanometres thick, thinner than a human hair — applied to the top glass surface of a solar panel via solid-state electrodeposition. No cleanroom. No heating or curing. No surface pre-treatment. No liquids involved. The panel goes back into service immediately after coating. That simplicity is, in many ways, the product.
The coating bundles three properties into a single application step: light trapping (inspired by the nanostructure of super-black bird feathers, which absorb nearly all incident light), anti-reflection (modelled on moth eyes, which eliminate surface reflection), and self-cleaning (the lotus leaf effect, causing water and oil to bead and roll off, taking dust and contaminants with them). The result is a module that absorbs more light, runs cooler, and stays cleaner for longer.
Field and laboratory data referenced by the team — and subsequently corroborated at IIT Bombay — point to approximately 4–6% improvement in energy yield, around 2°C reduction in module operating temperature, and meaningful reductions in cleaning frequency and water use. For existing solar farms facing degradation and soiling losses, these are not marginal numbers.
After the presentation, we moved to the factory. Two production lines are in operation: a semi-automatic setup and a fully automatic line capable of significantly higher throughput. The automated line is the scale path — and it is the one our investment was directed toward. Seeing it running was reassuring. The equipment is operational, the team knows how to use it, and the process is repeatable.
One detail from the factory visit stayed with me: the application frame is placed directly on the solar panel, requiring only a standard 220V power connection. There are no exotic infrastructure requirements. In practice, this means the coating can be deployed on-site at utility-scale solar farms as easily as in a factory setting — a flexibility that opens up the existing installed base of panels, not just new manufacturing.
The evening ended with dinner and a brief tour of the waterfront — the kind of unscheduled time with a founding team that often tells you more than a formal presentation. Dr. Sethi has been building this for fifteen years. That kind of sustained commitment, in the face of the scepticism that any genuinely novel material science company must navigate, is its own signal.
Where the testing actually happens.
The second day took us to the IIT Bombay campus and, in particular, to the National Centre for Photovoltaic Research and Education — NCPRE — which sits within what is India's most respected engineering institution. We met with Kedar Deshmukh, Program Manager of the Photovoltaic Technology and Innovation Centre, and a member of the research team.
What I wanted to understand was simple: does the data in TriNano's materials hold up under independent scrutiny? The answer, based on that conversation and a review of the test setups, was yes. Coated and uncoated panels have been tested side by side on the roof of the Nano Electronics building since August 2022. The results — approximately 5–6% uplift in peak power, around 2°C lower module temperature — are consistent with what TriNano has presented to us. The testing protocols are rigorous. Similar findings have been independently recorded by NISE, the National Institute of Solar Energy in Delhi.
This matters. Third-party validation from institutions of this calibre is not a formality. For a technology at TriNano's stage, having IIT Bombay's NCPRE as an active testing partner is a meaningful marker of credibility — both for commercial customers conducting due diligence and for the broader scientific community.
"The testing protocols at NCPRE are beyond what most commercial validation processes require. For a material science startup, that is the right place to be putting your data."
The afternoon brought us to SINE — the Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship — which is IIT Bombay's business incubator. Established in 2004 as a Department of Science and Technology Centre of Excellence, SINE sits at the intersection of deep technology and institutional infrastructure. It is not a typical startup incubator. The companies it hosts are genuine science-out-of-the-lab ventures, and the support infrastructure around them — access to IIT Bombay's facilities, faculty, and network — is substantial.
SINE launched a ₹250 crore deep-tech venture fund in December 2025. We were invited to their invitation-only investor–startup interaction programme. The opportunity to build a relationship with this institution — and through it, with the pipeline of deep-tech ventures emerging from one of India's most productive engineering faculties — is one we intend to develop.
India is not emerging. It has arrived.
The easy narrative about India's energy transition is one of scale — the country's solar capacity targets, the auction volumes, the headline numbers. Those are real and they are significant. But what struck me most about this trip was something harder to quantify: the density of capability concentrated in a relatively small geography.
Within the span of two days, we moved between a highly capable manufacturing operation, a world-class photovoltaic research centre, a government-backed deep-tech incubator, and a founding team with 50+ years of cumulative experience in green chemistry, nanotechnology, and thin films. These are not scattered nodes of competence. They are clustered, interconnected, and reinforcing each other. TriNano is incubated at IIT Bombay. Its technology is validated by IIT Bombay. Its founders teach at and collaborate with institutions of equivalent standing across Asia.
For investors looking at India's energy transition from the outside, the story is often told in terms of policy — the government targets, the IRA-equivalent incentive regimes, the solar auction prices. What is less often discussed is the quality of the technology infrastructure underneath it. It is deeper, and more serious, than the headlines suggest.
We are deepening our engagement with TriNano across both the Indian market and the Middle East, where the combination of intense solar irradiance and high soiling rates makes the coating proposition particularly compelling. We are also building our relationship with SINE to access the pipeline of deep-tech ventures emerging from IIT Bombay. India, in our view, is not a market to watch. It is a market to be in.
One final observation. TriNano's coating was developed for solar panels. But the underlying material science — solid-state nanocoatings with tunable optical and surface properties — has applications well beyond photovoltaics. Automotive glass, building facades, optical instruments, industrial surfaces. The team is aware of this. So are we. The full scope of what they have built is something we will be tracking carefully.
I left Mumbai at 02:30. By the time the plane lifted above the city, the lights below were already moving — trucks, taxis, the early shift of a city that runs around the clock. India does not wait. Neither should we.