India’s manufacturing growth opens new investment opportunities: Trifecta Capital co-founder Rahul Khanna

India’s growing manufacturing sector and its position as a trusted economy are creating new investment opportunities across chemicals, materials and defence, Trifecta Capital co-founder and managing partner Rahul Khanna said on Thursday.

Speaking at a panel discussion organised by Bloomberg, Khanna said India’s participation in the global manufacturing ecosystem is generating opportunities across sectors where the venture capital firm has invested.

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"I see a lot of interesting opportunities emerging as India participates in a new manufacturing ecosystem globally. Manufacturing is rising tremendously in India. We're seeing a lot of pipeline opportunities in chemicals, materials," he said.

Trifecta Capital has invested over $1 billion in India across more than 200 companies, including unicorns Meesho and Urban Company.

Khanna said the push for sovereign technology has also created opportunities in defence, where the firm has made multiple investments. He added that supply chains are being reorganised as businesses look for trusted economies.

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"A lot of supply chains are reorganising. You hear about trusted economies. Clearly, India has positioned itself as that and particularly in the context of Europe," he said.

Khanna also cited companies bringing technology acquired overseas to India before exporting it to Europe.

Meanwhile, Pronto CEO Anjali Sardana said the company's operations in India help generate data that can be used to train robotics models and support research.

She said robotics could help address labour market challenges in developed countries, but a shortage of data remains a major hurdle.

"So the way you solve that problem is through robotics and deployment of robotics. Robotics has a huge data bottleneck. This is a problem that we felt we can solve or we can essentially kill two birds with one stone. The operations business in the developing world allows us to get data which we use to train our own models and also help our lab partners with their research," Sardana said.