ET Soonicorns Sundowner 2025 — highlights from Hyderabad edition: Founder stories, frontier sectors, and a regional growth lens

On July 31, 2025, Hyderabad became the first stop in a bold new chapter for The Economic Times’ Soonicorns franchise. The evening’s energy was electric from the start. As India’s startup engine gains velocity beyond metro strongholds, this Sundowner marked the Summit’s first regional spin-off. Positioned as an evening for founders, investors, and ecosystem enablers to exchange real talk, it delivered on every promise. Designed as an intimate, invite-only networking mixer, it also reverberated with a mission-driven outlook, with unfiltered conversations paving the path for dialogues on deep-tech ambition and more. The event celebrated Hyderabad’s budding legacy as a centripetal force, the cohesive centre of the Telangana-Andhra Pradesh startup cluster that is also home to other nascent startup hubs. This debut Sundowner served as the perfect build-up to the mainstage in Bengaluru on 22 August, as the ET Soonicorns Summit 2025 returns with its fourth edition.

The evening’s defining moment was the unveiling of ET Top Soonicorns and Minicorns X Priority Sectors | Telangana-Andhra Pradesh 2025—a comprehensive cluster map of the regional startup ecosystem, curated in collaboration with research partner Tracxn, a data intelligence platform. Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary (I&C), Government of Telangana, Sandeep Maheshwari, Sr. Executive VP – Fund Management, 360 ONE, and Deepak Ajwani, Editor, EconomicTimes.com, jointly launched the report to a packed house. Framed as a region-focused sectoral deep dive, the report spotlights high-potential soonicorns and minicorns across priority sectors such as electric vehicles (EVs), NewSpace, EdTech, and direct-to-consumer (D2C). Throwing light on startup formation rates, capital flow trends, investor activity, acquisition dynamics, sectoral maturity, mega-rounds, among others, the report identifies not just where money is flowing, but why. Ranjan’s core message: Telangana’s proactive, startup-friendly governance isn’t just rhetoric—it’s infrastructure, policy, and partnership in action. The report is now live—and it's a must-read.

Titled ‘Built in Hyderabad: The Rise of India’s Product-First Startups,’ the panel featured on stage: Dr. Raj P. Narayanam, Founder & Executive Chairman, Zaggle, GV Keshav Reddy, Founder of Equal and Board Member at Reddy Ventures, Prasad Vanga, Founder and CEO of Anthill Ventures, Sandeep Maheshwari – Senior Fund Manager, 360 ONE Asset, and Kavikrut, CEO of T-Hub. Moderated by The Economic Times’ Deepak Ajwani, the session navigated various facets of funding and building, inviting sharp takes on pivots, scale, and sustainability. In sync with the tone of the session, the speakers didn’t sugarcoat the challenges; instead painted an intimate portrait of Hyderabad and unravelling its unique advantages and nuances. They offered a grounded take on why Hyderabad is quietly becoming India’s most capital-efficient, product-focused startup corridor.

The case for Hyderabad was made without the usual clichés. GV Keshav Reddy, Founder of Equal and Board Member at Reddy Ventures, shared how Equal convinced over 80 employees to relocate from India’s metros, without losing momentum. “I could have started Equal in any major city, but we chose Hyderabad. Purpose, culture, lower cost, better lifestyle—it’s a founder-friendly city. Out of our 100 people, 81 moved here from other metros with no prior connection.”

Dr. Raj P. Narayanam, Founder & Executive Chairman, Zaggle, likened the city to biryani: “This city is like biryani—slow-cooked overnight. That’s how businesses should be built.” For Zaggle, retreating from Bengaluru wasn’t a fallback; it was a deliberate reset to build revenue-first. He emphasised how this startup ecosystem in this city is relatively quieter, not giving in to noise. The message landed: Hyderabad builds for endurance.

Then came the cautionary truths. The panelists didn’t hold back on what not to do. Chasing hype for its own sake, imitating Silicon Valley playbooks, or pivoting without clarity—each was flagged as a recipe for collapse. Prasad Vanga, Founder and CEO of Anthill Ventures, added, “Don’t follow the hype cycle. Go against the grain. The truly successful founders are often the ones going the other way.”

Sandeep Maheshwari – Senior Fund Manager, 360 ONE Asset, issued a stark warning about the AI era: the real threat isn’t the competition—it’s the pace of technological irrelevance. “One OpenAI release can wipe out 20,000 startups. The only real moat today is customer love, or regulatory ones like licenses. Application-layer AI is easy to prototype but hard to productionise.” He also spotlighted Hyderabad’s edge in defence and space-tech and its frugal innovation culture as a strategic advantage.

Kavikrut, CEO of T-Hub, placed Hyderabad’s rise in a national and global context. For India to lead in the AI age, he argued, it can’t rely on a single tech hub. “We need a hundred Bangalores and Hyderabads,” he said, emphasising that Hyderabad’s unique value lies in its export-grade talent, top-tier universities, and deep enterprise footprint. With Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon already deeply rooted here, and a concentration of Fortune 2000 companies rising, the city is nearing an inflection point. But infrastructure alone won’t tip the scale—what’s needed now are capital bridges and a louder, bolder narrative to match Hyderabad’s ambition.

“For the last seven (or so) years, we were operating in stealth mode—this is our first time on stage in Hyderabad,” shared Nishanth Dongari, Founder and MD of PURE EV, during his open-mic segment at ET Soonicorns Sundowner 2025. The IIT Hyderabad-incubated startup, which began with a focus on deep-tech IP and lithium-ion battery innovation, has since transformed into a fast-growing electric mobility brand with national reach. Dongari revealed how the company’s early years were spent quietly perfecting the backend technology and building the right distribution and product frameworks. The pivotal moment came around 2019–2020, when PURE EV shifted gears from being a pure-play battery tech firm to a consumer-facing EV brand. Today, it offers a growing portfolio of electric scooters and motorcycles such as the ePluto 7G, ETrance Neo, and eTryst 350. With over 1 lakh vehicles sold and a cumulative 300-crore-kilometre impact, Dongari said, “Profitability has become the moat.” He emphasised that performance, mileage, and efficiency have driven adoption, and the company is now poised to scale with both purpose and profit. “This story,” he concluded, “is about flipping backend tech into a large-market play.”

“We were the first private company in India to launch a rocket successfully,” said Kishore Tallam, CFO of Skyroot Aerospace, at the ET Soonicorns Sundowner 2025 in Hyderabad, explaining how “trust” is the most important currency in space-tech. Skyroot’s journey is emblematic of how Indian private space-tech is stepping out from behind the ISRO curtain and into the global market. With the Vikram series of launch vehicles—ranging from suborbital (Vikram-S) to small-lift orbital missions (Vikram I, II, III)—the company is unlocking on-demand, cost-effective access to space for small satellite customers. Tallam spoke about the sector’s defining challenge: reliability. “In space-tech, not every rocket will launch successfully. What matters is repeatability, engineering rigour, and the ability to deliver.” With Skyroot being the highest-funded startup in this segment, he sees that as a strong market signal of both trust and patience, two forces that will define this capital-intensive industry. As they prepare to launch Vikram I, Skyroot’s ambition is clear: to build India’s answer to SpaceX—leaner, local, and more accessible.

Hyderabad’s startup ecosystem is fast becoming a nucleus of India’s deeptech and product-first ambitions, particularly in sectors that demand long gestation, regulatory rigour, and engineering depth over vanity blitzscaling. From propulsion systems to private satellite launches, homegrown ventures are reimagining what it means to build at the frontier. Take Stardour, co-founded by Sankarsh Chanda, who started investing at 14 and launched his first venture at 18. Now, he’s aiming for the stars—literally. “We don’t just mean space exploration as sci-fi,” he said at the startup storytelling open-mic segment. “To make that a reality, the first thing we realised was that R&D has to go into private hands.” His remarks reflect a growing consensus: that innovation in space tech, EVs, and fintech must be grounded in IP-led, capital-efficient engineering.

As the evening drew to a close, it was clear that Hyderabad was only the beginning. All eyes now turn to Bengaluru, which will host the flagship ET Soonicorns Summit 2025 on August 22, followed by upcoming regional editions of the Sundowner series in Gurugram and Mumbai. Adding a narrative-rich layer to the evening, the launch of the Limitless Founder Journeys: N to X report—featuring 20 behind-the-scenes stories curated by 360 ONE—brought founder voices to the fore in fine print.