When founders pitch to most investors, they prepare for the same sequence of questions: What is your traction? What is your MRR? How many users do you have? What is the retention curve?
These are good questions. They are also, for a certain kind of company at a certain stage, the completely wrong questions.
PESU Venture Labs invests at the pre-prototype stage. That is not a polite way of saying we invest in very early companies — it is a literal description of our position in the stack. We meet founders before the thing exists. We are the first check in, often the first people to tell them the thesis has legs, and sometimes the first people to tell them it does not.
This is a deliberate structural choice. It is worth explaining why.
Why the Standard Model Fails on Campus
The traction-first model works well for consumer apps, marketplace businesses, and software companies with fast feedback loops. You build something, launch it, measure it. If the numbers move, you have signal. If they do not, you pivot or you stop.
Deep-tech companies do not work like this. An AI model that diagnoses rare agricultural diseases does not have a beta test with 1,000 users in Month 1. A materials science startup working on low-cost carbon capture does not have an MRR chart. The feedback loop is measured in months or years, not days.
Campus-stage founders face a compounding problem: they have the insight — often from research, often from coursework, often from direct observation of a problem nobody outside their field has thought about as a startup opportunity — but they do not yet have the infrastructure to demonstrate traction. They need capital and co-building support to build the first version, but investors want to see traction before providing capital.
This is a structural gap. PVL exists to close it.
“The best deep-tech insights come from people who are close enough to a problem to see it clearly, and early enough in their careers to be willing to spend five years solving it.”
— Suresh Narasimha
What We Actually Look At
If we are not looking at traction, what are we looking at? The answer is three things, in order of importance:
The Insight — not the idea, the insight. The idea is an AI system for music education. The insight is that current music practice is unsupervised and therefore ineffective at the technique level — the moment of error and the moment of feedback are separated by hours or days, making correction extremely hard to internalize. The insight tells us whether the founder has spent serious time understanding the problem, or whether they have a solution looking for a problem. We can tell the difference in about fifteen minutes of conversation.
The Team Composition. Deep tech requires technical depth. But technical depth alone builds products that nobody uses. We look for teams where the technical co-founder genuinely understands why the problem matters to real humans, and where the domain co-founder genuinely understands what is and is not technically possible. The teams that succeed at PVL are the ones where each founder has learned something material from the other within the first two weeks of working together.
The Honest Assessment of What They Do Not Know. The founders who worry us are the ones who have an answer to everything. Real deep-tech problems have hard open questions. We want to back teams that can articulate, with precision, exactly what they do not know — and have a plan for finding out.
The Term Sheet: Why It Looks Different
PVL's term sheets do not have drag-along clauses. They do not have tag-along clauses. This is not an oversight.
Drag-along and tag-along provisions are investor protections designed for situations where the investor and the founder have different incentives around an exit. They make sense in a world where the investor is purely financial — where their job is to return capital to limited partners on a fund timeline.
PVL is a micro fund backed by CoCreate Ventures. We do not have LP provisions of the traditional kind. Our incentives are genuinely aligned with the founder's long-term outcome — not with a specific exit window. So we do not need the protections that assume misaligned incentives.
ON FOUNDER-FRIENDLY TERMS
The single most damaging thing that can happen to a student founder is signing a term sheet they do not understand with a partner who does not care whether the company succeeds — only whether they get their money back. PVL structures deals that protect founders and create long-term alignment, because that is the only way this model works.
What Pre-Prototype Investment Actually Means For You
If you are a student or researcher considering applying to PVL, here is what this model means practically:
- ▸You do not need a demo. You need a clear articulation of the problem, a credible theory of why technology is the right solution, and a team that can execute.
- ▸The Accelerator Bootcamp is how we build the thesis together — it is not a filter that requires you to arrive with everything figured out.
- ▸We co-build. PVL's team works alongside yours on product, design, and engineering during the early stages. We are not passive capital.
- ▸We invest when the thesis is proven — not when the company is proven. That distinction is the entire point.
The Contrarian Bet
Every investor will tell you they are looking for something different. Most of them are looking at the same metrics, on the same decks, with the same checklist.
PVL's genuine differentiation is temporal. We enter earlier than almost anyone else investing in India's deep-tech space. We do this because we believe the quality of a team's insight at the idea stage is a better predictor of outcome than any early traction metric — especially for hard, slow, category-creating deep tech.
We have been wrong. We will be wrong again. But across 21+ portfolio companies, the pattern holds: founders who had the clearest articulation of why the problem is hard and why they are the right people to solve it have consistently outperformed founders who showed up with impressive early numbers and vague theses.
If you have the insight — even if you do not have the prototype — that is who we want to talk to.
APPLY TO PVL
The next Accelerator Bootcamp opens applications in November. If you are a PES University student or researcher with a deep-tech thesis, you do not need a prototype to apply. You need a clear problem, a credible team, and the willingness to spend a structured 10 weeks pressure-testing the thesis with people who have done this before.
