Deep tech is the new sport in town, and venture capitalists are cross-training.

Earlier this month, Tiger Global fully exited Ather Energy with a nearly 16X return on the Rs 75 crore it invested in the electric-vehicle maker a decade ago. A few days later, the investor’s storied investment in Unacademy came to naught when Upgrad emerged as a rescuer, intending to acquire the beleaguered edtech for less than $400 million.

If Ather epitomises a dogged deep-tech company, Unacademy stands for brash, valuation-driven consumer tech where investors and founders have run amok. The two outcomes, meanwhile, show what deep-tech patrons have known all along—there’s little that can trip up a late-stage venture in frontier technologies.

Even then, such ventures have remained boutique in India, backed by a plethora of government grants, soft loans, and focused early-stage VCs. But that spray-and-seed approach hasn’t built critical mass in any of the transformative technologies that will shape the world in this decade and beyond.

As deep tech increasingly becomes connected to national and regional sovereignty, its funding mechanism is going to change in India. Perhaps forever.

In July, the Indian cabinet approved a Rs 1 lakh crore ($12 billion) Research, Development, and Innovation Fund. This month, the government began inviting applications for “second-level fund managers”. Such managers would include alternative investment funds, development finance institutions, non-banking financial companies, and others.

Unsurprisingly, VCs of all stripes are now talking the deep-tech language. Some have formed an alliance, others are counting on the government to be the biggest customer. Among other things, VCs understand that the phase of blitzscaling digital platforms, D2C, and consumer apps has run its course. Traditional software is waning, and AI is high risk for most investors.

“All these VCs—Accel, Premji [Invest], and others—would not invest in us because we did not have a US strategy. Now that they see there’s money here, they are creating this [deep-tech] alliance,” says the founder of a deep-tech company in Bengaluru. “But [the RDI fund] cannot be a pot of money that VCs use to create fake deep-tech versions of themselves because a lot of US companies are now saying, ‘we should have been registered in India’…All that game is going on because the US has no money [for non-AI companies], but India has.”

It’s not just New Delhi; states are dipping into their deep pockets too.