Revolutionizing Energy: Mirik Gogri on Geothermal Innovations in Climate Tech

An engineering graduate from IIT Bombay, Mirik spoke to indianexpress.com on the focus of Spectrum Impact, the journey, and the game-changing tech trends and startups in the field of climate tech. Edited excerpts:

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us about Spectrum Impact and its journey.

Mirik Gogri: We adopted the name Spectrum Impact formally around 2020. Before that, as a family office, we were already deploying capital across investments, impact initiatives, grants, donations, and equity, but in a more ad-hoc way. In 2020, we decided to focus our efforts on climate solutions.

Unlike a VC, as a family office, we have the flexibility to use debt, equity, and grants. We want to solve problems rather than just doubling down on already successful organisations.

Our background also gives us a deep understanding of how the industry works, and helps us appreciate both the scale of the climate challenge and the opportunities within it.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us about your sectoral focus.

Mirik Gogri: Climate is our predominant area of focus, and we prefer being a very early investor or grant giver, because that is where you can create disproportionate impact.

Within climate tech, we are generally very broad. One of the lenses we use is: where are the emissions coming from? We try to ensure we have an organisation or a company working on solutions in each of those major areas.

Our biggest areas of interest are energy generation and materials. Those are two very large buckets. But we are equally focused on the food system, industrial decarbonisation and other areas within the climate space.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us about your climate tech investments and the problems they are solving.

Mirik Gogri: There is Quaise Energy in the US, which we are very excited about. Solar and wind are major renewable sources but suffer from intermittency, which requires the use of costly batteries. If you can achieve clean baseload energy, that’s a big breakthrough. Nuclear is the main option today, but geothermal has huge potential.

Globally, geothermal is limited by how deep you can drill economically. Quaise Energy has developed a new drilling method using a nuclear-fusion offshoot technology. It allows drilling extremely deep, very fast, and in a cost-effective manner. They are still pre-commercial, but the potential is pathbreaking.

There is Biofuel Circle, an Indian company in the agricultural waste space. The challenge is getting agricultural waste from farms to end-users who can convert it into energy or materials. The company is building a marketplace and aggregation model to solve that problem.

There is Copernic Catalysts, also from the US, working on improving the process for ammonia production. Since ammonia is critical for fertilisers and industrial processes, even marginal efficiency improvements can have a huge global climate impact.

NOPO Nanotechnologies, an Indian company, is working on single-walled carbon nanotubes. Adding these nanotubes to battery anodes significantly increases energy density, which has major implications for next-gen batteries.

There is Planet Electric from Delhi, which is developing lightweight composite materials to replace metals in EVs. Reducing the weight of EVs directly improves battery efficiency and range.

These are some of our investments.

We are also investors in the general impact space. There is Dozee, a health-tech company and Zeno Health, which works on democratising access to generic pharmaceuticals. These aren’t climate-focused, but they fit the larger impact story.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Is there some disenchantment with the climate tech space among investors, given the approach of the new Trump administration to climate change?

Mirik Gogri: A lot of climate tech is ultimately a global play, and if the US is not supportive of climate action, there will be ripple effects.

However, not everything in climate tech is dependent on regulation. For example, carbon credits and carbon markets require regulatory frameworks. But take solar: its deployment is driven primarily by economics. Solar has reached cost competitiveness, so countries and organisations are scaling it regardless of global political sentiment. In that sense, not all climate solutions are tied to global regulations.

If governments in the US or others are broadly pro-climate, that creates momentum. But ultimately, economics is what will drive climate solutions, not just policy signals. The scale is so large that if the economics does not work, nothing else will.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us about some of your grants to nonprofits in the sphere of climate change and the problems they are solving.

Mirik Gogri: One of our significant grants is to CEEW (Council on Energy, Environment and Water), which is doing extensive work on heat action plans. As heat increases across India and globally, cities need to be better prepared. That means not just preparing documents but actually institutionalising systems, procedures for hospitals, first responders, local authorities, and protocols for dealing with heat stroke.

However, when you go from working with two cities to working with fifty or a hundred, tech becomes a critical enabler for scaling processes, data collection, monitoring, and coordination. So our perspective is problem-first, not tech-first.

There is Sustainability Mafia, which focuses on ecosystem-building; helping the broader climate-tech ecosystem understand problems better, learn from each other, and connect startups with corporates.

We ourselves have a non-profit called SCALE, built jointly with Chemtech. The idea came from a practical observation: climate-tech startups often do well in the lab, but when they need to scale, it’s a completely different challenge. Because we come from a manufacturing background and have connections across India’s vendor ecosystem, we realised we could help bridge that gap. And this is what the nonprofit does.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: What challenges do climate tech startups face in India?

Mirik Gogri: There are two ways to look at challenges. First, investment in climate tech, compared to non-climate tech, is naturally lower. And even within climate tech, if you divide it into EV and non-EV segments, you can see the gap clearly. The EV space has a lot of momentum and several success stories, but if you remove EV from the picture, the rest of climate tech still requires significantly more investment. Early-stage funding is happening, but when companies need to raise larger rounds, there is still a noticeable gap in India.

But the bigger gap is actually in the ecosystem itself. Climate tech needs strong university infrastructure for testing, access to specialised equipment, and the right manufacturing and vendor networks. The usual playbook that works for classic software or general tech doesn’t translate directly to climate or deep tech. Piloting and prototyping are much harder. I know of companies that have struggled simply because the vendor ecosystem they needed did not exist in India. And when they have to go to China or Singapore, the costs rise dramatically and timelines stretch.

Even analytical testing is a bottleneck. Several companies in the chemical or sustainable chemicals space have told us they cannot get the testing they need in India because the right labs do not exist.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Are these climate-tech startups solving India-specific problems, or is the focus on solving global problems with a hope of them being acquired?

Mirik Gogri: Many climate-tech startups are solving India-specific challenges, especially in areas like circularity, bio-waste-to-materials, biochar, and similar emerging sectors. These solutions are being deployed primarily in India because the operational context is very India-centric. But even in those cases, there is usually some scope to sell to global customers, although the core operations remain in India.

The EV space is a mix. Right now, a lot of it is built for India, but there is definitely potential for global expansion. Industrial decarbonisation is another area where we are seeing strong startups. Many of them work initially with Indian companies, but the underlying solutions, like replacing fossil-fuel-based heat with electric heat pumps, are global in nature and can be applied anywhere in the world.

It is not a straightforward picture where everything is either purely India-focused or purely global. But I have not seen many pure-play ‘build only for the world’ startups in climate tech. Almost all of them have some India story attached. Even in hydroponics or new-age farming techniques, you see plants and facilities being built in India to serve this market first.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us about global climate tech trends which have caught your attention?

Mirik Gogri: Let me share a few futuristic ones. The first is geothermal, which I am quite bullish about, and we are invested in Quaise Energy. In the US, oil and gas companies already have deep expertise in drilling, so the transition to geothermal is more natural for them. There have also been success stories. Fervo Energy, for example, has raised large amounts of capital and is already setting up a commercial-scale plant in the US using next-generation geothermal techniques.

In India, we worked with an international nonprofit called Project Inner Space to create a geothermal geomap of India, identifying hotspots across the country. We are working with them to explore this further.

The second trend is electric trucking and logistics. Battery improvements are accelerating, and in China, it appears that diesel truck usage is already dropping significantly because electric trucks are gaining ground. This has the potential to reshape the global diesel market. Electric trucking could become a major enabler for decarbonising logistics. We have done both grants and equity investments in this space.

The third trend, which is a real dark horse, is natural hydrogen, also called geologic hydrogen. When people talk about hydrogen, they immediately think of green hydrogen, but there are many other ‘colours’ of hydrogen that are less known. A few years ago in France, they found a large underground deposit of naturally occurring hydrogen. It’s in an extremely early stage; scientists are still figuring out where such deposits exist and how they can be extracted.

We gave a grant to conduct one of the first assessments of natural hydrogen potential in India. The work is still ongoing. We still have to understand whether they can be extracted economically. There are many unknowns. But the potential is significant, and if natural hydrogen is viable, it could change the entire hydrogen landscape.

So geothermal, electric trucking, and natural hydrogen, I believe, will shape the next wave of climate innovation.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Name a few global climate tech startups that have caught your eye and the problems they are solving.

Mirik Gogri: Apart from Quaise Energy, there is Fervo, which is quite a strong player in the geothermal space.

In nuclear fusion, Helion is doing interesting work. In the food systems space, there’s Every, which has developed an alternative egg protein.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Name some out-of-the-box tech problems that your investments are seeking to solve.

Mirik Gogri: Natural Hydrogen. The potential is enormous, and it is like shooting in the dark, but if it turns out to be viable, it could be game-changing for the country. As far as I know, we are among the first, or at least among the very few, looking at this seriously.

The other long-term bet is in the alternative protein space. There is one company, which is now in stealth mode, which is working on the texture problem. In alternative proteins, there are two big challenges: replicating flavour and replicating texture. Texture, especially mimicking the feel of meat in the mouth, using plant-based inputs is extremely hard, and this company is making strong progress. If they crack flavour, texture and cost together, it becomes a very powerful solution.

Food systems are a long-term challenge for the climate. Unlike electricity, food is deeply cultural and societal. People don’t care whether their electricity comes from coal or solar as long as it’s reliable and affordable. But food is tied to identity, habit and emotion. Transforming that system will take time.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Which of your climate tech investments could prove truly transformational if they succeed?

Mirik Gogri: Apart from Quaise Energy, there is an IIT Bombay startup called ART- PV India, which works on perovskites, essentially a next-generation solar technology. If they succeed, it could be a huge breakthrough.

Today, solar module efficiencies are around 22-23%. Perovskites are a new class of materials that capture a different wavelength of sunlight, and when layered correctly on top of a traditional silicon panel, you can significantly improve total efficiency.

Solar is already extremely competitive; if perovskites scale over the next five to seven years, the impact on energy economics could be massive. There are challenges, particularly around long-term reliability, but that’s what makes it such an exciting long-term bet.

Another space with game-changing potential is nanomaterials, and here companies like NOPO, which works on single-walled carbon nanotubes, stand out. Even if their initial applications are in batteries, the real strength lies in mastering the production of single-walled nanotubes. Once you have that capability, you can unlock applications across multiple sectors, such as water treatment, where desalination can become far more energy efficient.

Nanomaterials more broadly offer enormous potential for bulk applications. Even in something fundamental like concrete and cement, adding the right nanomaterials can dramatically improve performance and reduce emissions.

So perovskites, geothermal, single-walled nanotubes, and nanomaterials in general represent some of the long-term, high-impact technologies we are excited about.