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Vibhore Sharma is an investor backing deep tech startups across robotics, climate, semiconductors, AI infrastructure, biotech, and the categories where the technology is hard and the path to adoption is genuinely unclear. He argues that design is not the layer you add at the end, but the bridge between the lab and the market - the thing that makes complex technology legible, usable and credible enough to be bought. He's increasingly recognised for shaping "deep tech by design" not as a styling exercise but as a serious commercial discipline.In this episode we sit down with Vibhore to unpack one of the most overlooked questions in deep tech: why do so many genuinely brilliant technologies struggle to reach the people they're built for?Vibhore's answer is design: not as aesthetics, but as the discipline of making the complex usable, trustworthy and adoptable. The conversation moves from why deep tech has historically under-invested in design, to what changes when design sits at the core of how a hard-tech company builds and goes to market. Along the way he sketches out what "design for deep tech" actually looks like in practice, and why he believes it's becoming a category of its own.

Breaking down a US-based battery materials company after their Series A raise.

After 9 months of design partnership they had 80 inbounds, $10M in grants, and a joint venture partnership.

Prachi and Julia walk through the full partnership week by week (from a basic website brief to board presentations, investor updates, Hanwha Q&A documents, and CES collateral) and the business results that followed.

This episode is for founders and technical teams who have raised and are figuring out what comes next.

What we cover:

- why most deep tech companies wait too long to bring in a design partner

- how information architecture changes how seriously partners take you

- why it's not about making things pretty but about making them legible

Most of the conversation in deep tech is about how to raise and nobody talks about what happens after.

That's what this episode is about.

This is the first episode of our podcast where we talk about why we're bringing this back. We've been active on Twitter and LinkedIn sharing behind-the-scenes stuff from This is it Studio, but it's always been fragmented. A long-form podcast feels like the most natural way to actually talk through what's happening - working with deeply technical founders, designing for companies raising Series A/B/C, the gap between design education and the actual industry, and how design is finally entering the deep tech world. In this episode: intro to us and our backgrounds, some case studies from our work, and how design is changing in tech.

We want this to be Lex Friedman or Rich Roll level depth but for design, business, and tech. We'll bring in founders, VCs, professors from top design schools in India, and have real conversations about design as a business lever - not just aesthetics. Our end goal is simple: become the global benchmark design partner for deeply technical companies. If you're a founder in tech, you should want to work with us. That's what this podcast is building toward.