Manufacturing has long been India’s Achilles heel, contributing far less to GDP than is necessary for accelerated growth and sustained per-capita income gains. At Independence, India lacked three foundational pillars: industrial capability, a conducive policy environment, and robust demand. The result: manufacturing peaked at around 18% of GDP over the last sixty years, against China’s consistent ~30%. That gap is more than a statistic. It represents decades of lost jobs, lost industrial depth, and value that flowed out of the country because India could build to specification but could not design, own, or control.
Over the last three decades, however, India has systematically built and proven industrial capability across sectors: autos, steel, pharma, and increasingly, DeepTech verticals like SpaceTech, robotics and aviation. Policy has become meaningfully more supportive, and we expect continued focus on improving ease of doing business. Post-Covid supply-chain reconfiguration and today’s geopolitical realities have pushed global customers to pursue a “China +1” strategy. This has created a once-in-a-generation opening for India to emerge as a large domestic manufacturing base and a credible alternative for global demand. But windows like this do not stay open indefinitely. The countries and companies that move decisively in the next few years will define the next era of global electronics. Those that hesitate will find the window has closed around them.
Within this, electronics is one of the fastest-growing segments. India’s electronics production stood at ~USD 115B in FY24 and, supported by multiple structural tailwinds, can grow at ~25% CAGR to reach ~USD 500B by FY30. The scale of this opportunity is obvious. It is also, typically, out of reach for small seed-stage funds like Merak, given how capital-intensive electronics manufacturing tends to be. Which is precisely why meeting Ashita Gupta and Shalabh Srivastava, co-founders of iDO Devices, an Original Design Manufacturer (ODM), was so compelling.
India’s Electronics Gap
India’s modern electronics story began over four decades ago with players like Dixon Technologies and Amber Enterprises, and has accelerated meaningfully in the last decade. Apple’s iPhone assembly in India became the marquee example. Yet through this period, India’s value-add, innovation, and indigenisation of the value chain have remained constrained. The reason is structural: the country has lacked true ODMs. The top of the funnel — design, IP, product definition — has continued to be controlled by Chinese players.
This is the crux of the problem. India has demonstrated it can assemble at scale. What it has not yet proven is that it can design at scale. And until that changes, the highest-value layers of electronics manufacturing will continue to sit outside the country, making Indian brands tenants in someone else’s ecosystem. If we do not build indigenous ODM capability in this window, we risk locking in another generation of dependency: Indian companies assembling products they did not conceive, on timelines they do not control, at margins that reflect someone else’s IP.
From our first meeting with the iDO team, it was clear they were uniquely positioned to change this. The founders bring a deep understanding of the electronics manufacturing landscape, decades of experience building and scaling EMS businesses, and strong relationships with global suppliers.
The Problem
Today, over 90% of electronics manufacturers in India depend on Chinese ODMs. Building EMS capacity has been relatively easier; creating an ODM is far harder. It requires substantial upfront capital, ownership of IP across the electronics stack, and deep, multi-geography supplier relationships. Beyond the obvious geopolitical risks, this dependence adds 25–30% to costs, constrains brands’ ability to launch new products, and results in 18–24 month design-to-launch cycles where brands lack real control over the supplier ecosystem.
iDO’s Approach
iDO has leveraged longstanding relationships with India’s leading electronics brands and EMS players to identify True Wireless Stereo (TWS) with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) as its initial beachhead. The team has intimate knowledge of the component ecosystem and close partnerships with Chinese System-on-Chip (SoC) companies willing to open their products to iDO’s firmware. iDO has already onboarded top engineering talent in India, people who have built similar firmware stacks for global giants like Qualcomm, and is using this capability to build proprietary firmware on the SoCs it designs around.
This foundation allows Indian brands to ideate and innovate on new product lines and bring them to market in under six months, instead of waiting 18–24 months. It also helps brands and Indian EMS providers progressively indigenise more of the bill of materials, directly contributing to the development of domestic electronics manufacturing capability.
Vision and Early Traction
iDO’s vision is ambitious: become India’s first true ODM, dominate the TWS category on the back of its BLE stack, expand into India’s first indigenous Wi-Fi router, and ultimately develop its own SoC embedded across these products. Beyond capability and supplier access, the company entered our conversation with advanced customer discussions, both domestic and international.
Why We Invested
We invested in iDO because they represent something India’s electronics ecosystem has needed for decades: a credible, IP-led ODM that can shift the country from assembly to design. Ashita and Shalabh bring the rare combination of deep domain expertise, established industry relationships, and the ambition to build at category-defining scale. Their approach is both disciplined and audacious: starting with a focused beachhead in TWS, building proprietary firmware, and progressively expanding across the electronics stack.
For Merak, this investment reflects a deeper conviction. We believe that the transition from assembly to design is one of the defining challenges of Indian manufacturing in this decade, and that the companies and investors who commit to it now will shape the trajectory for years to come. iDO can unlock higher value capture for Indian brands, reduce dependence on China, and compress innovation cycles. More fundamentally, it can help prove that India is capable of owning the full stack, from design to delivery. We are proud to partner with Ashita, Shalabh, and the iDO team as they build what Indian electronics has been missing.