Work / Speciale Invest
Case study
Five years of being counted on.
Speciale Invest
Capital & Brand Narrative
Summit, publications, reports, film, fund materials
Deep-tech venture capital
Partner since 2022
A fund is judged on things you can't see.
Speciale Invest backs deep tech — the hard, slow, expensive kind. Founded in 2018 by Vishesh Rajaram and Arjun Rao.
LPs decide whether to back them. Founders decide whether to take their money. Neither one is looking at a product.
They're deciding whether to trust the people.
Everything they hand you has to be worth keeping.
A fund's whole year is in its conversations. But conversations end, and what's left in the room afterwards is whatever they gave you — a report, a book, a film, a page.
Those things have to carry the fund when nobody from the fund is there.
That's a lot of weight for a printed object. So it has to be right, and it has to be right on the day, every year, without a second chance.
Every year, the same three. Then whatever the year needs.
Design and production partner since 2023
The summit is the one day a year Speciale's entire world is in a single room — LPs, founders, operators, the wider ecosystem. Everything the fund has thought and done across twelve months gets compressed into a few hours, and everyone leaves with an impression they'll carry until the next one.
That's a difficult brief. A conference can be organised well and still feel like nothing in particular. The risk isn't chaos; it's a day that goes smoothly and leaves no mark.
We design the whole of it. The stage and the environment. The presentation system every speaker works inside, so a dozen sessions read as one event rather than a dozen decks. The print, the signage, the wayfinding. The things people take home — which are the only part of the day that outlives it.
Since last year we've been shooting it too. Photography through the day, and an after-film that gives the summit a second life: for LPs who couldn't travel, for founders deciding where to raise next, for the version of the day that circulates long after everyone's gone home.
We're on again for 2026, with more to do than last year.
Speciale Summit 2025 — after movie
Annual, for the summit
Every fund faces the same small problem. Someone asks what's in your portfolio, and the honest answer takes twenty minutes or a link that never gets opened.
The flipbook is our answer to that. A hand-sized book, remade each year, with about ninety seconds on every company Speciale has backed — what it does, why it matters, who's building it.
The size is the whole idea. It fits in a pocket and it fits in a conversation. You can hand it across a table mid-sentence, and the person opposite can flick through it while you keep talking. That's a very different thing from sending a link and hoping.
It has become the piece people ask for by name.
Unlocking Future Technologies — the flipbook
Annual
A year at a fund is genuinely hard to summarise. New investments, follow-ons, portfolio milestones, thesis work, ecosystem appearances, awards, hires, the reports. All of it real, none of it obviously connected.
Most funds solve that with a long PDF that gets opened once.
Speciale Times is a newspaper. The full year, laid out the way a paper lays out a year — headlines, columns, sections you can dip into and abandon. It asks for five minutes rather than an hour, and it gives back a complete picture of a fund without anyone having to explain it.
It's now the single thing you'd hand someone who asked what does Speciale actually do?
As the thinking demands
Speciale publishes serious research, and research is only useful if it gets read by the people who set direction — policymakers, institutions, founders, other investors.
India's Deep Tech Revolution, with Oister Global. 132 pages on where India's deep tech economy is heading, endorsed by Kris Gopalakrishnan and Lakshmi Narayanan. Our job was to make a book that length feel navigable — structure, hierarchy, data visualisation, and a print object substantial enough to sit on a desk rather than in a downloads folder.
The Indian Semiconductor Startup Landscape 2026, with the Startup Policy Forum. Launched at an event in Delhi. Design and print, built for a room of people who would each read a different twenty pages.
Indian Semiconductor Startup Landscape 2026
Ongoing
Investment decks, thesis documents, LP communications — the working documents of a fund, across the year.
Including the materials for Speciale's own fundraise. That one matters more than the rest. It's the document a fund uses to ask for money, and it is the last thing anyone hands to someone they aren't certain of.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped being outsiders.
When we started, Speciale was a ₹300 crore fund. It's ₹1,000 crore now. We made the materials they raised on — which is the one job a fund would never hand to someone it wasn't sure of.
Four years in, nobody renegotiates anything. The work just gets bigger.
And they send us their own portfolio companies. InspeCity came that way, and raised $5.6M on the deck we built.
of being counted on
Guys, what hit me the most was — You are super articulate. You delivered to the promise. You stood by us. You did this all very calmly.