Simulit: Rebuilding a Pitch to Find the Real Market

Vishva encountered Simulit, a semiconductor startup founded by two IIT research scholars working in deep UV lithography. When they pitched, his initial read was skeptical: the semiconductor industry is dominated by players like ASML with decades of investment, and China and the US have capital advantages that are nearly impossible to match.

He pushed them hard on the market, asking whether they genuinely believed they could compete at the frontier of the industry. Their pitch deck didn't hold up under scrutiny, and they couldn't articulate a clear competitive position.

Rather than pass on them outright, Vishva scrapped their pitch deck and rebuilt it from scratch, forcing clarity on what they were actually building. Through that process, a defensible thesis emerged: Simulit wasn't trying to compete with ASML on cutting-edge extreme UV lithography. They were targeting the deep UV segment, specifically building machinery capable of producing chipsets in the 28-to-90 nanometer range.

The 28-nanometer node is a gold standard for a range of industrial and consumer electronics applications, including HVAC and other devices that don't require sub-nanometer precision. As the broader industry races toward subatomic-level processes, this segment is underserved and cost-sensitive, and Simulit's cost efficiency gave them a real angle.

After the rebuild, Simulit re-pitched using the new framing. The clearer positioning made the investment case legible in a way the original pitch had not.