Imran Kizilbash & Abhinav Jain from Titanium Innovation Investments

Imran Kizilbash & Abhinav Jain from Titanium Innovation Investments

Author: collide. March 3, 2026 Duration: 1:10:52

The industrial world is still running on manual processes and siloed data while our phones got smarter ten times over, and that gap is exactly where Titanium Innovation Investments is placing its bets. Abhinav Jain and Imran Kizilbash, co-founders and managing partners at Titanium Innovation Investments, break down what it actually takes to sell tech into enterprises that move slow by design, why product market fit is something you can lose just as fast as you find it, and how they evaluate founding teams when the revenue is basically zero. Plus some real talk on Houston's startup ecosystem and whether the city has the deal flow to back up the ambition.

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0:00 Introduction
1:00 Titanium Innovation Investments thesis and origin story
4:17 Why industrial tech adoption lags behind consumer tech
7:01 Data as an asset in M&A and enterprise transactions
10:23 Imran and Abhinav's career journeys from field to finance
15:04 What product market fit actually looks like at seed stage
19:24 Unit economics and business models in hard tech vs software
29:56 Cutting through the AI hype in industrial applications
34:23 Data ownership, legal challenges, and enterprise selling
40:16 Change management and why adoption cycles are longer
43:21 Portfolio construction and sector diversification
50:13 Houston's startup ecosystem and deal sourcing nationally
1:04:18 Advice for founders on fundraising and building trust

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They say everything's bigger in Texas, including the challenges and opportunities presented by climate change. That's precisely why Houston has become a surprising epicenter for the global energy transition. In H-Town, the fourth largest city in the United States, a new wave of entrepreneurs is converging, partnering with established industry titans to forge the technologies that will slash emissions and power a low-carbon future. This is the landscape explored in Energytech Startups, a podcast from collide. that goes straight to the source. Hosts Nada Ahmed and Jason Ethier sit down with the very people driving this change-the founders, investors, and innovators who are building companies at the intersection of energy and technology. Each conversation digs into the real work: the engineering breakthroughs, the complex business models, and the hard-won lessons from the front lines of a sector undergoing massive transformation. It’s a direct line to the strategies and stories shaping the future of energy, making this podcast an essential listen for anyone curious about the business and investment dynamics behind building a sustainable world. You’ll hear frank discussions about funding, scaling, and the practical realities of bringing a transformative idea to market, all set against the backdrop of a city historically known for oil and gas now betting big on its own reinvention.
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