In the high-stakes world of startups, one challenge looms larger than funding, talent, or even product-market fit: finding the first customer. For deep-tech ventures building one-of-a-kind technologies, the barrier is even steeper—conventional government tenders require prior experience, established turnover, and competitor benchmarks that simply do not exist for novel innovations.
Read More
In a world where talent is abundant but meaningful connections are scarce, two of India’s most experienced product and technology leaders are building a solution. Former Swiggy executive Anuj Rathi and former Zomato CTO Prashant Parashar have launched Profound, an AI-native platform that gives every professional their own AI representative. The company has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from a stellar roster of technology founders and institutional investors, and opened early access to its first cohort.
Read More
In a significant boost for climate-tech innovation in India, Bengaluru and New York-based deep-tech startup Mitti Labs has raised $9.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Aramco Ventures, the venture capital arm of Saudi Aramco. The round also saw participation from existing backer Lightspeed India, alongside new investors including Godrej Industries Group, Cisco Foundation, Francis Family Fund, and Volta Circle.
Read More
India’s e-commerce enablement unicorn Shiprocket is set to make its public market debut with a ₹1,617.59 crore initial public offering (IPO) opening on August 12, 2026. The Gurugram-based company has fixed the price band at ₹92 to ₹97 per share, with the issue closing on August 14. At the upper end of the price band, Shiprocket is valued at approximately ₹7,057 crore.
Read More
Artificial intelligence has become the defining investment theme of India’s startup ecosystem in 2026. After years of cautious experimentation, venture capital is now flowing steadily into AI-first startups, making them the centerpiece of the country’s innovation narrative. The data is unambiguous: Indian AI startups raised **$1.07 billion** in the first half of 2026, a 33% increase from $802 million a year earlier. For the whole of 2025, Indian AI startups had raised $1.6 billion.
Read More
On a humid July morning in Lucknow, a team of scientists at Biotech Park watched their phones light up with notifications from investors across the country. The news spread fast: Arboreal Bioinnovations, the specialty food and nutraceutical ingredients startup they had built from scratch, had just closed one of the largest Series A rounds in India’s specialty food ingredients sector. The ₹230 crore ($24.09 million) investment, co-led by EAAA Alternatives (the alternatives arm of Edelweiss) and Omnivore, with continued backing from existing investor Rainmatter by Zerodha, wasn’t just a funding milestone—it was a signal.
Read More
On August 4, 2026, an Indian AI infrastructure startup emerged from stealth and dropped a bombshell that sent shockwaves through the global technology industry. Volta Infra, a company founded just seven months ago, announced it had secured a $10 billion AI cloud computing contract—one of the largest deals ever signed by an Indian deep-tech company.
Read More
India’s next wave of app innovation is being built with AI at its centre—and Google is placing its biggest bet yet on the founders leading that charge. On August 3, 2026, the tech giant unveiled the 2026 cohort of its Google Play Accelerator India, selecting 20 AI-powered startups for a three-month, equity-free programme designed to help them scale from domestic success stories to globally competitive products.
Read More
The enterprise software market has a long-standing reputation for inertia. For over a decade, the customer relationship management (CRM) landscape has been largely unchanged, with legacy vendors like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, and Zoho controlling the majority of the market. This has left enterprise sales teams burdened with systems that function primarily as “systems of record”—places where data is manually entered rather than intelligence being actively generated.
Read More
For decades, India’s semiconductor story has been framed as one of missed opportunity. The country produces some of the world’s finest chip designers, yet almost all of them work for foreign companies, designing chips that are manufactured abroad and sold back to India. That narrative is being rewritten. At the heart of this transformation is a quiet but determined collaboration between IIT Delhi, industry leaders, and the government—a partnership that is building the infrastructure for India’s fabless chip-design startup ecosystem from the ground up.
Read More