Startup Spotlights

Global design platform Canva has identified India as a strategic priority in its growth roadmap, with ambitions to elevate the country from its current position as the fourth-largest market to its number one market worldwide. With over 2.8 billion designs created in India and 2.5 million new designs added daily, the platform is witnessing explosive adoption among students, educators, small businesses, and content creators.

Mangalore-based deep-tech startup Hydgen has secured $5 million in a pre-Series A funding round to accelerate the deployment of its proprietary Anion Exchange Membrane (AEM) electrolyzer technology, enabling industries to produce green hydrogen on-site using renewable energy. The equity-debt mix round was led by Transition Venture Capital, with participation from Cloudberry Pioneer Investments (Europe), Moringa Ventures (Singapore), and strategic family offices from India and Singapore.

In a landmark partnership aimed at accelerating India’s deep-tech innovation, global venture capital firms Accel and Prosus have joined forces to co-invest in early-stage Indian startups through Accel’s Atoms X program. Announced on October 26, 2025, the alliance will provide combined investments of up to $2 million per startup ($1 million each from Accel and Prosus), targeting ventures in AI-driven automation, advanced manufacturing, energy transition, robotics, and other LeapTech domains.

In a major boost to India’s artificial intelligence ecosystem, Dell Technologies has launched the Dell Pro Max with GB10—a high-performance desktop workstation equipped with the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell Superchip, designed to empower developers, researchers, and enterprises to build and train large AI models locally without dependency on cloud infrastructure. Priced starting at ₹3.99 lakh, the workstation targets AI startups, academic institutions, and sectors like healthcare and finance, supporting models of up to 200 billion parameters and offering data center-level performance in a desktop form factor.

Bengaluru-based voice AI startup Fundamento has raised $1.9 million in a seed funding round to accelerate the development and deployment of its multilingual conversational AI platform. The investment will fuel product enhancement, team expansion, and market outreach as the company targets enterprises and SMBs seeking to automate customer interactions through natural, human-like voice AI.