Technology has the power to help your business grow its reputation, revenue, and profit margin. However, with many tech solutions available on the market, you might be unsure about the best tools and services for your company’s specific needs.

If you are worried about making the wrong decision, there are some essential services and tools you would be wise to incorporate into your operations. Here are four tech strategies that can grow your business this year.

1. Hire Professional IT Consulting Services

Rather than guessing what IT solutions your business needs, hire experienced IT consultants to make informed decisions based on your company’s exact needs, goals, and IT infrastructure.

Expert help from professional IT consulting in Ottawa will save your business a considerable amount of time and money while boosting its productivity. After all, they can help you develop a tech roadmap to ensure you buy the right tools for your business while optimising your current IT infrastructure.

An IT consulting firm also reviews your IT, security, and data policies to improve your company’s cybersecurity and compliance, shielding your company from an expensive breach and supporting its growth. The average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million in 2024, according to IBM’s annual Cost of a Data Breach Report — making proactive security consulting one of the highest-ROI investments a business can make.

The demand for this kind of expertise is only growing. The global IT consulting services market was valued at $561.8 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $906 billion by 2032, growing at a CAGR of 7.4%, according to Verified Market Research. Around 62% of organisations implemented at least one IT consulting project in the past 24 months — a clear signal that external technology advisory has moved from a luxury to a standard business practice.

2. Use Advanced Analytics

As you might know, it’s cheaper to retain a customer than to secure a new one, and advanced analytics lowers your overheads further. More companies are using the technology to analyse consumer behavior and patterns to determine their Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). As a result, your business can immediately identify the most valuable leads, meaning you stop wasting your time and money on lower-value users.

By focusing your efforts on higher-value customers, your business is more likely to generate a bigger return, leading to a higher annual revenue and profit margin.

The numbers behind this strategy are compelling. According to McKinsey research, companies that use customer analytics extensively are 2.6 times more likely to have a significantly higher ROI than competitors, and 23 times more likely to outperform rivals on new customer acquisition.

3. Invest in Productivity and Collaboration Platforms

A cloud-based productivity and collaboration platform could transform your business. After all, innovative tools, such as Trello or Slack, could encourage teams to work together, improve accountability, and boost efficiency each day.

It is a must-have for hybrid and remote teams, as it’s easier to manage various projects, delegate jobs, and collaborate on tasks. The virtual trail also makes staff more accountable for a task, helping the company deliver projects to a high standard and on schedule.

The productivity case is well-documented. The global team collaboration software market was valued at $36.1 billion in 2024 and is forecast to reach $57.4 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research. Teams using Slack report a 47% increase in productivity and send 32% fewer internal emails — reducing the communication clutter that costs organisations an estimated $37 billion annually in lost productivity. With hybrid work now standard — over 48% of the global workforce operated in hybrid or remote settings in 2025 — collaboration platforms have gone from useful to non-negotiable.

4. Embrace Software Automation Tools

Compete with your competitors by incorporating various software automation tools into your daily operations. The technologies automatically complete tasks so your employees don’t have to, freeing up their time while increasing morale.

The scale of the opportunity is significant. McKinsey estimates that 60–70% of business tasks across industries have the potential to be automated with current technology. Meanwhile, 88% of SMBs say automation allows them to compete with larger companies, according to Zapier’s State of Business Automation report 2021 — and businesses that implement process automation report cost savings of between 10% and 50% across departments. For marketing specifically, 76% of companies using marketing automation earn ROI within their first year of deployment, according to Demandsage.

For instance, you could invest in:

• Social media scheduling: The right tool will make it easier to plan and schedule social media posts in advance, track reviews, and analyze data.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) workflows: The tool simplifies customer communications, data, and tasks.
• Email marketing automation: Create and schedule email campaigns for specific customers, such as welcome emails for new customers and special offers to encourage repeat orders.

The above solutions can improve employee productivity and satisfaction, lower overheads, prevent internal errors, and increase the company’s annual revenue and profitability.

This article was contributed by BedrockIT. It has been reviewed and edited by the LAFFAZ Media Editorial Staff for clarity, accuracy, and style.

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When Mukund Jha co-founded Dunzo — one of India’s most recognised hyperlocal delivery startups — few would have predicted his next act would involve shipping an AI platform that renders coding optional. But that is exactly what happened. In 2025, Mukund and his twin brother Madhav Jha launched Emergent, a platform that lets anyone turn a plain-language idea into a production-ready application without writing a single line of code. Eight months later, Emergent had crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, with more than 8 million builders across 190+ countries deploying software on the platform.

That momentum brought a harder question: what comes after building? The answer, Jha decided, was running. Last month, Emergent launched Wingman — an autonomous AI agent that lives not in a dashboard or a standalone app, but inside WhatsApp, Telegram, and iMessage. It schedules meetings, runs sales outreach, drafts content, preps briefings before calls, and manages your inbox — continuously, in the background, through the chat interfaces that founders already use. LAFFAZ covered the Wingman launch when it dropped; what follows is the conversation behind it.

The company is backed by Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Lightspeed, Y Combinator, Prosus, Together, and Google’s AI Futures Fund, with $100 million raised in total.

LAFFAZ sat down with Mukund Jha to understand the internal logic behind Wingman, how Emergent thinks about trust in autonomous systems, and what the rise of AI agents really means for human coders.

LAFFAZ: ​​Wingman feels like a major expansion from Emergent’s vibe-coding roots. What was the internal insight that convinced you the next product should be an autonomous agent rather than another layer of software-building tools?

Mukund: Emergent was built on a simple premise: that the best technology should be accessible to everyone, not just those with technical backgrounds. Wingman is the next step in that vision, applying the same agentic engineering foundation to autonomous agents. We know that professionals can lose hours of valuable time to day-to-day admin, such as outreach, task delegation, meeting prep, follow-ups, and general management.

We designed something to give users those hours back so they can focus on driving results and serving clients. By relieving the mental load that scheduling and digital discourse require, people can reclaim that time and direct their attention towards growing for the future.

LAFFAZ: Users want autonomy but also peace of mind. Can you walk us through how Wingman’s “trust boundary” works in practice? For example, how does it decide what tasks are low-risk enough to handle independently, versus those needing user approval—and what’s the process if it makes a misjudgment?

Mukund: Our trust boundary is essentially how Wingman distinguishes between low-stakes tasks that can be automated and consequential actions that still require input from the user. So for routine tasks, such as moving a meeting time or generating a research summary, the logic is binary, predictable, and confidence is high. However, sending messages to large groups or modifying important data are considered to be high-risk requests where the agent must interpret intent, meaning that it will prepare the actions, but will need the green light from the user in order to proceed. These trust boundaries can also be established by the user upon sign-up, ensuring that they are always in control and can specify any task they would like to directly oversee.

LAFFAZ: Wingman builds memory across sessions and adapts to your tone and communication style. How do you design this personalization to feel genuinely helpful and reliable, without coming across as intrusive or overly dependent on user trust or preference?

Mukund: Wingman adapts to a user’s ‘normal’, which means that they never have to start from zero. It retains context, saves routines, and recalls preferences across sessions, meaning that every new session is a continuation of the last. This means that the user doesn’t have to be overly specific in their prompts as the agent quietly observes their behaviors and evolves to mirror them. However, while Wingman notices these patterns, it collaborates with and seeks verification from the user before acting autonomously. Instead of being overly reliant on user preferences, the agent is trained through application and analysing feedback, which makes Wingman feel more like a trusted operator rather than another tool to manage.

LAFFAZ: A lot of AI agents promise broad utility, but many struggle with ambiguity and edge cases. Where do you see Wingman’s current limits today, and what kinds of tasks still require a human in the loop?

Mukund: Although being able to act autonomously for more routine tasks, Wingman always requires human insight in order to carry out more ‘high-risk tasks’. How this works is that the agent will calculate the risk associated with a task by detecting intent and priority, and then validate the action with the user before executing. So humans will still need to provide their input for any outbound actions, such as sending an email or meeting invite, but this also means that they are in complete control of their professional admin. Because Wingman lives in the apps that humans use every day, such as WhatsApp or Gmail, it can observe your behaviours and establish patterns but it will always clarify with the user first. Wingman also reconfigures these permissions for every user, so any disruptions will redirect the agent back to you for final confirmation.

LAFFAZ: From a market perspective, Emergent’s vibe-coding hit $100M ARR in 8 months. But Wingman pivots to task bots—what if users stick to free agents from OpenAI or Anthropic? How do you win?

Mukund: What separates Wingman from its competitors is that it is built for how people already work. By embedding itself into WhatsApp, Telegram, and iMessage, it eliminates the biggest pain point in AI adoption and meets people in their existing workflows. There’s no app to download or onboarding to sit through; you can open a chat and start delegating. Most AI agents today live inside developer environments or standalone platforms that require technical setup or conditioning to operate in a way that is most efficient and effective for the user.

The most successful AI agent will be the one that founders and businesses actually use, which is exactly what this platform was built for.

LAFFAZ: Vibe-coding agents like Wingman let anyone prompt apps without writing code. They’re clearly helping non-tech founders, and Indian startups are already using AI for 40-80% of coding. But how do you see these tools impacting human coders?

Mukund: The human impact of AI is not something to dismiss. It’s a real concern and one that I take very seriously. However, I believe that AI tools can be an extension of talented coders rather than replace them. AI can help streamline operations and make coders dramatically more productive, meaning they are able to take on more ambitious projects and redirect their focus onto measurable outcomes instead of arduous processes.

AI is redistributing opportunities to people who never had access to them, as opposed to removing the need for human input.

Companies with growth ambitions tend to expand what they build rather than shrink their teams, so they must design systems that can evolve along with AI innovations and complement human potential.

What comes through in Jha’s answers is a consistency of principle rather than just product positioning. The same thesis that drove Emergent — powerful technology should reach everyone, not just developers — runs directly through Wingman’s design logic: no new app, no setup, no learning curve. Just a chat and a delegation.

Whether Wingman can hold that promise at scale, against well-capitalised competitors from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, remains the open question. But Jha’s track record — from Dunzo’s hyperlocal infrastructure to Emergent’s eight-month sprint to nine figures in ARR — suggests that this is a founder who moves faster than the debate. The next phase of AI won’t be won by the most capable model. If Jha is right, it will be won by the one already sitting in your inbox.

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Pixxel and Sarvam AI have announced a partnership to develop India’s first orbital data centre satellite, named Pathfinder — a 200 kg spacecraft carrying datacenter-class GPUs into low Earth orbit, with an AI inference stack running entirely in space. The satellite is scheduled to reach orbit as early as Q4 2026.

Under the partnership, Pixxel will design, build, launch, and operate the satellite. Sarvam will provide the AI backbone — handling both model training and inference directly in orbit, with no dependence on foreign cloud or ground infrastructure. It is the first time India-built AI models will run aboard an India-built satellite.

“Ground-based data centres are facing increasing constraints around energy, land, regulation, and scale, and the current model is becoming harder to sustain environmentally. Orbital data centres open up a new frontier, where compute can be powered by abundant solar energy, operate closer to space-based data, and move beyond some of the limits faced on Earth.”

— Awais Ahmed, CEO, Pixxel

The operational logic is a direct challenge to how Earth observation has worked for decades. Most satellites collect raw imagery, beam it to ground stations, and wait for terrestrial systems to process it — a pipeline that introduces hours of latency between capture and insight. Pathfinder collapses that gap. When the satellite passes over a location, it can detect a wildfire, identify a crop disease, or flag a pipeline leak in the same orbital pass — without a round trip to Earth.

Pathfinder will also carry Pixxel’s hyperspectral imaging camera, capable of capturing high-fidelity spectral data across hundreds of wavelength bands. That imagery will be analysed in-orbit by Sarvam’s foundation models, delivering processed intelligence rather than raw files.

“AI infrastructure is not just a software question — it is a sovereignty question. Sarvam has been building India’s full-stack AI platform from the ground up, and partnering with Pixxel allows us to extend that sovereign stack into space.”

— Pratyush Kumar, CEO, Sarvam AI, via Pixxel

The mission is also a hardware stress test. Running datacenter-class GPUs in orbit requires managing extreme thermal swings, radiation exposure, and power constraints that ground-based systems never face. Pathfinder will validate whether frontier compute can survive and perform in the harsh space environment at scale.

Pathfinder will be built at Gigapixxel, Pixxel’s upcoming satellite production facility designed to produce up to 100 units. The company was founded by Awais Ahmed and Kshitij Khandelwal and is backed by investors including Google, Lightspeed, and Accenture. It has previously launched a constellation of hyperspectral satellites and positioned itself as a planetary intelligence company rather than a conventional Earth observation provider.

Pixxel has earned its credibility the hard way. In September 2024, Pixxel became the first Indian space startup to win a NASA contract — joining the agency’s $476 million commercial smallsat data acquisition programme to supply hyperspectral Earth observation data to NASA, the US government, and academic partners.

Sarvam, co-founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, has been building India’s sovereign large language model stack since 2023, with backing from Peak XV Partners and Lightspeed India. The orbital partnership marks a significant expansion of that mandate — from language to space-based intelligence infrastructure.

Pixxel has been making the broader case publicly too. In a thread on X on 15 May, the company argued that the scale of the problem demands a structural rethink — not just incremental infrastructure expansion.

“Every second, the world generates more data than its infrastructure was built to handle. And the gap is widening.” Pixxel posted on X

The broader backdrop matters. As AI demand strains terrestrial power grids and water resources, orbital compute is emerging as a structural alternative — solar-powered, jurisdiction-flexible, and physically closer to space-based data sources. Pixxel and Sarvam are not alone in this race. Neevcloud and launch startup Agnikul Cosmos are targeting a launch for Project Orion — a planned orbital data centre constellation — by the end of 2026 as well. The orbital compute race in India is no longer a single bet; it is becoming a sector.

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Dil Foods, a Bengaluru-based virtual restaurant enabler, has raised ₹72 crore in a Series B funding round led by the family office of Bikaji Foods International, with participation from existing investors V3 Ventures, MJV Ventures, and Alteria Capital, along with undisclosed international funds.

The raise takes Dil Foods’ total funding to ₹113.35 crore, including ₹37.7 crore raised across its Seed and Series A rounds. Founded in 2022 by Arpita Aditi, the company operates a platform that partners with local restaurants — using their existing kitchen capacity — to run delivery-first food brands on Swiggy and Zomato. The asset-light model sidesteps the real estate-heavy costs of conventional cloud kitchens entirely.

Arpita Aditi brings an unusual founder profile to the food business. A biotech engineer from MIT, she channelled stints at Himalayan Drugs, Reliance Capital, and Swiggy into a clear-eyed understanding of both supply chains and consumer behaviour before launching Dil Foods in 2022. The platform’s early credibility got a significant public moment on Shark Tank India Season 3, where Arpita closed a ₹2 crore deal for 2.67% equity — backed by all four sharks: Radhika Gupta (Edelweiss Mutual Fund), Vineeta Singh (Sugar Cosmetics), Peyush Bansal (Lenskart), and Ritesh Agarwal (OYO Rooms). The four-shark close is rare on the show and signalled early conviction in both the founder and the model.

Dil Foods currently operates 10 regional food brands, including Khichdi Bar, Bihari Bowl, House of Andhra, and The Chaat Cult, across six cities and over 340 pincodes, with more than 300 restaurant partners onboarded. It set up one of Bengaluru’s largest central kitchens last year, spanning over one lakh square feet, to support back-end production and supply standardisation across partner kitchens.

Arpita Aditi framed the raise around capturing a larger share of India’s fast-evolving food delivery market:

“Dil Foods has always been built on the idea of creating a sustainable ecosystem in the food industry. This funding will help us double down on that belief and capture a larger share of the consumer’s plate. With this capital, we aim to scale to 600 locations by FY28 and reach an annualised revenue of ₹500 crore. A significant portion will also go into strengthening our backend production and supply chain.” — Arpita Aditi, Founder, Dil Foods

The Bikaji Foods family office involvement is the strategic highlight of this round. Deepak Agarwal, Managing Director of Bikaji Foods International, pointed to a shared conviction around regional Indian cuisine — the same culinary DNA that built Bikaji’s snack empire now backing a platform designed to take India’s diverse food culture to more consumers through digital distribution.

Mohammed Ali Shariff, Partner at MJV (Mount Judi Ventures), offered the clearest description of what Dil Foods actually is: not a cloud kitchen play, but a distributed virtual brand network built on infrastructure that already exists — turning idle restaurant capacity into branded, scalable delivery businesses without requiring partners to build from scratch.

The growth trajectory validates the model. V3 Ventures, which backed Dil Foods at the Series A when the platform operated from just 30 locations, noted a 30x scale achieved since — a trajectory that makes the 600-location FY28 target look achievable rather than aspirational.

India’s online food delivery market is projected to reach $59 billion by 2030, driven by rising disposable incomes, convenience-led consumption, and accelerating demand for regional cuisines beyond metro taste profiles. Dil Foods competes in this space against Rebel Foods, EatClub, and Curefoods — all of which operate at significantly higher capital bases. The virtual restaurant enabler model, if it scales as planned, offers a structurally lower-cost path to the same outcome.

Also Read: Bombay Banta Raises ₹8 Crore Pre-Series A Led by DSG Consumer Partners

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Mekr Technologies, a New Delhi-based consumer appliance design and manufacturing platform, has raised ₹67 crore ($7 million) in a Series A funding round led by Avaana Capital, with participation from Titan Capital Winners Fund — an existing investor that backed the company at the start.

Founded in 2022 by Anand Yadav and Gaurang Kuchhal, Mekr operates as an Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) — it handles the full product lifecycle for consumer appliance brands, from concept design, prototyping, and tooling through to certification and mass manufacturing. The company currently manufactures across home appliances, kitchen appliances, personal care products, and automotive accessories, using modular engineering systems including BLDC motors, heating systems, load cells, and proprietary mould designs.

The company operates a 50,000 sq ft manufacturing facility in Kundli, Haryana, and is setting up an additional 1 lakh sq ft unit to scale to 1 million units per month.

Its client roster is telling: Croma, Wipro, Amazon Basics, and Flipkart are among 40-plus brands it has worked with, across more than 100 SKUs. The company currently operates a 50,000 sq ft manufacturing facility in Kundli, Haryana, and is setting up an additional 1 lakh sq ft unit that will take monthly production capacity to nearly one million units.

The fresh capital will go toward deeper R&D, proprietary tooling, supplier localisation, manufacturing automation, and building export readiness for global market expansion.

“Mekr is building foundational engineering and unlocking manufacturing capabilities that directly address India’s structural reliance on imported appliance components. Its design-led, modular architecture enables faster innovation cycles, superior cost efficiency, and more resilient supply chains.” — Vikas Verma, Partner, Avaana Capital,

The market context reinforces the thesis. India’s small home appliances market is estimated at over ₹40,000 crore and growing at 7–9% annually — yet remains heavily dependent on imported components. The China+1 supply chain realignment underway globally is creating a structural opening for Indian ODMs that can match quality and cost competitiveness at scale.

Mekr’s bet is that brands don’t want to build in-house manufacturing capability — they want a reliable, tech-enabled manufacturing partner that handles complexity end-to-end. Shiv Kapoor of Titan Capital noted the founders have “come a long way” since the firm’s initial investment, building a multi-product portfolio with some of India’s most respected brands as customers.

The wider ambition is no less than establishing India as a self-reliant manufacturing hub for consumer electronics — starting with the everyday appliances that fill Indian homes.

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Flo Mobility has raised $2.5 million in a pre-Series A funding round co-led by Mela Ventures and Arali Ventures, with participation from ARTPARK, VentureGarage, JITO Incubation & Innovation Foundation, and DEVX Ventures, to scale its autonomous construction robotics business across India and into international markets.

The Bengaluru-based startup — founded in 2021 by Manesh Jain (CEO) and Pratik Patel (COO) — builds what it calls Physical AI solutions for the construction sector: autonomous mobile robots designed to handle material movement and site workflows across large, unstructured project environments.

Flo Mobility’s flagship product, the Flo Hauler, is a battery-powered autonomous robot capable of transporting loads up to 1.5 tonnes across construction sites, including multi-floor operations, in harsh outdoor conditions and constantly shifting layouts. The company claims deployments at more than 25 sites, with the total robot fleet exceeding 60 units across 10 states. Clients include L&T Construction, Godrej Properties, Sobha, Embassy Group, Capacité Infra, and KEC International.

The reported outcomes are striking: clients cite roughly 45% cost savings on material movement, 50% faster material transport, and a 67% reduction in site accidents — figures that, if they hold across broader deployments, make a compelling case for automation in a sector that has been deeply resistant to it.

Manesh Jain framed the raise around a systems diagnosis rather than a labour replacement argument:

“The construction industry has been operating the same way for decades, with enormous amounts of labour dedicated to simply moving materials from one place to another. That’s not a people problem; it’s a systems problem. Flo Mobility was built to solve it. Our robots do not replace the skilled labour that builds India’s cities — they free that labour to do the work that matters. This funding gives us the firepower to scale our deployments, build more robots, and expand internationally. We’ve proven the model. Now we’re going to take it to every major construction market in the world.”
— Manesh Jain, Co-Founder & CEO, Flo Mobility

The structural problem is well-documented. Construction employs over 270 million people globally but deploys just 15–20 robots per 10,000 workers — a fraction of the 600-plus deployed in automotive manufacturing. India’s construction boom makes the gap particularly acute: labour shortages are increasingly structural rather than cyclical, and project delays due to material handling bottlenecks remain endemic.

Also Read: This Indian Startup Built a Farm Robot to Solve Labour Shortages – And It Just Won a Global Award

Flo Mobility will use the fresh capital to scale manufacturing of its robots, advance its vertical AI and autonomy stack, expand deployments across India, grow the engineering team, and make its first moves into international markets — particularly the Middle East, where large-scale construction activity and labour cost pressures create a natural fit.

Co-founder Pratik Patel pointed to the moment on-site that still anchors the company’s mission:

“When we first walked onto a construction site with our robot, the reaction from site teams was immediate — they saw materials moving autonomously to the right floor, to the right zone, without anyone pushing a wheelbarrow. That moment still drives us. We’ve built the hardware, the AI, and the go-to-market from the ground up. With this capital, we will expand our engineering team, double down on product development for automating more use cases, and cement Flo Mobility’s position as the defining robotics platform for construction.”
— Pratik Patel, Co-Founder & COO, Flo Mobility

The round follows an earlier seed investment from JIIF in late 2024, and the participation of ARTPARK — the AI and Robotics Technology Park backed by IISc Bengaluru and the Government of India — signals growing institutional credibility for the startup’s technology thesis.

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HrdWyr, a Bengaluru-based fabless semiconductor startup, has raised $13 million in a Series A funding round led by Ideaspring Capital, with participation from Singularity AMC, Avatar Growth Capital, and existing investor Persistent Systems.

The capital will go toward accelerating the development of its AI-native System-on-Chip (AISoC) products and deepening customer engagements across global markets. HrdWyr builds chips purpose-designed for edge computing and what the company calls “Physical AI” — artificial intelligence embedded directly in real-world systems like EVs, industrial equipment, consumer electronics, and data centres.

Founded in 2023 by Ramamurthy Sivakumar (CEO) and Guruswamy Ganesh (COO), the company operates as a full-stack fabless semiconductor business — designing complete chip products rather than licensing IP. The team brings over 250 years of combined semiconductor experience across India, the US, Europe, Israel, and APAC, spanning transitions from 1-micron to near-1nm process nodes.

Unlike conventional chips adapted for AI after the fact, HrdWyr designs its AISoCs from first principles around AI workloads — prioritising low latency, power efficiency, and the ability to process data autonomously at the point of generation. The company’s TEA (True Edge Autonomy) framework combines its semiconductor architecture with an agentic AI stack powered by reinforcement learning.

“The real power of AI will be unlocked as we enter the era of Physical AI, where advanced intelligence seamlessly integrates with real-world systems. This inflection point demands a fundamental rethinking of how computing systems are conceived, architected, and deployed.” — Ramamurthy Sivakumar, Founder and CEO, HrdWyr

The consumer electronics hook is notable: HrdWyr, in August 2025, partnered with audio and wearables brand boAt to launch the Indus 1011 chip — one of the first instances of an Indian-designed chip powering a mainstream Indian consumer product.

Naganand Doraswamy, Managing Partner at Ideaspring Capital, highlighted the strategic fit: the investment aligns with the firm’s thesis of building globally competitive products from India while supporting the country’s push for semiconductor self-reliance.

The macro backdrop is favourable. India’s semiconductor market is estimated at roughly $62 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $155 billion by 2031, driven by domestic demand, global supply chain diversification, and policy tailwinds. The government has committed over ₹76,000 crore under the India Semiconductor Mission, with 12 projects approved and roughly ₹1.64 lakh crore in planned investment in the pipeline.

Also Read: BigEndian Semiconductors Raises $6 Mn to Commercialise India’s First Homegrown SoC

HrdWyr is one of more than 130 active semiconductor startups in India, but its focus on complete AI-native chip products — rather than design services or IP licensing — places it in a narrower, higher-stakes category where execution and customer design wins will define the next phase.

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Rapido has raised $240 million in a primary funding round led by Prosus, with participation from WestBridge Capital and Accel, as part of a broader $730 million primary and secondary transaction that values the Bengaluru-based ride-hailing platform at $3 billion on a post-money basis.

The raise marks a sharp jump from Rapido’s last disclosed valuation of $1.1 billion when it entered the unicorn club in September 2024 — effectively nearly tripling its valuation in under two years. Prosus, which has been a long-term backer of the company, deepened its stake through the transaction, reinforcing its conviction in India’s mobility sector as a structural growth opportunity.

Rapido plans to deploy the capital towards expanding in tier-2 and smaller cities, growing its captain network, strengthening technology infrastructure, and investing in talent. The company already operates across more than 400 cities and has positioned itself around affordable transportation — bike taxis, auto rides, and cabs — alongside flexible earning opportunities for driver-partners.

Co-founder Aravind Sanka framed the raise around Rapido’s dual mission — mobility access and livelihood creation — rather than pure capital deployment. “At Rapido, we’ve always believed that the true measure of mobility is not only the rides completed but also livelihoods created. This investment is about accelerating our ability to unlock both these structurally.”

Also Read: Amit Shah launches Bharat Taxi platform in Delhi-NCR, Gujarat

The financial context reinforces why investors are doubling down. Rapido’s revenue from operations grew 44% to ₹934 crore in FY25 from ₹648 crore the previous year, and net losses narrowed by over 23% to ₹258 crore — driven by a surge in subscription revenue (up 14x to ₹275 crore) and delivery services (up 28% to ₹340 crore). Total income crossed ₹1,000 crore for the first time in FY25.

The competitive framing around this raise is striking. In August 2025, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi publicly named Rapido as its biggest rival in India — ahead of Ola, which he described as a distant third. Uber has since infused roughly ₹3,000 crore into its Indian subsidiary and announced a data centre partnership with Adani Group, underscoring how seriously it views the threat. Ola, meanwhile, is preparing for an IPO despite a 42% decline in FY25 revenue and widening losses.

Founded in 2015 by Aravind Sanka, Pavan Guntupalli, and Rishikesh SR, Rapido began as a bike-taxi aggregator before expanding into autos, cabs, and food delivery. Its SaaS-driven captain model — where drivers pay a subscription fee upfront rather than per-ride commission — has become a defining differentiator, with the platform now supporting over 9 million livelihoods across India.

Ashutosh Sharma, Head of India Ecosystem at Prosus, framed the investment around India’s structural mobility gap: two gaps are widening as growth shifts beyond metros — access to reliable, affordable transport, and access to flexible, dignified earning opportunities. Rapido, in Prosus’s view, is building at the intersection of both.

With $240 million in fresh primary capital and a war chest backed by credible institutional investors, Rapido enters its next phase as the clear alternative to Uber in India’s rapidly fragmenting ride-hailing market.

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Bombay Banta, a Sonipat, Haryana-based beverage startup selling desi-flavoured carbonated drinks, has raised ₹8 crore in a Pre-Series A round led by DSG Consumer Partners — the consumer-focused fund that first backed the brand at the seed stage in 2023. The round also includes Kapil Chopra, founder of EazyDiner and The Postcard Hotel, as a strategic investor, and values the company at ₹80 crore.

The brand was founded in 2021 by husband-wife duo Akkshita Malhotra and Meet Singh Malhotra. Akkshita, with prior experience at Nestlé and PVR, leads brand and consumer strategy. Meet, a gold medallist from The Oberoi Centre of Learning & Development and one of the youngest executive chefs in the Oberoi system, who handles product development and recipe formulation. Early hospitality backers Simrita Arora and Chef Deep Mohan Arneja, who supported the brand through product development, remain part of the cap table.

Bombay Banta built its early distribution by landing a listing as a featured beverage on Vistara Airlines, giving it direct access to urban premium flyers before it moved into restaurants, hotels, and quick commerce. Its current portfolio spans eight SKUs across two lines — a carbonated range including Masala Cola, Kala Khatta, Jeera Soda, Masala Soda, and Lemon Soda, and a non-carbonated, low-sugar range of Shikanji variants. The brand is now live on Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart, Flipkart Minutes, and BigBasket, and is stocked across hundreds of hotels and restaurants nationally.

Also Read: Who Owns Campa Cola? Reliance Bought It for ₹22 Crore

The fresh capital will fund pan-India distribution expansion, deeper quick commerce penetration, and new product launches. A Diet Vanilla Cola — its first zero-sugar, zero-calorie SKU — is planned for release later in May. The founders are targeting revenue to double over the next six months, with summer demand cited as a near-term driver. The brand recorded nearly 50 percent sales growth during investor discussions.

Akkshita Malhotra, co-founder and CMO, said the raise marks an inflection point for the brand. “This fundraise marks a significant inflection point for Bombay Banta. It reaffirms our conviction to disrupt the Indian beverage market as a brand that uniquely interprets flavour memories that generations have grown up with. Reimagined for today’s modern consumer with better ingredients, a distinctive range, premium branding, and world-class packaging – this capital with the backing of our investors will enable us to accelerate our vision across India and on a global stage over time,” she said.

DSG Consumer Partners’ Hari Premkumar, who led the round, said the fund is doubling down on the brand’s cross-channel momentum.DSG Consumer Partners’ Hari Premkumar, who led the round, said the fund is doubling down on the brand’s cross-channel momentum. “Bombay Banta is building a highly differentiated Indian beverage brand at the intersection of nostalgia, flavour and modern consumer relevance. Meet and Akkshita have demonstrated exceptional product instinct and brand-building capability in a highly competitive market, while creating strong resonance with consumers across channels. We are excited to deepen our partnership with them as they continue scaling Bombay Banta into a large and enduring consumer brand,” he said.

The raise is part of a broader trend of investor appetite for culturally rooted Indian challenger brands in beverages — a category where legacy cola duopolies still dominate shelf space but quick commerce and D2C hospitality channels have opened new distribution lanes for newcomers. DSG Consumer Partners’ continued backing across two rounds suggests Bombay Banta’s early traction across both premium hospitality and mass delivery is being read as a more defensible positioning than a single-channel play.

Also Read: Dil Foods Raises ₹72 Cr Series B to Scale India’s Regional Virtual Restaurant Brands

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When Alakh Pandey — founder and CEO of Physics Wallah — sat down with News Pinch on May 13 and went on record against the National Testing Agency, he was not speaking as a businessman protecting market share. He was speaking as someone who built an entire company around a belief that the system had already failed millions of students once — and was watching it happen again.

The interview clip spread within hours of going live. Not because of algorithms. Because every line landed like something the country had been thinking for years, but nobody in power had been willing to say out loud.

NEET-UG 2026 was conducted on May 3 across the country. Around 22 lakh students appeared. Within days, the Rajasthan Special Operations Group had already found what it needed: a handwritten “guess paper” circulating on Telegram before exam day, containing around 410 questions — 120 of which matched the actual paper, including roughly 90 Biology questions and 30 Chemistry questions. Those papers were allegedly being sold for up to ₹2 lakh apiece. A preliminary probe also traced a similar set of material to a medical student in Kerala, who investigators believe circulated the content before May 3. The SOG arrested two men — Manish Yadav and Rakesh Mandavriya — as alleged masterminds of the operation.

“Even schools manage exams better than the NTA. Kids are depressed. Their families were heavily invested in this exam for two years.” — said Alakh Pandey in an interview with News Pinch on May 13

On May 12, the NTA announced the full cancellation of NEET-UG 2026 and confirmed that the exam would be reconducted. The Central Bureau of Investigation registered an FIR under provisions of the BNS, the Prevention of Corruption Act, and other applicable laws. NTA Director General Abhishek Singh said at a press conference in New Delhi that all examination fees would be refunded, and no fresh registration would be required — all candidature data and centre preferences from the May cycle would be carried forward.

The minimum the agency could do. Not a defence. A damage-control statement — and India’s medical aspirants know the difference.

The quote from Pandey’s interview that spread most widely painted a picture that the dry language of exam cancellations never reaches.

In a statement to ANI, Pandey described what this exam actually means to ordinary households: a mother selling jewellery to buy textbooks, a father skipping new clothes for three years, an entire family organising its finances and its emotional life around the single ambition of making their child a doctor. The child goes in happy, scores 600, comes home believing the sacrifice worked — and then the paper gets cancelled. That description is not rhetoric. It is the lived reality of NEET aspirants across Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh — states where cracking NEET carries the weight of generational mobility. The betrayal, when a leak happens, lands on the whole family.

“There are 1 crore people who are unhappy and sad today. The children have not attended any party in 2–3 years, nor have they had any fun… his mother sold jewellery to buy his books. His father did not buy new clothes. And all of a sudden, the child goes to give the paper, and he is happy and says, ‘I am getting 600 marks’ — and now this,” said pandey to ANI

Pandey went further than grief. He argued that the cancellation itself was aimed at obscuring where the leak originated, and demanded criminal consequences not just for the sellers of leaked papers but for the buyers — the wealthy families who can afford ₹2 lakh per paper while students from ordinary homes prepare on free YouTube lectures. He questioned why those responsible for past leaks had not faced jail time, and in his most striking formulation, told ANI that these individuals should be treated the way the state treats those who pose a national security threat. He alleged that the paper leak was orchestrated by an organised nexus of insiders and influential intermediaries seeking quick money — and that strict action is rarely taken because those who conduct the raids are embedded in the same system that benefits from looking the other way.

This was not Pandey’s first public confrontation with the NTA. In 2024, he filed a Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court of India challenging the agency’s controversial grace-mark decisions — a case that led to a Supreme Court intervention. The NEET 2024 controversy had its own anatomy: an unusually high number of perfect scorers, grace marks awarded unevenly across centres, arrests in Patna and Godhra, and CBI investigations that, as educator Khan Sir noted in a PTI report, yielded no structural accountability. More critically, the 2024 paper leak was not detected by any government agency. It was students themselves who first flagged the irregularity to the government. The pattern — leak, detection by outsiders, delay, cancellation, probe, no systemic reform — has now played out twice in consecutive years.

The NTA was created in 2017 precisely to bring professional rigour to national entrance examinations. The argument for a dedicated agency was that ad hoc arrangements produced vulnerability. In the years since its establishment, the frequency and scale of examination-related fraud has moved in the opposite direction. Critics have noted, with some bitterness, that the agency responsible for securing India’s most consequential exam has presided over its two most damaging paper leaks.

Beyond the anger, Pandey put forward a concrete reform agenda. He proposed that the NTA move away from the current single-day, pen-and-paper model and shift to a digital, multi-shift format — similar to the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for engineering. The offline model, he argued, creates too many human touchpoints: printing presses, courier logistics, exam centre staff — each a potential entry point for an organised gang. He announced that Physics Wallah would provide free coaching for all students appearing in the reconducted exam, and urged other coaching centres across India to waive fees for the 2026 cycle.

Also Read: PhysicsWallah in talks to acquire stake in government exam prep platform for ₹300–400 crore

The political response arrived swiftly. Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi posted on X calling the cancellation not just a failure but a crime against the future of Indian youth.

“The NEET 2026 exam has been canceled. The hard work, sacrifices, and dreams of over 22 lakh students have been crushed by this corrupt BJP regime. Some fathers took loans, some mothers sold their jewelry, lakhs of children stayed up nights studying, and in return, they got paper leaks, governmental negligence, and organized corruption in education,” said Rahul Gandhi on X

Former Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot alleged that the BJP government in Rajasthan had concealed information about the leak for two full weeks.

DMK president M K Stalin called NEET a qualifying exam that has become a scam, and reiterated longstanding demands from southern states — particularly Tamil Nadu — for the right to conduct their own medical entrance examinations independent of the NTA. The 2026 cancellation will sharpen that argument considerably.

“This year too, #NEET paper leak irregularities have come to light, and the exam has been cancelled. Lakhs of students have been subjected to severe mental distress. At every stage of this examination, NEET is filled with fraud. As I have been saying continuously, there is no scam in NEET — NEET itself is a scam,” said M K Stalin on X

“The newly formed government in Tamil Nadu should also announce its firm stand against the NEET exam. I request that the new government take forward our Dravidian Model Government’s legal efforts seeking exemption for Tamil Nadu from NEET and ensure our efforts succeed.” Stalin added

What the situation requires is not just Physics Wallah stepping up with free coaching. It requires a structural overhaul of how question paper logistics are handled — who holds paper materials before exam day, how printing contracts are audited, what happens to individuals at every point in the chain if something goes wrong, and whether the penalties for examination fraud are severe enough to make the risk not worth taking. As Pandey framed it: nobody knows whether the next examination will be tough, easy, or compromised again. That uncertainty is the problem. Until it is resolved, the gap between the system and the 22 lakh students it is supposed to serve will keep widening.

Physics Wallah went public on Indian exchanges in November 2025 with a ₹3,480 crore IPO — the first pure-play edtech company to list in India — and currently serves over 42 lakh students across its platform in five vernacular languages. Pandey, who founded the company as a free YouTube channel in 2016 after his own experience of being priced out of premium coaching, built Physics Wallah on the argument that quality education should not be a luxury product. That origin story is inseparable from why his words on NEET land the way they do. He is not a critic commenting from the outside. He is someone whose entire institutional reason for existing is the student that the NTA just failed.

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Skyroot Aerospace has raised $60 million (around ₹570 crore) in a round co-led by Sherpalo Ventures and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, crossing a $1.1 billion valuation and becoming India’s first spacetech unicorn. The Hyderabad-based launch-vehicle company is already past the fundraising story — its Vikram-1 rocket is on the launchpad at Sriharikota, integration is underway, and the first private orbital launch from Indian soil is now weeks away.

The round also saw participation from BlackRock, Arkam Ventures, Playbook Partners, Shanghvi Family Office, and the founders of Greenko Group. Sherpalo Ventures founder Ram Shriram — an early Google investor and current Alphabet board member — joins Skyroot’s board as part of the deal. Total capital raised since inception stands at $160 million.

The timing of the close is not incidental. Co-founder and CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana told Moneycontrol the rocket is currently mid-integration at the spaceport: “We are right now at the spaceport, the whole rocket is there, it’s undergoing integration operations. In a few weeks, we are expecting the launch.”

Vikram-1 is a 23-metre, three-stage solid-fuelled rocket with a liquid-fuelled kick stage for precise orbital insertion. It is designed to carry up to 480 kg to a 500 km sun-synchronous orbit. Chandana noted the vehicle was developed in roughly four to five years — among the fastest orbital launch vehicle development timelines globally — and that 80 percent of the Vikram tech stack was already validated on the suborbital Vikram-S mission in 2022.

While the upcoming Vikram-1 mission will carry customer payloads, Skyroot is treating it as a development flight focused on validating systems and collecting performance data. Chandana indicated the company could run multiple developmental launches before transitioning to full commercial operations — noting that three development launches are the industry standard before declaring commercial readiness. Manufacturing for future Vikram vehicles is already underway.

“We are more like a cab or an Uber to go to space. Customers requiring unique destinations in space book the full rocket.” — Pawan Kumar Chandana, Co-founder & CEO, Skyroot Aerospace

That positioning is deliberate. Rather than competing with heavy-lift rideshare operators like SpaceX, Skyroot is going after customers who need dedicated launches into specific orbital paths — a segment where global supply remains constrained. Chandana expects 70 to 80 percent of Skyroot’s business to come from overseas markets, including the US, Europe, and Southeast Asia, citing limited orbital launch availability globally as the structural tailwind: “Very few companies in the world have orbital launch capability.”

On domestic competition — Agnikul Cosmos, the Chennai-based rocket startup that has also tested sub-orbital vehicles — Chandana was measured: “The market is good enough to absorb multiple players right now, but the early players will have the advantage because the rocket is proven.”

The unicorn milestone and the imminent launch arrive against a rapidly expanding backdrop. India’s space economy is valued at $8.4 billion today and projected to reach $44 billion by 2033, with nearly 400 spacetech startups now operating under the Indian Space Policy 2023 framework. Proceeds from the latest round will also fund the development of Vikram-2 — a cryogenic-stage vehicle capable of lifting up to 900 kg to LEO, targeted for maiden flight as early as 2027.

Skyroot is the fourth startup to enter the unicorn club in 2026, following Juspay (January), Neysa (February), and KreditBee (April) — and the first from India’s deep-tech hardware space.

“We at Skyroot are excited about the upcoming Vikram-1 launch, India’s first private orbital rocket, marking a significant milestone both for India and the global space sector.” said Pawan Kumar Chandana in a statement

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Bengaluru-based Vobiz.ai has raised $1 million in seed funding from Piper Serica VC Fund. Co-founded in 2025 by Suman Gandham and Vikash Srivastava, Vobiz.ai offers a developer-first, API-driven telephony platform purpose-built for the era of AI-powered voice.

The product covers the full stack of what voice AI applications actually need: instant DID (Direct Inward Dialing) number provisioning, low-latency SIP trunking, real-time audio streaming for large language model integrations, noise cancellation, and automated compliance workflows aligned with Indian telecom regulations. The platform also provides call bridging optimised for AI response cycles — a small but critical detail, since traditional telephony introduces latency that makes conversational AI feel broken. Developers can integrate these capabilities without building the telecom layer from scratch, which has historically required either expensive carrier relationships or months of engineering work.

The global voice AI market is projected to reach $32.47 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 29%, driven by adoption across contact centres, healthcare, BFSI, and consumer apps. In India, the push toward AI-native customer engagement has been accelerating — from fintech companies running AI collection agents to D2C brands deploying automated post-purchase support. Most of these deployments currently run on platforms like Exotel, Plivo, or global players like Twilio and Telnyx — built for human agents, not AI cycles. Vobiz.ai is positioning itself as the AI-native alternative, with a compliance layer specifically tuned for Indian regulatory requirements.

Over the next 12 to 18 months, the company plans to expand its DID inventory and carrier partnerships, enhance real-time streaming capabilities, and launch advanced enterprise-grade observability tools. The seed capital will be directed toward strengthening engineering and go-to-market.

Also Read: Mumbai’s Ubiqedge Raises ₹10 Cr Seed Round Led by Piper Serica for AIoT OS

Piper Serica’s backing is also notable in context — the fund has been active across Bengaluru’s infrastructure-layer startups. The firm’s early conviction on Vobiz.ai reflects a broader thesis that the rise of voice AI will demand equally specialised infrastructure — and that the companies building that infrastructure early may prove just as valuable as the voice agents sitting on top of it.

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Ecofy, the Mumbai-based non-banking financial company that positions itself as India’s first green-only NBFC, has secured $15 million in debt financing from Mirova, the sustainable investment affiliate of Natixis Investment Managers. The funds will be deployed toward onward lending for residential and commercial rooftop solar installations, as well as electric vehicle financing across India.

For Mirova, the Ecofy bet follows its first India foray in November 2024 — a $10 million debt facility to Jaipur-based MSME lender Namdev Finvest, also focused on clean transport and renewable energy lending.

The deal arrives barely two months after Ecofy raised ₹380.5 crore (approximately $42 million) in a Series B equity round co-led by British International Investment and Finnfund. Before that, in January 2024, Dutch development bank FMO had extended ₹90 crore. The capital stack now reads like a roll call of European development finance institutions — BII (UK), Finnfund (Finland), FMO (Netherlands), and now Mirova (France/Luxembourg) — an unusual alignment that reflects both the quality of Ecofy’s loan book and the alignment of its mandate with global climate finance priorities.

Founded in 2022 by Rajashree Nambiar and Govind Sankaranarayanan — two veterans who have spent decades building large-scale retail lending institutions, including Tata Capital, Fullerton India, IIFL Finance, and Standard Chartered — Ecofy has scaled to serve over 130,000 customers across 26 states and more than 500 cities in just three years. Its loan book covers electric two-wheelers and three-wheelers, residential and commercial rooftop solar, energy-efficient equipment, energy storage, and sustainability-linked credit for small businesses. Assets under management have crossed ₹1,400 crore, supported by partnerships with over 100 OEMs and 23 banks and financial institutions.

“This partnership with Mirova marks another significant milestone in Ecofy’s journey to scale green financing. Access to long-term, mission-aligned capital strengthens our ability to reach households and small businesses for their rooftop solar and electric mobility solutions.” said Vivek Khandelwal, Head of Treasury, Ecofy

Also Read: Is India headed towards a solar power revolution?

On the financials, Ecofy’s revenue from operations grew 4.8x to ₹93.3 crore in FY25 from ₹19.19 crore in FY24 — the kind of trajectory that justifies the accumulation of DFI capital. The company remains in investment mode, posting a loss of ₹42.28 crore as it continues to build distribution and technology capabilities. The capital adequacy ratio post-fundraise stands at approximately 50%, providing significant headroom for portfolio growth.

For Ecofy, the DFI-anchored debt model is not incidental — it is structurally cheaper than commercial borrowing, allowing the company to price green loans competitively against conventional vehicle and equipment finance. That structural advantage may matter most as incumbents like Tata Capital and Mahindra Finance begin moving into EV and solar lending, bringing lower cost of capital and established distribution. Ecofy’s answer is a three-year head start, a 100% green mandate that appeals to impact-focused lenders, and a founding team that has already built credit books of comparable size — just without the climate thesis attached.

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Epigamia, the Verlinvest-backed Greek yogurt and healthy snacks brand, has announced the formal completion of its post-Mirchandani leadership structure: Ritesh Gauba has been appointed Chief Executive Officer, while Ankur Goel — who steered the company through its most difficult period — has been elevated to co-founder and COO. The moves signal that Epigamia’s board is closing the chapter of uncertainty that began in December 2024 and reorienting toward what comes next.

When Rohan Mirchandani passed away on December 21, 2024, at the age of 41, Epigamia lost its most public face and the architect of its brand positioning. The company did not stumble. Goel, as acting head alongside co-founder Uday Thakker and growth head Ajinkya Poundrik, kept operations running and — more significantly — reported over 50% revenue growth in FY26 alongside improved profitability. That performance is the strongest possible argument for his elevation to co-founder; it is formal recognition of leadership that was already being exercised in practice.

Gauba brings an FMCG pedigree suited to the stage Epigamia is now trying to reach. He has previously held senior roles at Pladis, Mars, and Britannia — three companies that know what it takes to build mass-market packaged food brands across diverse retail environments. Epigamia competes in the premium health food segment with products across Greek yogurt, smoothies, and protein snacks, and has expanded its distribution across retail, e-commerce, and quick commerce platforms. Scaling that kind of multi-channel FMCG distribution requires a different skill set than founding a challenger brand — exactly the kind of operational depth a Pladis or Mars background provides.

The company has raised approximately $60 million to date from investors including Verlinvest, Danone Manifesto Ventures, DSG Consumer Partners, and Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone, who came on board in 2019 as both a strategic investor and brand ambassador through her investment vehicle KA Enterprises LLP.

With Mirchandani’s vision now institutionalised into the brand’s DNA and a rebuilt leadership team in place, the next milestone is likely to be the Middle East expansion that Mirchandani himself had been planning before his passing — a market where premium yogurt and functional dairy products have demonstrated strong demand.

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India’s semiconductor ambitions have long been measured in policy announcements and factory groundbreakings. What has been harder to show is Indian companies actually designing original silicon — from architecture to tape-out — without replicating foreign blueprints. BigEndian Semiconductors is trying to change that, and this week it closed a $6 million pre-Series A round to prove it can go further. The round was led by IAN Alpha Fund, with participation from existing investors Vertex Ventures SEA & India and IvyCap Ventures, along with strategic angel investors.

The Bengaluru-based startup, co-founded in March 2024 by a five-member founding team — Sunil Kumar, Renuka Prasad, Dinesh Annayya, Kanagaraju Ponnusamy, and Jansen Cheng — brings backgrounds spanning chip design at Arm, Intel, and Broadcom. BigEndian is building high-performance, security-focused system-on-chips (SoCs) designed for surveillance, telecom, IoT, and enterprise systems. Crucially, the company has already completed tape-out of its first commercial chip — the point in the design cycle where a finished schematic is handed to a foundry for fabrication, a costly and technically demanding milestone that many Indian chip startups have yet to reach.

The timing is deliberate. The Union Budget 2026-27 announced the India Semiconductor Mission 2.0 with a ₹1,000 crore annual provision, while the government has separately mandated that surveillance equipment deployed in sensitive infrastructure comply with Standardisation Testing and Quality Certification norms — a move widely seen as restricting certain Chinese-made chipsets from key installations. That policy shift creates direct market demand for the kind of domestically designed, security-by-design silicon that BigEndian is building. The startup’s first SoC targets enterprise and consumer surveillance cameras, positioning it squarely in the edge AI and video processing market where companies like Ambarella currently dominate.

Also Read: KRAFTON and Naver Launch ₹6,000 Crore India Fund — The Largest from Asia for Indian Startups

“Raising capital in semiconductors is never about the money alone. It’s about earning trust in your ability to execute. This funding validates not just our technology, but our approach to building silicon the hard way: from architecture to tape-out, with a long-term roadmap in mind.” said Sunil Kumar, Co-founder & CEO, BigEndian Semiconductors

Fresh capital will go toward commercialising that first SoC, scaling the product engineering team, and deepening partnerships with foundries, IP ecosystems, and OEMs. The round remains open — BigEndian has indicated it may raise an additional $4 million if needed, which would take the total pre-Series A to $10 million. Vertex Ventures’ Ben Mathias noted that the company had achieved tape-out “in record time” since the seed investment eighteen months ago, and signalled the next phase would involve transitioning from test silicon to production-ready SoCs, alongside developing next-generation Vision Edge AI architectures. IAN Alpha Fund’s Rajnish Kapur framed the investment around India’s broader shift from large-scale chip manufacturing toward specialised, secure, domain-specific design — a segment where BigEndian is competing alongside peers such as Netrasemi, Mindgrove, and Vervesemi, the last of which raised $10 million in a Series A earlier this year.

India’s Design Linked Incentive scheme currently backs 24 semiconductor design startups — a thin but growing cohort trying to convert the country’s engineering talent surplus into original silicon IP. BigEndian’s fundraise, coming on the back of an actual tape-out, is the kind of execution milestone that separates credible chip startups from ones still stuck at the whiteboard stage.

Also Read: HrdWyr Raises $13 Mn to Build AI-Native Chips for India and the World

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For most of the last decade, the question that defined Indian consumer brand strategy was deceptively simple: build your own channel, or sell through marketplaces? Own the customer and the margin, or plug into Amazon and Flipkart’s traffic and absorb their cut? The debate generated conferences, op-eds, and a generation of founders who agonised over which side to pick.

In 2026, that debate is effectively over. Not because one side won — but because the market made the binary irrelevant.

The entry of quick commerce, a new investor consensus around EBITDA discipline, and a consumer who now toggles between five surfaces before completing a single purchase have together collapsed the either/or frame. India’s D2C e-commerce market is valued at $108.76 billion in 2026, projected to reach $322.1 billion by 2031 at a 24.3% CAGR. The brands winning inside that number are not running pure D2C operations or pure marketplace plays. They are managing five channels simultaneously, each assigned a different job.

What the modern channel stack looks like

A scaled Indian consumer brand in 2026 typically runs revenue across a structure that did not exist in this form five years ago. The owned website serves as the highest-margin channel and the primary first-party data asset. Marketplaces — Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra — capture search-driven demand from buyers who already know what they want. Quick commerce platforms handle impulse purchases and replenishment in urban markets. Social commerce through Instagram and WhatsApp drives community-led acquisition. And offline retail, through modern trade and general trade, adds physical credibility and reach into markets that digital alone cannot penetrate.

The sequencing varies by category and stage. Industry analysis published by Emerge shows that early-stage D2C brands typically derive 70–80% of online revenue from quick commerce in their launch phase, while brands in the ₹100–300 crore revenue range should target roughly 25% offline contribution to sustain a healthy margin architecture. Managing this stack simultaneously — synchronised inventory, consistent branding, unified customer data — is the central operational challenge for Indian founders right now. Not the channel choice itself.

Quick commerce changed the calculus entirely

No single development has disrupted the marketplace vs D2C debate more than quick commerce. Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart collectively account for more than 90% of India’s consolidated quick commerce market in 2025. Blinkit holds over 50% market share as of September 2025. The sector is valued at $5.38 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $9.95 billion by 2029.

For D2C brands, quick commerce behaves like neither a marketplace nor an owned store. It offers no brand-building surface, no customer data, and no relationship — but it delivers volume, urban penetration, and a discovery channel that increasingly influences purchase decisions even for products eventually bought elsewhere. Brands that ignored it early found competitors occupying dark store shelf space that is now structurally difficult to displace.

The numbers from early adopters are stark. Gourmet popcorn brand 4700BC now generates 87% of its total sales through quick commerce platforms, maintaining 45% year-on-year growth. Beauty brand Earth Rhythm scaled monthly sales from $6,000 to $180,000 within 18 months of listing on Blinkit. These are not outliers — they reflect a channel that has moved from experimental to mandatory for urban-facing consumer brands in a short window.

“Among online sales from traditional e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Flipkart, and direct website sales, it’s in quick commerce that we see the highest consumer engagement. It’s now integral to our overall digital strategy,” Chirag Gupta, Founder and CEO of 4700BC, told Mukund Mohan

Also Read: GoBoult crossed ₹762 crore in revenue — without taking a rupee of VC money

Marketplaces have not lost relevance — they have changed function

Despite the quick commerce surge, marketplaces have not become obsolete. They have become more specific in their role. Amazon and Flipkart remain the dominant surface for search-driven, high-intent purchase behaviour. A consumer who already knows they want a specific product from a specific brand goes to a marketplace. The discovery and consideration stages increasingly happen on Instagram, through creator content, or via quick commerce sampling — but conversion for high-consideration purchases still flows heavily through marketplace search.

What has changed is the economics. Marketplace commissions, return logistics costs, and the advertising spend required to maintain visibility have compressed margins considerably. The funding environment has responded accordingly. Mordor Intelligence’s D2C market analysis notes that investors are now explicitly favouring brands with positive contribution margins and proven retention economics — a shift that makes unmanaged marketplace dependence a liability rather than a growth lever. D2C funding across India slipped to $757 million in 2024 from $930 million in 2023, with capital concentrating in brands that demonstrate margin control.

The result: founders are using marketplaces as a demand-capture channel — not a growth engine — and allocating their marketing spend accordingly.

The owned website remains the margin and data anchor

Branded websites grew over 80% in 2022, a period when founders were still debating whether owned channels were worth building. That debate is settled. In 2026, every serious D2C brand treats its website as the non-negotiable foundation — even when the majority of volume flows through other channels.

The logic is structural. Marketplace and quick commerce sales generate revenue but not customer relationships. A brand doing ₹200 crore on Amazon with no first-party data on its buyers cannot build loyalty, predict churn, personalise replenishment offers, or reduce CAC over time. The owned website — even if it contributes a smaller share of total GMV — is the only channel that delivers actionable customer intelligence. This is why the strategic conversation has shifted from “marketplace vs D2C” to “what share of revenue should flow through owned channels, and how do we build that share as we scale.”

Offline as the frontier, not the fallback

If quick commerce was the channel surprise of 2022–2024, offline retail is the deliberate strategic push of 2025–2026. Brands that built product credibility and review scores online are now entering physical retail from a position of strength rather than desperation — using offline to add reach, build trust in tier-2 markets, and stabilise revenue against the volatility of platform algorithm changes.

The Minimalist acquisition is the clearest proof of this logic. Founded in 2020 by brothers Mohit Yadav and Rahul Yadav in Jaipur, the D2C skincare brand built its first ₹347 crore in FY24 revenue almost entirely online — through its own website and marketplaces. When Hindustan Unilever acquired a 90.5% stake at a ₹2,955 crore valuation in January 2025, the stated strategic rationale from both sides was access to HUL’s offline distribution network. Minimalist had proven its product and its digital model — the acquirer’s primary value-add was physical reach at scale.

This pattern is becoming a template. Digital-first brands that have demonstrated unit economics online are treating offline not as an alternative to digital, but as the next layer — one that adds geographic depth, consumer trust for high-involvement categories, and the resilience that pure online channels structurally cannot provide.

Also Read: Baby Products in 10 Minutes: Can OZi Do What Blinkit Can’t?

What founders are actually deciding

The practical decision Indian founders are making in 2026 is not marketplace vs D2C. It is how to sequence channels based on their stage, category, and capital availability — and how to manage the operational complexity of running multiple channels without letting any single one dominate or distort the margin profile.

A joint report by Meta and Alvarez & Marsal on Indian startups, published in June 2025, found that 67% of Indian startups have now adopted omnichannel models, recognising that the modern consumer journey toggles between online and offline. Discovery begins with digital — Instagram Reels, WhatsApp messages, creator content — and often ends in physical retail for high-involvement categories like fashion, home, and fitness.

The founder building a consumer brand in India in 2026 is not choosing a channel. They are designing a system: quick commerce for urban trial and replenishment, marketplace for search-driven conversion, owned website for margin and data, social commerce for community and acquisition, and offline for credibility and geographic depth. Each channel has a defined job. The competitive edge lies not in which channels a brand uses — every serious operator is using all of them — but in how cleanly it executes across all of them at the same time.

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High-resolution satellite imagery has quietly become one of the most consequential data categories of the decade. What was once the preserve of defense agencies and well-funded research institutions is now embedded into workflows across urban planning, insurance risk assessment, agricultural monitoring, disaster response, and supply chain logistics. The shift is being driven by a combination of falling launch costs, proliferating satellite constellations, and maturing data platforms that have made access easier than ever before.

The numbers reflect that momentum. The global commercial satellite imaging market was valued at $4.6 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 9.7% through 2033, according to IMARC Group. A separate estimate from Precedence Research puts the market at $3.10 billion in 2025, growing to roughly $6 billion by 2035. Demand is accelerating across sectors, and the environmental and climate monitoring segment is expected to grow at the highest rate — over 19% CAGR — through 2030, as governments and corporations increasingly rely on satellite data to track deforestation, flood extents, and emissions.

For buyers navigating this market — whether they are environmental consultants, infrastructure developers, or intelligence analysts — the choice of platform matters as much as the underlying imagery. Access models, data breadth, pricing structures, and analytics capabilities differ substantially across providers. Below is a curated look at the leading platforms available today.

SkyFi

SkyFi operates as a marketplace that aggregates satellite imagery from multiple providers into a single interface. Rather than requiring users to engage directly with individual data vendors, the platform brings together feeds from a range of satellite operators — making it easier to compare and source imagery suited to specific project requirements.

One practical advantage is the absence of long-term contract obligations. Users can make one-off purchases without committing to minimum spend thresholds, which works well for project-based teams or organizations that do not require a continuous imagery subscription. Several prominent data providers — including Vantor (formerly Maxar) and ICEYE — are accessible through SkyFi’s marketplace, reducing the overhead of managing multiple vendor relationships. The platform also includes built-in analytics tools, allowing users to derive insights from imagery within the same environment rather than exporting data to separate processing software.

For teams exploring satellite data for the first time, or those with intermittent rather than ongoing needs, this kind of on-demand, multi-source model addresses a real friction point in how geospatial data has traditionally been sold.

Vantor (formerly Maxar)

Vantor is among the most established names in commercial satellite imagery. Formerly operating as Maxar Technologies, the company has long supplied high-resolution optical imagery to defense agencies, national mapping bodies, and large infrastructure developers. Maxar Technologies launched 120 new high-resolution satellites in 2024, representing 19% of global launches that year — reinforcing its position as one of the highest-output operators in the commercial imaging space.

Vantor’s imagery is particularly suited to large-scale, long-duration projects that demand consistent resolution and broad geographic coverage. Its procurement model has traditionally been structured around enterprise contracts — a reasonable fit for government clients and major institutions, though less accessible for smaller or more agile teams. For organizations that need Vantor-grade imagery without the accompanying procurement process, the data is also available through marketplace platforms like SkyFi.

“The optical imagery segment held the largest market share in 2024, accounting for 65.5% of the commercial satellite imaging market, owing to its capability to produce high-resolution, true-color images that are straightforward to analyze and broadly useful across sectors.” — IMARC Group

That dominance of optical imagery underscores why Vantor remains a central reference point in the industry, even as newer data types gain ground. Its WorldView series, in particular, remains a benchmark for sub-half-metre resolution optical imaging globally.

ICEYE

ICEYE has built its reputation around synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging — a technology that distinguishes itself from conventional optical satellites in a fundamental way: it does not depend on sunlight or clear skies. SAR sensors emit pulses of radio waves that interact with Earth’s surface, capturing detailed information about surface characteristics regardless of weather or time of day. This makes the technology particularly reliable in scenarios where optical imagery becomes unusable — thick cloud cover, active wildfire smoke, or nighttime operations.

The practical implications are significant. In June 2024, ICEYE’s SAR imagery was deployed alongside optical data during severe floods in Southern Germany, enabling analysts to map affected areas and create actionable damage maps even when cloud cover made optical collection impossible. In maritime contexts, ICEYE’s SAR data enables detection of unreported vessels and suspicious ship-to-ship transfers — with high-resolution visibility day or night, through clouds and darkness.

The company’s commitment to humanitarian applications extends beyond commercial contracts. ICEYE has joined the International Charter “Space and Major Disasters,” providing SAR imagery free of charge to authorities responding to earthquakes, oil spills, and wildfires. Its constellation has also been expanding rapidly — in November 2025, ICEYE launched five new SAR satellites, enhancing global Earth observation capacity across all weather and lighting conditions.

While ICEYE’s core value lies in these specialized, all-conditions use cases, its data becomes more powerful when layered with optical imagery. Accessing both data types through an aggregated platform allows analysts to build a more complete picture of any location or event — something that single-source procurement makes harder to execute efficiently.

The Bigger Picture

The decision ultimately depends on what you are trying to observe, how often, and under what conditions. Optical imagery from providers like Vantor delivers fine-grained visual detail for mapping, construction monitoring, and land use analysis — but it is weather-dependent and has historically come packaged with structured procurement processes. SAR data from ICEYE fills the gaps that optical imagery cannot, making it indispensable for time-critical operations in difficult environments.

The broader market trend is moving toward aggregation. The global satellite data services market is forecast to expand from $14.15 billion in 2025 to $55.24 billion by 2034, with data analytics services growing fastest as organisations move beyond raw imagery toward actionable intelligence. Platforms that aggregate multiple data sources — optical, SAR, and beyond — and layer them with analytics are increasingly where that value is being captured.

For most users today, the question is less about which satellite sensor is best in isolation and more about which access model lets them combine the right data, at the right moment, without unnecessary friction. That shift in buyer behaviour is reshaping how the entire industry is structured — and the platforms that remove procurement barriers are positioned at the centre of it.

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In June 2017, Varun Gupta listed a pair of earphones on Myntra. There was no seed round, no angel cheque, no incubator backing. Just a small amount of capital, a brother named Tarun, and a bet that India was about to stop buying wired earphones.

The bet paid off. By FY25, the brand they built — then called Boult Audio, now operating as GoBoult — clocked operating revenue of ₹762.9 crore, up 9.4% from ₹697.2 crore the previous year. Profit after tax surged nearly tenfold — from ₹2.5 crore in FY24 to ₹24.2 crore in FY25. All without a single external investor on the cap table. The company, incorporated as Exotic Mile Pvt. Ltd. and headquartered in Delhi, has not taken a single rupee of external funding since inception.

GoBoult’s primary rival, boAt, is backed by Warburg Pincus and has raised hundreds of crores. Noise counts Peak XV Partners among its investors. GoBoult competes with both — and turns a profit while doing it.

Also Read: Bollywood actor Ranveer Singh invests in lifestyle brand boAt, becomes Brand Ambassador

Catching the pulse before everyone else did

Varun Gupta had already launched three startups before Boult — in advertising, community-based reselling, and e-commerce consulting. Each one sharpened his understanding of how Indian consumers discover and buy products online. By 2017, he was watching a structural shift that most consumer electronics brands were too slow to act on.

Apple had just begun shipping iPhones without the 3.5mm headphone jack. Chinese smartphone brands were following. Millions of Indian consumers, who had never bought earphones separately before, suddenly needed to. The TWS category was about to explode — and at the time, it had almost no organised D2C players building for it at scale.

The Gupta brothers didn’t move fast by raising money. They moved fast by staying lean. Within two years, Boult had expanded from Myntra to Amazon and Flipkart. The model was simple: design everything in-house, price 10% above the mass-market segment to signal quality without alienating buyers, and let the product generate repeat purchases instead of burning cash on brand recall.

The product-first playbook

One of the more unusual aspects of GoBoult’s operation is that it runs its own design studio — the only consumer electronics brand in India to do so, according to Varun Gupta. Every product — the colour, material, finish, ergonomics — is conceptualised internally before going to manufacturing.

“We are the only firm that does 100% in-house product designing. I am an artist myself, and so I work with the design team. I work on the colour, material, finish, overall presentation of the product, and ergonomics, everything is done in-house,” — Varun Gupta told digit

This matters for one reason that the revenue numbers don’t immediately reveal: review scores. GoBoult has accumulated over two million ratings across e-commerce platforms and claims the highest repeat purchase rate in its category. In a market where most brands compete on the same Chinese-manufactured components and nearly identical feature sets, design differentiation and post-sale quality become the actual moat.

The brand’s manufacturing footprint is also domestic. Varun Gupta has stated that 99% of products sold in India are manufactured and assembled in India, with facilities in Delhi and Gurgaon — a Make in India story that predates the policy pressure to localise production.

The brand’s lean marketing philosophy extended to ambassador choices too. In October 2022, GoBoult — then Boult — signed actor Saif Ali Khan and cricketer Suryakumar Yadav as brand ambassadors, a move that gave the brand mainstream visibility without the heavy celebrity endorsement budgets its funded rivals were known for.

“We don’t have heavy pockets or deep investment money to splurge money into marketing because we’re a bootstrapped firm. For us, the product is the hero,” Varun Gupta told Business Standard

Why competitors raising funds was never a threat

The Indian D2C audio market saw heavy venture capital deployment in the early 2020s. boAt raised funds from institutional investors. Noise raised a ₹335 crore Series B. Fire-Boltt came in with aggressive pricing. The category was awash with funded marketing budgets, Bollywood endorsements, and IPL sponsorships.

Varun Gupta’s response to this was counterintuitive. When asked about the fear of being outspent by funded rivals, he described competitor fundraising as a net positive for Boult.

“When a competitor raises 10 to 100 million dollars, they will invest a lot of media, a lot of energy, and a lot of funds into building awareness for that category. It increases the entire market size. It is not a zero-sum game.” — Varun Gupta said in a podcast with Think School

While boAt and Noise built broad market awareness for wireless audio, GoBoult — then Boult — absorbed the demand without spending on category creation. It stayed disciplined on pricing, avoided a race to the bottom during the 2022–2024 industry stagnation period, and came out with higher margins than competitors who had discounted themselves into thin unit economics.

“From 2022–24, the industry faced stagnation, with most competitors bleeding money. While we remained barely profitable, we resisted the temptation to drop prices, unlike others. This decision now allows us to command a premium, as we avoided a pricing spiral that eroded brand perception.” — Varun Gupta, in an interview with Impact

The channel strategy: online first, offline patient

GoBoult built its revenue base entirely online before making a calculated move to offline retail. The brand expanded to physical stores only around October 2023, entering Croma and Reliance Digital while simultaneously pushing into general trade. By the time it rebranded in August 2025, it had presence in 3,000 offline stores across India.

The next phase is a 10x expansion: GoBoult has announced plans to grow its offline footprint to over 30,000 stores — covering general trade, modern retail, and experiential formats — over the next 18 months.

Varun Gupta has been candid about why offline took this long.

Varun Gupta has acknowledged that offline remains skewed heavily toward the category leader, describing it as a slower, more patient channel to penetrate. According to IDC’s India Wearable Device Tracker, the offline channel expanded its share from 37.8% to 40.7% in 2025 — a signal that physical retail is becoming more decisive in the category even as online volumes soften.

The sequencing reflects a deliberate logic. Build product quality and review scores online where discovery is search-driven and rating-dependent. Once brand credibility is established in the digital channel, use offline presence to add a layer of consumer trust that e-commerce alone cannot replicate. The result: GoBoult entered physical retail from a position of strength rather than desperation.

Market position in a contracting category

The Indian wearables market is not growing. IDC data shows the market fell 4% year-on-year in 2025 to 114.2 million units, with smartwatch shipments declining 17.6%. The overall earwear category grew only 1.4%.

GoBoult is growing inside a shrinking market. In the over-the-ear headphones segment — the fastest-growing sub-category in earwear at 65.4% YoY growth — GoBoult posted an exceptional 698.3% year-on-year growth in 2025, per IDC. In smartwatches, despite the category-wide decline, it maintained growth of 29.8% YoY. In the TWS segment, it held a 14.9% market share as recently as Q2 2025, second only to boAt’s 31.9%.

The strategic reason: GoBoult stayed in its categories. Unlike boAt, which recently entered dashcams, GoBoult has not chased diversification.

The rebrand — and the legal reality behind it

GoBoult’s August 2025 rebrand from Boult Audio was publicly framed as a strategic pivot toward premiumisation and global expansion. The reality, as revealed through Delhi High Court documents reviewed by legal observers, is more complex.

boAt had filed a trademark infringement case against Boult as far back as 2019, arguing that the two names were phonetically and visually similar enough to mislead consumers. In January 2020, the Delhi HC issued an interim injunction restraining Boult from using certain marks. By September 2025, a two-judge bench upheld the injunction and ruled that “Boult” and “boAt” were deceptively similar — effectively barring the company from returning to its original identity.

The GoBoult name, however, was not part of the original petition and was not restrained by the Delhi HC order. A separate challenge from another brand, GoBold — filed in a Bengaluru commercial court — further complicated the rebrand, but as of the last publicly available proceedings, GoBoult continued to operate under the new name. The company’s own legal entity, incorporated as Exotic Mile, remains unchanged.

The legal headwinds have not materially affected the business. Revenue continued to grow through the dispute period, and the rebranding — whatever its origins — gave GoBoult an opportunity to move upmarket in both pricing and brand identity.

Also Read: Aman Gupta’s OffBeat Studios raises ₹100 crore in seed funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners

The road to listing: three milestones, one IPO

GoBoult’s IPO plans are structured around self-imposed thresholds rather than investor timelines — which, in itself, is a product of being bootstrapped. Varun Gupta had publicly set ₹1,000 crore in annual revenue as the internal benchmark for going public. The company is on track to hit that in FY26, targeting ₹1,000 crore this year after crossing ₹762.9 crore in FY25.

As of February 2026, GoBoult plans to file its DRHP with SEBI by October or November 2026, with a public listing targeted for mid-2027. The company has also outlined a longer-term revenue ambition of ₹3,000 crore by FY30 — implying roughly 30% annual growth from here.

To support premiumisation ahead of the IPO, GoBoult has partnered with Mustang (the Ford brand) and Dolby — collaborations that have already pushed average selling prices above ₹1,100. The two-year ASP target is ₹1,500, up from a mass-market average that once sat well below ₹1,000.

Tarun Gupta framed the direction plainly.

“Our expanded retail presence, robust product pipeline, and global expansion strategy position GOBOULT for its next growth chapter as we build toward our ₹2,000 crore vision by 2030.” — Tarun said in a statement to Financial Express

What the GoBoult model actually teaches

The standard narrative around Indian consumer electronics startups assumes that distribution at scale requires venture capital — that you need funded marketing budgets to build awareness, funded inventory to fill offline shelves, and funded losses to survive the pricing wars. GoBoult is a direct challenge to that assumption.

The Gupta brothers built to ₹762 crore not by outspending rivals but by out-designing them, out-reviewing them on the platforms where Indian consumers actually make buying decisions, and staying disciplined on pricing when the rest of the market discounted its way to single-digit margins. They treated competitor fundraising as category validation rather than a competitive threat. They sequenced offline entry for when they could enter from a position of strength.

The model is not replicable in every category — consumer electronics at this price point has specific structural advantages for a bootstrapped approach that a logistics or fintech startup would not enjoy. But as a case study in capital efficiency and brand-building without venture dependency, GoBoult sits in a category of its own.

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The Bengaluru-based bank locker infrastructure startup has raised ₹42 crore in a Series A funding round co-led by Earth Fund and Sattva Ventures, along with participation from angel investors. The company had earlier secured $10.3 million in the same round from Prime Venture Partners and Magnifiq Capital Trust.

Co-founded in 2023 by Vijay Arisetty, Suraj HS, Pratap Chandana, and Ganesh Balakrishnan, Aurm provides fully automated, high-security private safety deposit lockers for residential gated communities and corporate clusters — giving residents and employees on-demand access to professional-grade secure storage within their own buildings.

The product is more ambitious than it sounds. Aurm’s strong rooms feature 24/7 accessibility, multi-factor authentication, and active intrusion-proof surveillance, all wrapped in what the company calls a premium “dressing room” experience when customers access their valuables. The tech layer — not just the physical safe — is the real product.

The backer composition carries a strategic signal. Earth Fund is a venture platform focused on PropTech and climate-forward real estate innovation, anchored by Brigade Group and Gruhas, which means Aurm gets direct access to developer networks and deployment pipelines through the very companies building the gated communities where its lockers would sit. Distribution is baked into the cap table.

Fresh capital will be deployed to scale tech-enabled vaulting solutions and secure storage through automation and enhanced accessibility across more residential and corporate communities.

India’s urban middle class is accumulating more assets and increasingly questioning the reliability of traditional bank storage channels. The vault-at-your-doorstep model has a structural tailwind that is only getting stronger — and with PropTech-native investors now on board, Aurm has the right rails to scale it.

Also Read: The One Atelier Launches The One Capital, a Blockchain Platform for Tokenised Branded Real Estate

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Mumbai-based full-stack AIoT startup Ubiqedge has raised ₹10 crore in a seed funding round led by Piper Serica, with participation from Atomberg CEO and co-founder Sibabrata Shibam Das, OTO co-founder and CEO Sumit Chhazed.

Founded in March 2024 by Visat Patel, Archit Khandelwal, Akhilesh Thorat, and Hetvi Shah, Ubiqedge is building an operating system for industrial infrastructure. Its proprietary hardware platform, KLEON, and AI-powered software layer, SAMASTH, enable real-time monitoring, control, and optimization of critical infrastructure across water management, air quality, solar energy, and construction.

That combination — proprietary hardware plus a software intelligence layer — is what makes the Ubiqedge stack structurally harder to commoditise than a pure-software play. The platform converts fragmented real-time sensor data into actionable insights and automated controls, addressing the manual monitoring and delayed decision-making that remains the default across most of India’s industrial infrastructure today.

The early traction numbers are striking for a company that is just two years old. Ubiqedge claims to have digitised over 23,000 borewells and reduced issue resolution timelines by more than 80% across deployments.

Atomberg’s Shibam Das investing personally is a notable signal. Atomberg itself built hardware with embedded intelligence into a market conventional wisdom said was too commoditised — and found an outsized outcome. The parallel here is deliberate: India-first, vertically integrated, hardware-plus-software from day one.

The fresh capital will strengthen AI capabilities, scale deployments across verticals, and expand the network of system integrators and OEM partners. Ubiqedge competes with players like Samsara, Teltonika, and Datoms — but its full-stack, India-built positioning gives it a cost and integration advantage that global platforms typically struggle to replicate in local industrial deployments.

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The Bengaluru-based menstrual hygiene startup, HealthFab, has raised ₹20 crore (approximately $2.1 million) in a Series A funding round led by Atomic Capital.

Founded in 2019 by Kiriti Acharjee, Sourav Chakrabarty, and Satyajit Chakraborty, HealthFab focuses on reusable period products and broader menstrual wellness solutions. It is best known for its flagship brand GoPadFree — a reusable period underwear line that the company claims ranks among the top products in its category on Amazon India.

The growth numbers behind the raise are hard to overlook. The startup claims to have grown 3x year-on-year and currently serves over 5 lakh users, with a stated target of reaching 5 million users over the next three years.

The fresh capital has a clear deployment path: expanding the period care product portfolio, scaling distribution across quick commerce and general trade channels, and increasing manufacturing capacity. Moving beyond D2C and Amazon into quick commerce platforms like Blinkit and Zepto is where the next growth curve likely lies — these platforms have dramatically lowered the discovery barrier for niche health products that previously needed extensive consumer education before purchase.

HealthFab is also expanding its product suite beyond period care into energy, sleep, and pain management — signalling a broader women’s wellness positioning that could significantly expand its total addressable market over time.

The category itself is at a turning point. Awareness around sustainable period products has grown steadily through social commerce and community-driven content — the same channels that built HealthFab’s early user base. Converting that awareness into repeat purchasing at scale, across general trade and quick commerce, is precisely where the ₹20 crore gets to work.

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India’s men’s ethnic wear market is large, fragmented, and for a long time dominated by brands that either went too premium or too plain. Kisah has spent the last few years threading that needle — and investors are now paying attention.

The Kolkata-based men’s and kids’ ethnic wear brand has raised ₹35.9 crore (approximately $3.8 million) in a Series A funding round led by Fireside Ventures, with participation from individual investors. The company’s board approved the issuance of 38,220 Series A preference shares at ₹9,393 each to raise the amount.

According to the reports, Kisah will be valued at around ₹211 crore post-money — a 70% jump from its pre-Series A round, where it raised ₹13 crore from Wow! Momo co-founder Sagar Daryani, alongside Apoorv Salarpuria, Rahul Todi, Vinod Dugar, and Inflection Point Ventures.

Kisah was co-founded in 2018 by Yash Sarawagi and Yashwi Ladasaria, then later joined by Saurav Kothari. The brand offers high-fashion ethnic wear for Gen Z and millennial men at accessible price points. The brand began with a marketplace-first approach and is now evolving into a full omnichannel player — with offline expansion firmly in its sights.

Kisah delivered 65% year-on-year revenue growth to ₹41.8 crore in FY25, up from ₹25.3 crore in FY24, while profits more than doubled to ₹2 crore. Profitability at this stage, in a fashion brand no less, is rare — and likely what convinced Fireside Ventures, a firm known for backing consumer brands with genuine structural staying power, to take the lead.

Kisah used e-commerce to build a pan-India reach before it had a single offline store. That discipline — demand before infrastructure — is now the foundation its omnichannel expansion rests on. The fresh capital will deepen offline presence and scale D2C operations.

For a brand that has stayed profitable while growing 65% in a single year, the question now is how fast it can build retail density without breaking the unit economics that earned it this round.

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India’s premium dairy sector just received a significant vote of confidence from global institutional capital. Milky Mist has raised approximately ₹482 crore in a pre-IPO funding round from Jongsong Investments Pte Ltd, an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Singapore-based sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings.

The round is split into two components: a primary capital infusion of ₹357 crore from Jongsong Investments, and a secondary share sale worth ₹125 crore by promoters Sathish Kumar T and Anitha S. The compulsorily convertible preference shares issued as part of the primary raise will convert into equity on a one-to-one basis before the listing.

The pre-IPO placement was executed at ₹139.76 per share, implying a pre-money valuation of approximately ₹8,976 crore. Milky Mist had received SEBI approval for its ₹2,035 crore IPO in October 2025, with that approval window valid until October 2026. The company is currently evaluating market conditions for the right listing window.

The financial trajectory gives Temasek’s bet a firm foundation. In FY26, Milky Mist clocked revenues of approximately ₹3,275 crore, exceeding its own internal growth estimates. In FY25, revenue had grown 29% to ₹2,349 crore from ₹1,822 crore in FY24, while profit jumped 2.4x to ₹46 crore.

What makes the Milky Mist model deliberately distinct is its no-liquid-milk policy. The company focuses entirely on premium value-added products — paneer, cheese, yogurt, ice cream, butter, and ghee — operating a fully automated processing facility in Perundurai, Erode, alongside its own integrated cold chain logistics. The brand architecture spans sub-brands SmartChef, Capella, Misty Lite, and recently acquired labels Briyas and Asal.

IPO proceeds are earmarked for debt repayment, expansion of the Perundurai facility with new whey protein concentrate, yoghurt, and cream cheese production units, as well as scaling cold chain distribution infrastructure, including visi coolers and ice cream freezers across retail channels.

India’s value-added dairy market is at an inflection point, driven by a growing middle class trading up from commodity milk to branded, packaged formats. Milky Mist, with its manufacturing-first approach and tight brand architecture, sits squarely at the centre of that shift. Temasek’s bet — at a nearly ₹9,000 crore pre-money valuation — suggests the street agrees.

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India’s premium skincare segment has been drawing serious institutional capital, and the latest entrant is CHOSEN — a Chennai-based dermo-cosmetic brand that has raised $5 million in a Series A round led by Fireside Ventures, with participation from BOLD, the corporate venture capital fund of L’Oréal, alongside Alkemi Growth Capital and angel investors including CaratLane co-founder Avnish Anand, and dermatologists Dr. Chandan Asokan, KC Nischal, Punit Saraogi, Nishita Ranka, and Mikki Singh.

CHOSEN was launched in 2020 by Dr. Renita Rajan, a cosmetic dermatologist with nearly two decades of clinical experience who also runs RENDER Skin and Hair Clinic in Chennai. The brand is built specifically for melanin-rich Indian skin and is grounded in the science of the exposome — focusing on pigmentation, skin texture, contour, and hair aging as its four core domains. Prior to this round, the startup had raised $1.2 million in an angel round in 2024, making this its first significant institutional bet. The new capital will go into R&D, pipeline expansion, scaling its Centre of Excellence, and senior talent hiring.

“For decades, skincare has often overlooked the specific needs of skin of colour. CHOSEN’s science focuses on high-performance skincare that works with — not against — melanin-rich skin.” — Dr. Renita Rajan, Founder, CHOSEN

What makes CHOSEN’s model structurally interesting is how it bridges the clinical and the consumer. The brand’s products are currently prescribed across more than 2,000 clinics nationwide, with patients starting treatment under dermatologist guidance and then continuing independently through its D2C platform — nearly 95% of which runs on its own website rather than third-party marketplaces. It has built a portfolio of around 58 SKUs across topicals and nutraceuticals, and roughly 70% of its revenue comes from repeat customers, primarily women aged 30 to 50. That kind of retention in a premium skincare brand is not incidental — it signals that clinical trust, once built, converts into durable consumer habit.

The participation of L’Oréal’s BOLD is a telling signal. BOLD has backed science-led specialty skincare brands globally, and its entry into CHOSEN — at Series A, not later — suggests the fund sees early-mover advantage in backing an Indian brand native to skin-of-color science before the category matures. CHOSEN is already planning international expansion into Latin America and East Asia, markets where Indian skin’s dermatological profile closely mirrors local needs. In a segment currently dominated by brands like Avène, Cetaphil, Sebamed, and Heliocare — largely designed for Caucasian skin and adapted for Indian consumers — CHOSEN’s ground-up positioning is its core strategic edge.

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Aman Gupta, the co-founder of consumer electronics brand boAt Lifestyle and one of the most recognisable investor faces on Shark Tank India, filed a personality rights protection suit in the Delhi High Court on Thursday — joining a fast-growing list of Indian public figures turning to the judiciary to guard their identities against unauthorised use in the age of AI.

India’s courts are increasingly being asked to answer a question that didn’t exist five years ago: who owns your face, your voice, your likeness — and what happens when AI can replicate all three? The Delhi High Court has become the de facto battleground for this question, having already granted protection to a range of celebrities, including actors Allu Arjun, Kajol Devgan, and R Madhavan, cricketer Sunil Gavaskar, politician Pawan Kalyan, and creator-entrepreneur Raj Shamani. The court has also granted injunctions against AI-generated deepfakes targeting spiritual figures and journalists, signalling that personality rights protection is no longer reserved for Bollywood — it now extends squarely into the startup and creator economy.

Gupta’s petition, filed as Aman Gupta v. John Doe & Ors, was initially listed before Justice Jyoti Singh, who recused from the matter. It has been redirected to Justice Tushar Rao Gedela, with the next hearing scheduled for May 7. Senior Advocate Diya Kapur and Advocate Nakul Gandhi are representing Gupta. The specific trigger for the filing has not been disclosed publicly, but the suit’s framing against unnamed “John Doe” defendants is consistent with prior personality rights cases targeting unknown parties circulating AI-generated or misleading content across social media platforms.

This matters for the founder community beyond the courtroom. Gupta has spent years building one of India’s most valuable direct-to-consumer brands — boAt holds a dominant position in the Indian wearables market with a reported valuation of ₹2,200 crore at its last major funding milestone. His public persona — blunt, aspirational, unmistakably entrepreneurial — is inseparable from the brand.

Also Read: Aman Gupta’s OffBeat Studios raises ₹100 crore in seed funding

A deepfake of Gupta endorsing a fraudulent investment scheme or a rival product doesn’t just harm him personally; it carries real commercial risk for boAt and for consumer trust in the founders that India’s startup ecosystem has made into household names. The same logic applies to every other Shark Tank judge, prominent angel investor, or founder-turned-influencer operating in India today — which is why this filing, regardless of its legal outcome, is a signal worth watching.

The next hearing on May 7 will determine whether the court grants an interim injunction, which would immediately restrain any identified or unnamed party from using Gupta’s name, image, voice, or likeness without consent.

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HyugaLife, the Mumbai-based nutrition marketplace that stakes its identity on product authenticity at a time when the Indian supplements market is rife with counterfeits, has raised Rs 100 crore ($10.5 million) in a Series A round, with a plan to get faster on delivery and wider in retail reach.

The round was led by IvyCap Ventures, with participation from First Bridge Fund. The raise follows a $6.3 million seed round in February 2024 from Peak XV and Spring Marketing Capital, with additional backing from Stride Ventures, Getvantage, and Indian cricketer KL Rahul. Notably, HyugaLife also onboarded the Bollywood actress Katrina Kaif as an investor and brand partner in March 2023.

Founded in 2022 by Sachin Parikh, Anvi Shah, and Neehar Modi, HyugaLife operates as an authenticated marketplace for proteins, supplements, health foods, and wellness products. Its H-Tested programme — which involves direct sourcing from brands and independent lab verification covering nutrition content and heavy metals — has been its primary differentiator in a category where trust is a persistent consumer concern. The platform currently lists over 10,000 products across more than 450 brands and serves fitness enthusiasts, athletes, working professionals, and families across India.

The fresh capital will be deployed on three fronts: strengthening the AI-led personalisation engine that powers product recommendations, building a dark store network to support faster last-mile delivery, and expanding into offline retail. The move into physical retail marks a meaningful shift for a brand that has operated exclusively online, reflecting broader trends in D2C where omnichannel presence is increasingly seen as necessary for volume growth beyond the first tier of cities.

Also Read: BigMuscles Nutrition Ropes in Bollywood Star Nora Fatehi as the Brand Ambassador

On the financials, HyugaLife’s parent entity Pratech Brands — which also owns natural healthcare brand Inaari — reported revenue of Rs 45.32 crore in FY25, up from Rs 38.63 crore in FY24. Losses narrowed to Rs 21.32 crore from Rs 32 crore in the prior year, suggesting improving unit economics even before the Series A capital arrives. Pratech’s portfolio structure, combining a marketplace play with owned brands, gives it multiple levers to drive growth with the new funding, particularly as India’s organised nutrition market continues to expand well beyond metro gym-goers into mainstream wellness buyers.

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Bengaluru-based Snabbit, the quick home services platform that scaled from 400 to 40,000 daily orders in under 12 months, has raised $56 million in a Series D round — pushing its valuation to $360 million and bringing total funding to $112 million.

The round was led by Susquehanna VC, with participation from Mirae Asset Venture Investments and Bertelsmann India Investments. Snabbit plans to use the proceeds to expand into new cities, deepen its presence in existing markets, add high-frequency service categories, and strengthen its balance sheet.

Founded in 2024 by Aayush Agarwal as a hyperlocal home services platform focused on speed and reliability, Snabbit currently operates across five cities: Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Delhi NCR, Pune, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru. The platform operates across 140 active micromarkets and processes over 40,000 jobs daily through a network of more than 15,000 service professionals — all women. In March 2026, the company crossed one million monthly jobs, a milestone it used to anchor this funding announcement.

The all-women service professional model has been central to Snabbit’s brand positioning from the outset, addressing a persistent trust gap in home services that has historically been a friction point for urban households — particularly in metro markets where safety concerns around service workers shape booking decisions.

The quick home services segment is becoming crowded quickly. Urban Company’s InstaHelp crossed one million bookings in March 2026, the same month Snabbit hit that threshold, setting up a direct comparison between the two platforms at scale. Pronto, another player in the space, completed its first year of operations, reporting over 500,000 monthly fulfilled bookings, and is reportedly in the process of raising $20 million in fresh capital, months after closing a $25 million Series B.

Snabbit’s edge, as it scales, will likely come down to unit economics in its existing five cities before it adds more. Expanding the micromarket model — which depends on a dense enough supply of trained professionals to guarantee fast turnarounds — is harder to replicate quickly than a marketplace playbook, but also harder for competitors to match once established. The $56 million gives it the runway to find out.

Back in January, another Bengaluru-based startup, Pync, operating in the home services sector, was shut down, and its co-founders, Harsh Prateek, Mayank Sahu, and Dev Priyam, have joined Snabbit in senior leadership roles overseeing operations and business functions.

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Sahi, the Bengaluru-based stock trading platform built by former Swiggy CTO Dale Vaz, has closed a $33 million Series B — tripling its valuation in under a year and cementing its position as one of Indian fintech’s fastest-moving bets in the F&O trading space.

The round was led by Accel, with Accel Growth contributing approximately $20 million and the balance coming from existing investor Elevation Capital. The deal values Sahi at around $200 million, up from the $60 million valuation it commanded during its Series A in June 2025 — a more than 3x jump in roughly nine months.

Sahi was founded in 2023 by Dale Vaz (CEO) and Manish Jain (CPO), a former executive at Kotak Securities. The platform began operations in January 2025 and currently offers futures and options (F&O) and cash equity trading. It has since secured a research analyst licence, though the company says it remains focused on its transactional business for now rather than broadening into wealth management.

The growth numbers behind the raise are striking. Between April 2025 and March 2026, Sahi reported a 24x increase in trade volumes and a 19x rise in active traders. The platform has executed over 13 crore trades — with 86% of that volume coming in FY26 alone — and onboarded around 4 lakh demat accounts. It recently crossed one million trades in a single day and claims to contribute roughly 3% of India’s daily trade volume.

The platform competes directly with Zerodha, Groww, and Dhan, all of which have significantly larger user bases and longer operating histories. Sahi’s bet is that its AI-native architecture allows it to operate leaner and serve performance-driven traders — a specific sub-segment within the broader retail investing wave — better than incumbents built on older infrastructure.

Swiggy co-founder and CEO Sriharsha Majety holds a 0.10% stake in the company, a legacy of Vaz’s prior role. Accel and Elevation Capital each held 20% stakes as of the Series A, with the founders collectively retaining 47.17% and an ESOP pool accounting for 12.41%.

Also Read: Kissht IPO Opens — Cofounders Already Bought Shares at ₹201, Anchor Investors Put In ₹278 Cr

The fresh capital will go toward deepening the AI stack, expanding into new trading categories, and growing the user base. For a platform that went from zero to a $200 million valuation in just over a year of operations, the next question is whether Sahi can hold its momentum as competition for India’s next wave of retail traders intensifies.

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Bengaluru-based Ctruh has raised $2.5 million in a seed funding round led by Inflection Point Ventures (IPV). The round also saw participation from Avinya Ventures, India Accelerator, Founder’s Avenue, Anthill Ventures, and LVX, alongside angel investors Vivek Sinha (Founder and CEO, Emversity; Ex-COO, Unacademy) and Shivakumar Ganesan (Founder and CEO, Exotel). The funds will go toward R&D, product development of its browser-native 3D engine, its VersaAI generative AI platform, and expanding into the United States and the UAE.

Vinay Agastya founded Ctruh after stints at Swiggy, Scapic (acquired by Flipkart), Exotel, and Unacademy. He holds a B.Tech from GITAM Deemed University and was a fellow at MIT. The company currently has a team of 36.

Ctruh is building what it describes as infrastructure for the spatial internet — a proprietary, browser-native, no-code 3D engine that allows immersive experiences to run on any device without app installs, SDKs, or specialist hardware. Built on three years of foundational R&D, the engine supports up to 16K rendering in the browser. On top of it, the company has shipped Commverse Studio, which it positions as the first AI-powered unified XR commerce platform, letting brands deploy 3D experiences in under 30 minutes. VersaAI, the generative AI layer, converts images, text, and video into production-ready 3D assets.

“At Ctruh, our focus has always been to simplify technology for businesses by making advanced solutions more accessible. We are building an infrastructure for the upcoming generation of digital experiences, where our goal is to create spatial experiences for every business, regardless of size and scale. This funding will accelerate our ability to do exactly that.” said Vinay Agastya, Founder and CEO, Ctruh

The startup has built some early visibility before this round. It appeared on Shark Tank India Season 5 (Episode 13), receiving offers from Anupam Mittal and Vineeta Singh. It was named an ELEVATE 2025 winner by the Government of Karnataka, won the Aegis Graham Bell Award 2025 for Innovation in Immersive Experience, and was included in the Forbes Select 200 Companies list. Ctruh is also part of the NSRCEL IIM Bangalore and LeapFWD Accelerator ecosystems.

“While the AI space continues to get increasingly crowded, Ctruh is cutting through the noise with a strong technical differentiation. Its patented 3D engine enables high-fidelity 4K, 8K, and even 16K experiences to run smoothly on the web with fast load times.” said Vinay Bansal, CEO and Co-Founder, IPV

The broader XR market context gives this raise some weight. Fortune Business Insights and IMARC project the global XR market to grow from $346 billion in 2026 to over $2.1 trillion by 2034, at a 25–34% CAGR. Within that, India is emerging as the fastest-growing XR market in Asia — currently valued at $4.8 billion and projected to reach $14.1 billion by 2027, backed by Karnataka’s AVGC-XR 3.0 Framework and state-level investments exceeding ₹3,000 crore. For a browser-native infrastructure play targeting markets where app-download friction is high, the timing is deliberate.

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The IPO of OnEMI Technology Solutions, the parent of digital lending platform Kissht, opened for public subscription today at a price band of ₹162–171 per share. Before the issue opened, two things had already happened: its own cofounders bought shares from existing investors at a price above the offer, and a group of 22 anchor investors committed ₹278 crore at the upper band.

According to the company’s RHP, CEO Ranvir Singh acquired approximately 17.7 lakh shares for around ₹35.5 crore on March 4, purchasing from cofounder Abhijit Bhandari and AION Advisory Services. CFO Krishnan Vishwanathan picked up around 2.6 lakh shares for ₹5.3 crore from Vertex Ventures SEA Fund III and VenturEast SEDCO Proactive Fund. Both transactions were at ₹201 per share — roughly 18% above the IPO’s upper band of ₹171.

Bhandari, who is no longer in an executive role at the company, now holds a 1.22% stake, down from 1.8% at the DRHP stage. Following the purchases, Singh’s stake rose to 18.8% and Vishwanathan’s to 13.5%. The secondary transactions are also likely behind the IPO’s OFS component being halved — from 88.8 lakh shares in the DRHP to 44.4 lakh shares in the final RHP — and the fresh issue being trimmed from ₹1,000 crore to ₹850 crore.

On April 29, a day before the IPO opened, Kissht allotted 1.62 crore equity shares to 22 anchor investors at ₹171 per share, raising ₹277.77 crore. Domestic mutual funds took 57% of the allocation — ₹158.32 crore across 13 schemes from seven fund houses, including HDFC MF, ICICI Prudential, WhiteOak Capital, Bandhan MF, Quant MF, Tata MF, and Sundaram MF. Global institutions Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and BNP Paribas also participated.

The total issue size is ₹925.92 crore, comprising a fresh issue of ₹850 crore and an OFS of around ₹76 crore. Existing investors Vertex Ventures, Ammar Sdn Bhd, Endiya Seed Co-creation Fund, and AION Advisory are partially offloading stakes via the OFS. The IPO is managed by JM Financial, HSBC Securities, Nuvama Wealth Management, SBI Capital Markets, and Centrum Capital, with KFin Technologies as registrar.

Founded in 2015, Kissht offers personal and small business loans of up to ₹5 lakh through its mobile platform, alongside a payments app called Ring. For the nine months ended December 2025, the company reported operating revenue of ₹1,560 crore and a net profit of ₹199 crore. The IPO closes May 5. Allotment is expected on May 6, with listing on BSE and NSE on May 8.

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When public markets are closely observed, share price movements often reveal more than short-term valuation changes; they signal how an entire industry is perceived by investors. In the food delivery sector, these movements are closely tracked as early indicators of shifts in confidence, capital flows, and growth expectations.

One example is Zomato Limited, now known as Eternal Limited, which is frequently referenced to understand sentiment across listed food delivery platforms. Zomato’s share price is often analysed to interpret how investors are reacting to changes in demand patterns, profitability outlook, and competitive pressure within the sector. Even subtle movements can reflect larger shifts in how the industry is valued.

This blog explores key ways these share price trends influence funding cycles across the food delivery sector and what they signal for market participants.

5 Ways Share Price Fluctuations Align with Funding Cycles in the Food Delivery Sector

Here is a closer look at how market behaviour shows that share price trends influence funding decisions across the food delivery ecosystem:

1. Funding benchmarks for market valuations

Share price movements often act as an early indicator of funding sentiment in the food delivery sector. Rising prices signal stronger investor confidence in future earnings and growth potential, supported by improving demand visibility, better margins, or stronger operational efficiency. In such conditions, risk appetite increases, leading to more active capital deployment and faster deal momentum.

Movements in Zomato’s share price are widely tracked as a reference benchmark for valuation expectations in the sector. This influences how funding rounds are priced and how growth prospects are assessed.

Conversely, declining share prices signal caution around growth or profitability due to rising costs, slower demand, or margin pressure. This weakens investor confidence, making capital allocation more selective and slowing funding activity.

2. Public market valuations set private funding benchmarks

Public market valuations serve as key reference points for private funding benchmarks, with metrics such as Zomato’s share price guiding investor expectations. Listed companies help calibrate valuation multiples, especially for late-stage startups nearing liquidity events.

While private market developments may influence sentiment, public markets remain the primary driver, shaping pricing discipline, capital allocation, and overall sector valuation trends.

3. Profitability becomes a priority in weak markets

When share prices weaken, investor sentiment typically shifts from growth expectations to profitability and capital efficiency. They place greater weight on sustainable margins, cash-flow visibility, cost discipline, and the resilience of business models under slower-demand conditions.

Evaluation frameworks are becoming more conservative, with a greater focus on unit economics, customer retention, delivery efficiency, and long-term earnings stability. This often results in stricter valuation discipline and more selective capital allocation.

For this reason, Zomato’s share price is frequently interpreted by investors as a signal to reassess risk exposure and recalibrate valuation benchmarks across the sector. As sentiment moderates, funding expectations are reset lower, and deal pricing reflects heightened emphasis on profitability and sustainable cash generation. This eventually leads to tighter capital deployment cycles.

5. Sector-wide sentiment moves in sync with listed stocks

Listed companies serve as primary sentiment anchors for sectoral positioning, with market performance of players such as Zomato offering real-time signals on industry health, demand visibility, and profitability expectations.

Investors rely on these indicators to shape risk appetite and capital allocation across both public and private markets.

While periods of elevated funding activity may coincide with stronger sentiment, they largely reflect underlying optimism rather than independently driving listed valuations. This remains anchored to fundamentals and macro conditions.

5. Market corrections reset growth expectations

Sharp corrections prompt investors to reassess earlier growth assumptions and re-evaluate risk-adjusted returns with a stronger focus on downside protection.

Over-optimistic projections are replaced with more conservative and realistic targets, leading to stricter scrutiny of business models, cash flows, and long-term sustainability. This shift results in a downward revision of valuation expectations and disciplined capital allocation, with funding decisions based on visibility into profitability and operational resilience.

Corrections in Zomato’s share price often reset broader investor expectations across the food delivery sector in the online share market. This reinforces tighter valuation benchmarks and more cautious funding cycles.

Track market signals to make smarter funding decisions

Understanding funding cycles in the food delivery sector depends heavily on reading public market signals that reflect investor behaviour. These signals often change before private funding activity adjusts, making them an important early indicator.

Zomato’s share price serves as a clear example of how shifts in sentiment influence funding expansion or contraction across startups. Rising trends usually indicate stronger capital flow and higher valuations, while declines point to cautious investor behaviour and slower deal activity.

Online trading and investment platforms like Ventura help investors and startups track these movements more effectively by providing access to market data and insights. Start monitoring these signals to improve investment timing, valuation decisions, and alignment with the real funding cycle, leading to better long-term outcomes.

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For a generation of Indian graphic designers, content creators, and marketing professionals, Freepik was less a tool and more a rite of passage — the free tier that got you through your first poster, your first pitch deck, your first client brief. On Tuesday, that company announced it is retiring the Freepik name entirely and relaunching as Magnific, a full-stack AI creative platform with $230 million in annual recurring revenue, over one million paying subscribers, and a thesis about the future of work that should make every creative professional in India pay close attention.

The rebrand, announced on April 28, 2026, is not cosmetic. Freepik was founded in 2010 in Málaga, Spain, by Joaquín Cuenca Abela and his brother Alejandro Cuenca as a search engine for graphic resources. What followed was 15 years of quiet, bootstrapped dominance — no venture capital, no splashy funding rounds, just 100 million monthly visits and a profitable business that most of the startup world never thought to write about because it never needed their money.

The trigger for the transformation came in 2022 when OpenAI released DALL-E 2. Cuenca, who had previously co-founded Panoramio — a geotagged photo platform that Google acquired in 2007 — read the shift immediately and pivoted hard into generative AI. In May 2024, Freepik acquired Magnific AI, an image upscaling tool founded in Murcia, Spain, by Javi López and Emilio Nicolás that had gone viral on launch, signing up over 30,000 users in 24 hours without a rupee in paid advertising. Both founders remain with the company. Last year, Cuenca pushed further still — into AI video generation. Today, video alone accounts for roughly half of Magnific’s $230 million ARR.

“People saw fragments: Freepik as stock, Magnific as an upscaler. This is the first time the full system is visible as one platform.” said Joaquín Cuenca Abela, CEO, Magnific

The unified Magnific platform now covers what the company calls the full creative stack: AI image and video generation, including 4K output with audio, the original upscaling technology, a real-time collaborative workspace, 3D and virtual scene tools, an AI assistant, and a library of over 250 million stock assets. Critically, it is model-agnostic — users can select from third-party video models, including Google’s Veo 3.1 and ByteDance’s Seeddance 2.0, combining them with Magnific’s own tools. That orchestration layer is the architectural bet: not becoming a model company, but becoming the platform where the best models get used together.

The enterprise pull is already real. Over 290 teams — including BBC, Guess, R/GA, and Damm — are running production workflows on the platform daily. Andreessen Horowitz has ranked Magnific the 11th top generative AI web company globally by users, and the top in Europe — ahead of well-capitalised American competitors, built entirely without external funding. The platform’s Business plan, launched in January 2026 for smaller teams, crossed 2,000 subscriptions in six weeks and is currently growing at 150 new teams per week.

But the most consequential number in Tuesday’s announcement may be this: 72% of new creators joining Magnific identify as beginners. That figure sits at the heart of what Cuenca is calling the “no-collar economy” — his argument that AI is creating a third class of work, after blue-collar and white-collar, where creative output that previously required a studio, a team, and a six-figure budget can now be produced by a single person with a browser tab. “In the future, we will make films like we write books,” Cuenca has said. “One person with a vision and the tools to execute it.”

For the Indian creative industry, the implications are pointed. India has one of the largest pools of freelance graphic designers, motion artists, and content creators in the world — many of whom built their early portfolios on Freepik’s free tier. The platform’s rebrand signals that the free-asset economy is giving way to an AI-production economy, and that the competitive moat for individual creators is shifting from access to assets toward taste, judgment, and the ability to direct AI tools with precision. That is a transition that will reward some and displace others, often depending on how quickly they move.

Magnific is not the only platform making this bet — Adobe, Canva, and a growing number of platforms with deep user bases in India are all racing toward the same integrated AI creative stack. What makes Magnific’s story worth watching is that it got here without a single outside investor, from a city most people associate with sunshine rather than software, and it did so by watching what creators actually needed next rather than what the market was funding. Cuenca built the first version to be useful. He is betting the new version will be irreplaceable.

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Most website projects that fail don’t fail in development. They fail in documentation, or the complete absence of it. A founder who skipped a design brief ends up in an endless loop of revisions; a developer who never received one builds what they imagined, not what the client needed. The fix is deceptively simple: a web design brief.

The numbers make the case plain. About 75% of people judge a company’s credibility based on its website design, and 38% of users will stop engaging with a site if they find the layout or content unattractive. Meanwhile, a well-designed user interface can increase conversion rates by up to 400%. These aren’t abstract metrics — they represent real customers who arrived, glanced, and left. A design brief is what makes sure your site never becomes someone’s reason to bounce.

So what exactly is a web design brief, and why does writing one feel harder than it should?

What a Web Design Brief Actually Is

A web design brief is a structured document that captures the essential information a designer or developer needs before they start building your website. It is not a wishlist or a mood board — it is a project contract written in plain language. According to Asana, a design brief is a foundational document that outlines the core details, goals, and expectations of a design project, serving as a shared roadmap between clients and designers. That roadmap function is precisely why it matters: without it, two smart people can work in perfect parallel and still build completely different things.

The brief covers everything from what your business does and who you are trying to reach, to what the site needs to accomplish technically, what budget and timeline you are working within, and what success actually looks like. It is a document whose purpose is to provide both parties with a clear understanding of what is expected in terms of project workflow, deliverables, and post-launch services. For small and medium businesses, especially. It is also the most effective tool for preventing scope creep — the slow, expensive process of a project expanding well beyond what was originally agreed.

The practical value of a well-written brief compounds quickly. It gives the entire team a creative and clear direction from day one, concentrates resources toward purposeful development, and keeps designers and developers aligned on the same objectives throughout. It also minimises the error margin that comes from verbal handoffs and fragmented conversations — and because everything is documented, it doubles as a reference point the team can return to whenever decisions get contested, or scope starts to blur. As domyhomework123.com notes, clear documentation reduces miscommunication and makes storage and referencing significantly easier at every stage of the build.

Start With Your Business, Not Your Wishlist

The first and most commonly underwritten section of any design brief is the company overview. Founders who are deeply familiar with their own brand often assume that context is obvious. It rarely is. A developer who does not know whether you are a D2C brand or a B2B SaaS company will make fundamentally different design choices — in hierarchy, in color language, in the weight they give to testimonials versus product specs.

One of the most common mistakes in briefs is leaving out essential background information about the business. The overview should answer what your company does, when it was founded, where it operates, what differentiates it from competitors, and what its brand voice sounds like. If you already have brand guidelines — fonts, color palettes, logo usage rules — attach them. If you do not, flag that the design process itself may need to generate them.

This section also matters because it gives your design team a reason to care. A developer building a generic “e-commerce site” is doing a job. A developer building a platform for first-generation women entrepreneurs in tier-2 cities is making something.

Define the Website’s Objective Precisely

A website’s purpose sounds obvious until you try to write it down. Vague objectives — “we want a professional-looking website” or “we want more leads” — are the silent killers of design briefs. They cannot be built against, and they cannot be evaluated after launch. The idea is to articulate not just what they want to create but also the specific user challenge the design needs to solve.

A sharper objective sounds like: “We want a website that converts first-time visitors into newsletter subscribers, with a secondary goal of getting qualified leads to book a discovery call.” That gives designers something to build toward — a clear hierarchy of actions. It also disciplines the design itself, because every element of the site can be evaluated against whether it moves the visitor toward that specific outcome.

Know Your Audience Before Your Developer Does

Audience definition is where the design brief earns its keep most visibly. The target audience determines the information hierarchy of the site — what you lead with, what you bury, how much text is too much, and what imagery resonates. Purrweb’s UX brief guidelines emphasise that interface design is directly shaped by the content and the people expected to consume it; a news site and a social network have structurally different briefs for good reason.

Your brief should describe your target audience in terms of demographics (age range, geography, income bracket), psychographics (what problems they are trying to solve, what they distrust, what earns their confidence), and device behaviour. Hostinger’s 2026 web design statistics report found that the US web design services industry hit $43.5 billion in revenue in 2024, and much of that growth is being driven by businesses finally acknowledging that mobile-first design is not optional — it is table stakes. If a large portion of your audience is arriving on mobile, your brief needs to say so explicitly, because it changes everything from layout decisions to image dimensions to how CTAs are structured.

In-House or Outsourced: The Answer Changes Your Brief

How much detail your brief needs to contain depends significantly on who is reading it. An in-house developer already knows your brand, your tech stack, and the internal stakeholders they need to satisfy. An external agency or freelancer knows none of that. The brief you hand to an outsourced team needs to be close to self-contained — covering your business background, technical requirements, access credentials, content responsibilities, and revision process all in one document.

Most design professionals recommend designating a single internal point of contact and stating that explicitly in the brief. Projects where feedback travels through multiple stakeholders — what designers call “design by committee” — reliably produce the worst outcomes: longer timelines, diluted decisions, and a finished product no one fully owns. Naming one person as the decision-maker is a structural choice with outsized returns.

Budget and Timeline: Stop Treating Them as Sensitive

Many founders treat their budget as a card to hold close during a negotiation. This misreads the dynamic. A design team that does not know your budget cannot make intelligent trade-offs — they cannot tell you whether a custom-coded solution is worth pursuing or whether a well-configured CMS will serve your goals equally well at a third of the cost.

A useful distinction to maintain: the budget section of a brief should state how much is available for the design phase, while pricing specifics are handled in a separate proposal document. The brief is not the negotiation — it is the information that makes the negotiation honest. Similarly, timelines should be broken into milestones with concrete dates: wireframe review, design sign-off, content deadline, staging review, and go-live. Without that structure, timelines exist only on paper, and the project drifts.

The Elements Your Brief Cannot Afford to Leave Out

Beyond the core sections above, there are several elements that distinguish a functional brief from one that creates more problems than it solves. Website examples — three to five sites whose design you admire — give designers a concrete reference point for aesthetic direction. They are not instructions, but they communicate taste and expectations faster than any written description.

Technical requirements should cover CMS choice (WordPress, Webflow, a custom build), hosting environment, integrations needed (CRMs, payment gateways, analytics), SEO requirements, and accessibility standards. Adhering to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) should be mentioned explicitly if your audience includes users with disabilities — and most audiences do. Finally, post-launch responsibilities should be addressed: who maintains the site, who updates content, who owns the relationship with the hosting provider.

The best briefs close with a clear description of what “done” looks like. Not in emotional terms — “we want it to feel premium” — but in functional ones. Traffic targets, conversion benchmarks, load speed requirements, and quality-assurance criteria. A brief is most effective not when it is the longest, but when every sentence it contains can be acted upon.

The Cost of Not Writing One

There is a version of this where you skip the brief, send a developer a reference site you like, and hope for the best. Some projects survive that process. Most do not. Research shows 70% of online businesses fail due to poor usability — and poor usability almost always originates in a poor planning process, not in a developer’s technical limitations.

A web design brief does not guarantee a great website. But it eliminates the most preventable reasons for a bad one: misaligned expectations, undisclosed constraints, undefined audiences, and revision cycles that outlast budgets. For any business spending real money on its digital presence, the two to three weeks it takes to produce a thorough brief is not overhead — it is insurance.

The brief is also, quietly, a document that reveals how clearly you understand your own business. Founders who struggle to write it often discover something useful: that they had not yet answered the questions a designer was always going to ask them. Better to answer them at the beginning than in month three of a project that has already gone sideways.

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Every year, somewhere in a Mumbai conference room, a brand manager presents a slide with two options: a Bollywood actor’s face on the left, an Instagram grid on the right. The debate that follows — celebrity or influencer? — consumes hours, budgets, and, sometimes, entire marketing cycles.

Minimalist never had that meeting. When brothers Mohit Yadav and Rahul Yadav launched their skincare brand in October 2020, they did it with a single Instagram post, an account with barely 200 followers, and 1,000 bottles of product. No celebrity. No launch campaign. No paid media push. Within two days, those 1,000 bottles had sold out, and the account had crossed 10,000 followers. Within eight months, the brand hit ₹100 crore in annual revenue — profitably.

In January 2025, Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) acquired a 90.5% stake in Minimalist for ₹2,955 crore, in what became the largest acquisition in Indian D2C beauty history. The brand had reached ₹360 crore in revenue by then, with a 4.7-star average rating across platforms and distribution across 7 international markets.

No Bollywood face was anywhere near the cap table.

The Market They Walked Into

When Minimalist launched, India’s skincare market was running on a familiar playbook. Legacy brands manufactured broad-claim products — “fairness,” “glow,” “natural” — and signed film stars to sell them. The consumer was treated as a passive buyer, moved by aspiration rather than information. A Sara Ali Khan or a Shilpa Shetty Kundra on a bottle was considered the shortcut to recall.

Mohit, a chartered accountant who had previously worked at Credit Suisse and CarDekho, and Rahul, a chemical engineer from IIT Roorkee, saw a different consumer emerging. A younger, more informed cohort — call them skintellectuals — who read ingredient lists, debated niacinamide concentrations on Reddit, and cross-referenced products before purchasing. This consumer did not need a celebrity to tell them what to put on their face. They needed a brand willing to tell them exactly what was inside the bottle and why it worked.

Minimalist called it the #HideNothing philosophy. Active ingredient names and concentrations were printed on the front of every product. Clinical data backed every claim. The Instagram feed looked more like a chemistry class than a beauty campaign.

“Instead of chasing trends or relying on flashy ads, our marketing initiatives are rooted in science-backed information, transparency, and real consumer experiences.” said Mohit Yadav in a conversation with Storyboard about Minimalist’s marketing approach

“Instead of bringing trending products, shouldn’t it be the other way round? Shouldn’t we understand what the consumer wants and then develop products?” Yadav told YourStory

How the Influencer Strategy Actually Worked

Minimalist did use influencers. But the selection logic was fundamentally different from what most Indian brands were doing.

The brand worked with niche skincare creators — Shreya Jain, Shweta Vijay, Tarini Peshawaria, and Jovita George, among them — who had built credibility with audiences specifically interested in skincare science. These were not macro-influencers chasing broad reach. They were trusted voices within a defined, high-intent community. Their followers were already looking for products like Minimalist before the collaboration began.

The distinction matters. A celebrity endorsement buys visibility across a diffuse audience, most of whom have no immediate purchase intent. A niche skincare influencer brings the brand directly into a pre-qualified conversation. The conversion economics are structurally different.

Minimalist also worked with dermatologists and skincare experts who added a layer of clinical credibility to the brand’s positioning. This wasn’t influencer marketing as reach play — it was influencer marketing as trust infrastructure.

The Portfolio, Not the Bet

The broader logic maps cleanly onto what marketing professionals have been arguing for years but Indian brand managers have been slow to act on. A single celebrity campaign is a concentrated risk — one face, one narrative, one shot at resonance. A portfolio of niche creators spreads that risk across multiple audiences, allows for real-time testing, and compounds trust over time rather than spending it in a single campaign burst.

Minimalist’s approach demonstrated this at scale. By keeping marketing spend disciplined — approximately 10% of topline — and routing it toward creator-led education rather than billboard-style endorsement, the brand kept customer acquisition costs low while building the kind of loyalty that sustained a 4.7-star rating across thousands of reviews.

The numbers in the broader market support the logic. Micro and nano-influencers in India consistently deliver engagement rates of 3–6%, compared to 1–2% for celebrity and macro-influencer campaigns, according to industry data. For a category like skincare, where purchase decisions are research-driven and trust-dependent, that engagement differential translates directly into conversion.

Also Read: Minimalist Won’t Survive Under HUL, Predicts Bombay Shaving Company CEO Shantanu Deshpande

What HUL Was Actually Buying

The ₹2,955 crore acquisition was not simply a bet on a product portfolio. Hindustan Unilever was buying a brand architecture that its own legacy stable could not replicate quickly — a brand trusted by the exact consumer cohort it had been struggling to reach: urban, 22–35, digitally native, and deeply sceptical of traditional advertising.

Minimalist had built that trust without a single Bollywood face. It had done so by treating the consumer as an intelligent adult, by letting creators who shared that consumer’s language carry the message, and by ensuring that every product claim could withstand scrutiny.

That is an asset that cannot be manufactured through a celebrity contract. It has to be earned, creator by creator, honest review by honest review, over years of showing up in the right conversations.

The Indian D2C beauty market is projected to grow at a 36.4% CAGR through 2032. As that market matures, the brands that will be acquisition targets — the ones that command the kind of multiples Minimalist commanded — will be the ones that built genuine trust architectures, not the ones that paid the biggest faces to smile on their packaging.

Two brothers from Rajasthan, working without a single celebrity, built the proof of concept. The exit speaks for itself.

The post Minimalist Never Hired a Bollywood Face, HUL Paid ₹2,955 Crore for It Anyway appeared first on LAFFAZ.

Palmonas has appointed Ritu Raj as Vice President – Supply Chain & Operations, bringing in one of India’s more experienced D2C logistics leaders as the Pune-based brand prepares to add 100 stores to its existing network over the next 12 months.

The appointment is a direct signal of what stage Palmonas is entering. Winning on product and digital distribution got the brand this far — operating revenue grew over 40 times to ₹39 crore in FY25 from just ₹97 lakh in FY24, and the company turned profitable in the same year, posting a net profit of ₹4.3 crore. Sustaining that trajectory across a physical retail network several times its current size requires a different kind of capability entirely: one built around logistics discipline, margin control at scale, and a supply chain that can serve both online and offline channels without breaking. That’s the gap Raj has been hired to close.

His background runs through some of the hardest supply chain problems in Indian consumer tech. Most recently at DeHaat, Raj served as VP – Supply Chain, leading end-to-end execution across a complex rural farm-to-consumer network spanning multiple states — an environment that demands both operational rigour and adaptability at the edge. Before that, at Milkbasket, he scaled omnichannel supply chain operations across 21 cities as Associate Director, managing large teams while keeping profitability and customer satisfaction intact. Earlier stints at Udaan, Peel-works, and Reliance Retail — where he contributed to the early build of last-mile grocery delivery infrastructure — round out a profile that is distinctly suited to what Palmonas needs next. He holds an Executive Development Programme credential from IIM Raipur and a degree in Hotel Management from IHM Pusa.

The context for this hire is a brand flush with capital and committed to a specific use for it. Palmonas closed a $40 million Series B just weeks ago, on 2 April 2026, co-led by Xponentia Capital and Vertex Growth Fund, with continued participation from existing investor Vertex Ventures SE Asia & India. Co-founder Shraddha Kapoor confirmed the capital will go toward aggressive offline expansion — the brand currently operates 60 stores, each of which is reportedly individually profitable.

The current valuation for Palmonas comes around at $211 million, with founders retaining 69% of the company; Kapoor’s stake in the business is currently worth approximately ₹1,360 crore on paper, according to Tracxn.

Pallavi Mohadikar and Amol Patwari founded Palmonas in 2022, with Kapoor joining as co-founder in March 2024 — a structural arrangement that went well beyond a standard celebrity endorsement. The brand operates in the demi-fine jewellery segment, a category positioned between fast-fashion accessories and traditional fine jewellery, using surgical steel and sterling silver with an 18K gold vermeil finish. It sells through its own website, Amazon India, Myntra, and quick-commerce platforms, including Blinkit, alongside its growing physical store network.

Palmonas appeared on Shark Tank India Season 4, which aired in early 2025, where the company secured a deal from sharks Namita Thapar and Ritesh Agarwal. The duo revealed during the pitch that Shraddha Kapoor was one of the very early customers of the company, long before she came on board as co-founder.

Also Read: Hyphen’s “Kriti Sanon quits” post was a stunt. She’s now Chief SPF Officer

Ritu Raj’s mandate will be to build the distribution infrastructure and operational control systems that can absorb the pace of expansion Palmonas has committed to. A 100-store rollout in 12 months — on top of 60 already running — isn’t a marketing exercise. It’s a logistics problem, a team-building problem, and a unit economics problem rolled into one. Bringing in someone who has operated at the intersection of all three, across rural networks, quick-commerce, and modern retail, suggests Palmonas is approaching the next phase with more operational seriousness than most celebrity-backed consumer brands manage at this stage.

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Tamannaah Fine Jewellery has entered its first significant brand-building chapter, commissioning a set of bespoke pieces for sitarist Rishab Rikhiram Sharma to wear across his sold-out Sitar for Mental Health India Tour 2026. The collaboration marks the label’s first major custom commission — and its first male muse — coming at a moment when men’s jewellery is visibly gaining cultural legitimacy in India’s premium lifestyle space.

The category shift is real and accelerating. Indian men, particularly those positioned at the intersection of culture, performance, and fashion, have been steadily making jewellery a part of their public identity. Sharma has been one of the more prominent figures in that movement, regularly pairing couture ensembles from houses like JADE, Anita Dongre, and Shantanu & Nikhil with curated accessories during live performances. That visibility made him a natural fit for a brand still defining its cultural positioning.

For Sharma’s Delhi shows, Tamannaah Fine Jewellery created what it describes as the first pieces under its Originali-T bespoke offering: signature plump hoops reimagined with a Trishul motif, and a sculpted torque necklace with a custom-made Trishul drop — designs intended to be minimal and symbolic in equal measure, referencing Sharma’s own spiritual and artistic identity. The pieces were worn across his Delhi performances, which drew over 20,000 attendees at DDA Ground, Dwarka, as the finale of a 10-city tour that collectively recorded over 1 lakh in cumulative footfall and more than ₹50 crore in revenue.

Tamannaah Fine Jewellery launched in January 2026 out of a flagship store on Juhu Tara Road, Mumbai. Founded by actor Tamannaah Bhatia in partnership with her father Santosh Bhatia — who has operated in jewellery retail for over 15 years — the brand debuted three collections: Half & Half, The Flick, and Plumptious, all crafted in 14K and 18K gold with natural diamonds and gemstones. Its stated philosophy, “Beyond the Occasion,” positions fine jewellery as an everyday category rather than a wedding or event purchase. LAFFAZ covered the brand’s January launch when it first opened.

Also Read: Palmonas Appoints Supply Chain Veteran Ritu Raj as VP

Three months in, Tamannaah Fine Jewellery is using a high-profile, culturally resonant male figure — at the peak of his current public moment — to signal range and intent beyond its core female audience. For a celebrity D2C label still establishing recall, that kind of earned association carries more weight than paid placements. It also opens the brand’s conversation toward men’s fine jewellery, a segment with growing commercial interest but still limited dedicated supply at the premium end in India.

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The One Atelier has launched The One Capital, a blockchain platform designed to bring tokenised investment into branded residential real estate. The announcement was made on 27 April 2026, with Milan listed as the operational base for the new venture.

The platform targets the earliest, and typically most inaccessible, stage of the development lifecycle: pre-launch and early-phase projects where brand alignment and design decisions have the most impact on long-term value.

The move comes at a notable moment for the sector. Branded residences command an average price premium of 33% over comparable non-branded properties globally, according to the Savills Branded Residences Report 2025–26. The total number of branded residential schemes worldwide is projected to exceed 1,000 by the end of 2026, up from just 323 in 2015.

The One Atelier has spent two decades working with globally recognised lifestyle brands on residential projects — among them Karl Lagerfeld, Fendi Casa, ETRO, Armani Casa, ELLE, and Dolce & Gabbana. The One Capital is positioned as a direct extension of that work, applying structured capital frameworks to the kinds of projects the studio already handles.

Through the platform, economic rights linked to selected branded real estate assets are digitally represented as tokenised bonds — backed by Web3 infrastructure and designed to align with existing financial standards, subject to applicable laws and regulatory approvals. The underlying properties themselves are not tokenised; ownership and land registry structures remain unchanged.

“The One Capital is a natural extension of how we already operate. We work at the earliest stages of branded real estate projects, where decisions around brand alignment, positioning and design have the greatest impact on long-term value. The maturity of the technology now allows us to apply more structured and transparent approaches to early-stage development, supporting developers in project planning, alignment and execution across an ultra high-end network of luxury properties.” said Michele Galli, CEO, The One Atelier

Gabriele Carusi, Managing Director at The One Capital, framed the platform’s ambition as a structural shift rather than a product launch.

“Our ambition is to bring branded residences into the evolving landscape of real estate tokenisation, creating a clear and transparent framework that supports value creation from the very beginning. By reshaping how early-stage development is structured and deployed, we’re introducing a level of efficiency not typically seen at this stage, without ever compromising control, quality or the integrity of the projects we support.” added Gabriele Carusi, Managing Director, The One Capital

For developers, The One Capital offers an alternative capital route that can support early cash flow and strengthen financing structures — areas that have traditionally been underserved in the luxury segment. The platform emphasises governance, on-chain transparency, and a streamlined investor experience as its core operational pillars.

The One Atelier says further details on projects and investment structures will be announced in the coming months.

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India’s mobile gaming segment has spent years chasing global scale — and Metasports Interactive may have just found an unusual route to get there. The Bengaluru-based studio behind cricket game Hitwicket has secured $20 million in user acquisition (UA) funding from Metica, a London-based growth financing firm, in a deal that signals a maturing approach to how Indian gaming companies fund expansion without giving up equity.

UA funding is a non-dilutive financing model that has gained significant traction in the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia, but remains relatively rare in the Indian gaming ecosystem. Rather than raising venture capital, companies access capital specifically to fund customer acquisition, repaid through the revenue that acquired users generate. For studios with strong unit economics and predictable retention curves, the model can be more efficient than equity rounds. Metasports is positioning itself as one of the first Indian gaming companies to tap this structure at a meaningful scale.

Hitwicket, launched in 2020, is a competitive multiplayer cricket title built around skill-based gameplay. Kashyap Reddy and Keerti Singh, who co-founded Metasports, have grown its player base to over 18 million users spanning 109 countries — a footprint that gave Metica enough performance data to underwrite the round. Strong monetisation metrics and high retention rates were central to making the case, according to the company.

The $20 million will be deployed on intensifying user acquisition across priority international markets. Alongside the capital, Metica will integrate its proprietary technology platform into Hitwicket’s operations to optimise in-game revenue performance — a move aimed at lifting lifetime value per user and improving overall unit economics. Metasports is targeting nearly 8x growth over the next 18 months, driven by AI-led targeting, expanded marketing investment, and continued product development.

“With Hitwicket, our vision is to reach over a billion cricket fans globally and build a truly world-class gaming business from India. This partnership with Metica gives us the capital and the tools to move faster in international markets without diluting ownership. We’re proud to be among the first Indian gaming companies to access this kind of structured UA funding, and we see it as a model that can unlock real scale for studios with strong fundamentals.” said Kashyap Reddy, Co-Founder and CEO, Metasports Interactive

Metica CEO Phil Mohr said his firm reserves UA funding for businesses that demonstrate repeatable, efficient growth — and that Hitwicket’s ability to scale across both India and international markets made Metasports stand out. Beyond capital, Mohr pointed to Metica’s technology as a means to increase user lifetime value, framing the deal as a dual investment in growth and in-product monetisation.

Metasports had previously raised $8 million from Prime Venture Partners and Horizon Ventures. Cricket commentator Harsha Bhogle is also among the company’s backers — a marquee name that has likely helped with the game’s credibility among cricket audiences in India and the diaspora. The new round does not dilute that cap table further, which is precisely the point.

The deal arrives at a moment when Indian gaming startups are increasingly building for global audiences from day one rather than treating international markets as an afterthought. That Metasports could attract a London-based growth financier on the strength of player data and unit economics — not a speculative growth narrative — reflects how much the segment has matured. If the UA funding model takes hold more broadly, it could change how mid-stage Indian gaming companies think about capital and ownership.

Also Read: Bengaluru’s LightFury Games Raises $11 Million from MS Dhoni and Seven Cricketers

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Indian D2C beauty brands have figured out that no press release travels faster than a controlled scare.

On Friday, April 25, Hyphen — the skincare brand co-founded by actor Kriti Sanon — published a solemn Instagram post announcing that Sanon was stepping down as its Chief Customer Officer.

“This is not a statement we make lightly. After careful study, we believe that this should be addressed honestly. The road ahead represents a tremendous transition. Certain painful but important decisions were taken. With that, we publicly announce that Kriti Sanon is no longer functioning as our Chief Customer Officer.”

The post was subsequently deleted — but not before it had done its job.

Fans and customers flooded Hyphen’s DMs. Speculation ran immediately: some tied the move to Sanon’s upcoming film Cocktail 2, others wondered whether the brand was headed for an acquisition or a rebrand. Several outlets published straight-news coverage of the “exit.” What none of them reported — until now — is how the story actually ends.

Hyphen had been building toward a product launch the entire time.

On Saturday, the brand posted a video of Sanon dressed in a police officer uniform, designating her “SPF Police” — a character with, per the caption, “zero tolerance for skipping sunscreen.”

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A post shared by HYPHEN (@letshyphen)

On Sunday, the full commercial dropped: a Blinkit-partnered ad in which Sanon, still in cop character, confronts a young woman heading outdoors without sunscreen. The girl opens Blinkit on her phone and orders one on the spot.

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A post shared by Blinkit (@letsblinkit)

Alongside the commercial, Hyphen posted a clarification that closed the loop.

“Kriti Sanon is, has been & will always be our CCO. In fact, she’s now adding another title to the list — Chief SPF Officer. Thank you for all the love, panic, messages & overflowing concern in our DMs over the last two days. Honestly, we were overwhelmed (and slightly entertained). She’s NEVER going anywhere.”

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A post shared by HYPHEN (@letshyphen)

The stunt landed because Sanon is not a passive endorser at Hyphen — she is structurally embedded in the brand.

Also Read: Tamannaah Bhatia is the New Face of LOVETC as Ananya Birla’s Beauty Label Hits Its Stride in Year Two

Kriti Sanon co-founded it in July 2023 alongside PEP Technologies, launching on her 33rd birthday and positioning the brand as a personal entrepreneurial bet, not a licensing deal. CEO Tarun Sharma has said the company crossed ₹400 crore in revenue within two years, reaching four million consumers across 19,000 pin codes, with a 60% repeat customer rate. Products are priced between ₹449 and ₹649, available D2C and on Myntra, Nykaa, Amazon, Flipkart, and Blinkit.

That foundation is exactly what made the fake exit believable.

Audiences have been conditioned to see celebrity founders drift away once brands reach scale. A carefully worded “painful decision” post didn’t immediately read as theatre — it read as a founder quietly backing out. That credibility is a brand asset Hyphen just spent, and whether the payoff — a sunscreen launch with Blinkit quick-commerce distribution — was worth it will show in the numbers.

Not everyone found the two-day scare entertaining. Some customers felt genuinely misled, with one commenter writing that the announcement left them feeling “that connection is gone.”

Whether the SPF Police ad converts more than it alienates is the actual metric to watch. For now, Kriti Sanon has two C-suite titles and a Blinkit integration. The CCO isn’t going anywhere — she’s just got a new beat to police.

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Three years after Reliance Industries quietly acquired a dormant cola label for Rs 22 crore, that same brand is now sitting alongside Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Parle Agro at the top of India’s Rs 60,000 crore carbonated soft drinks market. Campa Cola — once a 1970s nostalgia play — posted over Rs 4,700 crore in gross sales during FY26, officially making it the country’s fourth-largest CSD brand.

The milestone is less about nostalgia and more about what Reliance Consumer Products Limited (RCPL) has engineered around it. Campa’s ascent has been driven by a pricing strategy that undercuts multinational rivals at nearly every SKU — a structural advantage Reliance can sustain through its retail infrastructure and distribution muscle. The brand has also locked in double-digit market share in key regions, suggesting the gains aren’t limited to value-tier buyers alone.

RCPL’s broader numbers reflect just how fast the consumer division is scaling. The company reported Rs 7,350 crore in revenue for the March quarter and Rs 22,000 crore across the full financial year — growth spread across beverages, staples, and packaged food. Campa is the headline act, but it sits inside a much larger portfolio push.

Mukesh Ambani flagged the consumer products business as a meaningful priority, describing the now-independent RCPL structure as positioned to capture India’s long-term consumption growth. Beyond cola, RCPL’s packaged water business has already become the country’s third-largest branded water player, with new high-speed bottling lines across 12 states and food parks spanning biscuits, chocolates, and staples. The beverage success is a proof of concept — Reliance can take a legacy Indian brand, strip out the premium pricing, flood the distribution network, and compete directly with multinationals at scale.

For context on how Campa got here — from a Rs 22 crore acquisition to a top-four market position — LAFFAZ has previously covered the full ownership story and Reliance’s price war strategy against American cola brands. The brand has also been building visibility beyond retail: it expanded into the UAE and secured an IPL title sponsorship, and more recently partnered with Ajith Kumar Racing as Campa Energy’s official sponsor — a direct play at the premium youth segment its cola entry-price positioning hasn’t traditionally reached.

India’s soft drinks market has historically been a duopoly story. That’s no longer quite accurate — and the speed of Campa’s climb suggests the structural shift has more runway left.

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Let me begin with a number that tends to concentrate minds: €4.8 million. That is the fine issued in 2023 by Germany’s Bundesnetzagentur and associated labor enforcement authorities against a Chinese manufacturing company that had been operating a European sales and logistics function for three years without registering a single employee correctly under German law. The company had people on the ground, it was generating revenue, and it believed — based on advice from its domestic legal team — that its German staff was adequately structured as “seconded” workers covered by Chinese social insurance. They were not. The retrospective liability for employer social security contributions, income tax withholding failures, and administrative penalties consumed a significant portion of the company’s European operating profit for that year.

I tell this story not to be alarmist, but because it is representative of a pattern I have observed consistently over the past decade: highly capable, well-resourced companies from China, South Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia entering European markets with a structural approach that would be completely reasonable at home and is comprehensively wrong in Europe. The failure mode is almost never dishonesty or negligence in the ordinary sense. It is a genuine lack of institutional knowledge about what European employment law actually requires — at a granular, country-by-country, registration-by-registration level — combined with an understandable reluctance to build expensive local legal infrastructure for a market that is still being validated.

The Employer of Record model exists precisely for this situation. And for Asian companies in particular, the reasons it represents the correct structural choice go considerably deeper than the generic arguments about speed and convenience that tend to dominate the marketing conversation.

The European Employment Environment Is Not a Single Thing

The most fundamental misconception I encounter when advising companies headquartered in Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, or Tokyo is that “Europe” is a jurisdiction. It is not. The European Union is a political and regulatory framework that harmonizes certain things — product standards, competition law, data protection — while leaving employment regulation almost entirely to member states. This matters because employment tax, social security, labor standards, termination law, collective bargaining, and employee benefit obligations are all national matters, and they diverge radically across the continent.
A Chinese company that has done its legal due diligence for Germany and proceeds to hire in France on the assumption that the rules are broadly similar will be wrong in ways that cost real money. The French Urssaf system, the DSN monthly payroll declaration, the mandatory complementary health coverage, the applicability of sector-specific collective agreements determined by the company’s NAF code, the specific termination procedures governed by the Code du travail — none of these have German equivalents. Germany has its own registration architecture, its own pension insurance funds, its own works council framework under the Betriebsverfassungsgesetz, and its own rules on salary continuation during illness (Entgeltfortzahlungsgesetz). The Netherlands has the WAB Act governing the distinction between fixed and open-ended contracts. Italy has the INPS/INAIL dual registration system and the TFR severance fund that accrues from the first day of employment. Sweden’s labor market is governed as much by collective agreements as by statute.

For a company based in China that is simultaneously trying to enter three or four European markets while managing its core domestic operations, the task of building compliant payroll and employment infrastructure in each of these jurisdictions in parallel is not merely complex — it is realistically impossible to do correctly without a team of local specialists in each country. The Employer of Record model replaces that team with a single contractual relationship.

Why Chinese Companies Face Specific Additional Exposure

Beyond the general complexity that any non-European employer faces when entering the EU labor market, companies headquartered in China carry a set of additional compliance burdens that are worth understanding explicitly.

FDI screening and the shadow it casts over employment structures. The EU Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR), which entered into force in 2023 and began full enforcement in 2024, alongside the national FDI screening mechanisms that now exist in Germany (under the Foreign Trade and Payments Act), France (under the IEM framework), Italy, the Netherlands, and most other major EU economies, means that Chinese companies making investments in Europe — including, in some interpretations, the establishment of local entities to employ staff — are subject to enhanced regulatory scrutiny. While an EOR arrangement does not eliminate this scrutiny where it applies at the corporate level, it allows a company to begin operations without triggering entity-establishment reporting requirements that can slow market entry by months. The commercial relationship between an Asian company and a European EOR is a B2B services contract, not an establishment, and is treated differently in most member states’ screening frameworks.

GDPR and the Chinese data law conflict. China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), which came into force in November 2021, imposes data localization requirements and cross-border transfer restrictions that are — in certain respects — in direct tension with how European employment law expects employee personal data to be processed. A Chinese company employing staff in Germany must, under German law and the GDPR, provide employees with access to their personal data, the right to erasure, and data portability. Simultaneously, PIPL may require that certain categories of data related to the company’s operations not leave Chinese servers. Managing this tension through an internal corporate HR system that routes all data through headquarters in Beijing is not compliant with European law. An EOR that processes all European employee data within EU infrastructure — under a properly structured Data Processing Agreement, with legal basis established under Article 6 and, where applicable, Article 9 of GDPR — removes this conflict by design. Acvian, for example, maintains payroll data processing within EEA infrastructure, which means neither the client company nor its employees are exposed to a cross-border transfer problem.

The secondment trap. The most common structural error I see from Chinese companies is the “seconded employee” model: the employee is formally employed by the Chinese parent, remains on Chinese social insurance, is paid their salary in China, and is nominally “assigned” to Europe for a fixed period. This model can work, within narrow constraints, for short-term postings under bilateral social security agreements — but China does not have comprehensive bilateral social security agreements with most EU member states. Germany has a limited agreement with China covering pension insurance only. Most other EU countries have no agreement at all, which means that a Chinese employee working in France on Chinese social insurance is simultaneously generating French social security contribution obligations that no one is paying. When French authorities discover this — and increasingly, they do, through data-sharing between tax authorities and Urssaf — the liability falls on the de facto employer: whichever entity is directing the employee’s work in France.

Relocation: The Problem Nobody Prices Correctly

For Chinese companies that are not merely hiring local European talent but relocating their own staff — engineers, managers, executives, product specialists — from China to European offices, the compliance requirements multiply significantly, and the financial stakes are higher because the individuals involved are typically more senior and more expensive.

When a Chinese employee relocates to Germany, France, or the Netherlands, the following tax and legal events occur simultaneously, on a timeline measured in weeks rather than months:
The employee becomes a tax resident of the host country once they have been present for more than 183 days in a calendar year (under most treaties), or earlier if they establish their primary domicile there. From that point, the host country taxes their worldwide income — including, in many cases, income paid by the Chinese entity in China. The employer — whichever entity is legally responsible — must begin withholding host-country income tax from the first paycheck after residency is established.

The employee simultaneously triggers host-country social security contribution obligations. Since there is no comprehensive EU-China social security totalization agreement, the employee is in most cases subject to contributions in both countries: Chinese social insurance continues to apply to the portion of their income paid by the Chinese entity, while the host-country system applies to all income earned from work performed in the host country. Without careful structuring, this produces genuine double contributions that are both legally required and financially punishing.

Work permit and residence authorization timelines interact directly with tax and payroll obligations. An employee cannot legally begin work in Germany until a valid work authorization is issued, but the payroll clock starts from the date they establish residency for tax purposes. Getting the sequencing wrong — beginning work before the permit is issued, or establishing tax residency before payroll registration is in place — creates either immigration law violations or payroll tax gaps, sometimes both.

The employee’s equity compensation — if they hold unvested stock options or RSUs from the Chinese parent — creates what tax practitioners call a “mobility tax event” on any vesting that occurs after the move. The portion of the vesting period spent in the host country is taxable in the host country, which requires the employer to withhold local income tax on equity income that may be denominated in offshore currency and paid through a foreign entity. This is technically demanding and routinely handled incorrectly.

None of these events is discretionary. They all occur by operation of law, on timelines that cannot be extended by internal HR policy or employment contract terms. A company that has not built the infrastructure to manage all of them simultaneously — payroll registration, tax withholding, social security enrollment, work permit coordination, equity tax withholding — will produce non-compliance in at least one dimension, typically several.

An EOR provider that offers full relocation support — including shadow payroll for assignees, tax equalization program administration, and coordination of work permit sponsorship — absorbs all of these obligations within a single managed service. This is where the value proposition for Chinese companies is most concrete and most quantifiable.

The Works Council Problem and Why Cultural Familiarity Matters

There is a dimension of European employment law that does not appear in tax codes or social security regulations but is equally capable of creating serious legal exposure: collective employee representation. In Germany, any company with five or more permanent employees has the right to elect a Betriebsrat — a works council — with consultation rights over working time, organizational changes, hiring, and in some cases remuneration structures. An employer who proceeds with a restructuring, a significant policy change, or a mass redundancy without the required consultation procedure is exposed to injunctive relief and damages. Similar frameworks exist in France (Comité Social et Économique), the Netherlands (Ondernemingsraad), and most other EU member states.
For a company headquartered in China, where the management culture tends toward relatively centralized decision-making and where the concept of mandatory employee consultation before implementing organizational decisions has no domestic equivalent, this is not merely a legal technicality. It is a genuine management culture challenge. Companies that have not been briefed on these frameworks consistently underestimate both their legal force and their practical consequences. I have advised on situations where a Chinese company’s European HR manager, acting on instructions from head office, implemented a reorganization without works council consultation — not because they were trying to circumvent the law, but because the requirement had never been communicated to the relevant decision-makers.

A quality EOR provider acts as an informed intermediary in exactly these situations. Acvian’s country specialists, for instance, advise client companies not only on the formal requirements of works council consultation but on the practical communication approach that makes that consultation productive rather than adversarial — because the legal obligation to consult does not prevent a sensible employer from managing the process well.

Tax Equalization: The Financial Arithmetic of Moving Senior Staff

When a company relocates a senior Chinese employee to, say, Amsterdam or Munich, the employee typically expects to maintain approximately the same after-tax income they received at home. This is a reasonable expectation and a standard feature of relocation agreements for executives. The mechanism for delivering it is called tax equalization — the employer “grosses up” the employee’s compensation to account for the higher effective tax rate in the host country, ensuring that the employee pays no more tax than they would have paid in China on equivalent income.
In practice, tax equalization is more complex than it sounds. The equalization calculation must account for the employee’s hypothetical tax in China (which requires maintaining a running calculation of what they would have owed under Chinese personal income tax rules), the actual tax owed in the host country (which changes with each payroll cycle as income accumulates and marginal rates apply), and any tax on Chinese-source income that remains taxable in China under the applicable double tax treaty.

For a Chinese national relocating to Germany, the China-Germany Double Taxation Agreement (signed 1985, updated 2016) is the primary treaty instrument. It generally assigns primary taxing rights over employment income to Germany once the employee is resident there, with a credit available in China for German tax paid. The mechanics of the credit calculation, particularly for income that straddles the relocation date, require a payroll system capable of handling multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction calculations — not the standard functionality of a Chinese HR software platform.
EOR providers that specialize in international mobility — as distinct from those that simply offer basic payroll outsourcing — maintain this infrastructure as a core product capability. The difference matters enormously for a company managing ten or twenty relocations per year. Getting the equalization calculation wrong by even a few percentage points creates either an over-benefit to the employee (which is a compensation cost) or an under-benefit (which is a breach of the relocation agreement and, often, a labor law violation in the host country).

Why the EOR Model Is Specifically Well-Suited to the Asian Expansion Pattern

European market expansion by Chinese and broader Asian companies tends to follow a recognizable pattern that differs from the typical American or British company’s approach. There is usually a longer exploratory phase — a period of revenue generation through distributors, agents, or partnership arrangements — followed by a relatively rapid transition to direct market presence once commercial validation is achieved. This pattern means that when the decision is made to hire directly in Europe, the company typically wants to move quickly, does not want to spend six to twelve months establishing a local entity, and is uncertain about how many people it will ultimately need in any given country.

This uncertainty is critical. The EOR model is not only faster to implement than local entity establishment (a properly structured EOR engagement can begin within two to three weeks, compared to two to six months for entity registration in most EU member states); it is also reversible without penalty. If a company’s German expansion does not achieve its commercial targets, unwinding an EOR arrangement requires giving notice to the provider and following the applicable German notice period for the affected employees. Unwinding a GmbH — with its registered share capital, its Handelsregister entry, its banking relationships, its potential works council — is a materially more complex and expensive process.

For Asian companies that are expanding into Europe for the first time and are therefore inherently in a learning-and-validating phase, the combination of speed, flexibility, and embedded compliance that an EOR provides is structurally aligned with their actual risk profile in a way that entity establishment is not.

Acvian’s model is designed specifically for this phase: it provides genuine local employer-of-record status — not an agency or a staffing arrangement — through its own registered entities in multiple European jurisdictions, which means clients are not depending on third-party local partners whose compliance standards they cannot fully audit. For a Chinese company for which reputational risk in a new market is particularly acute — given the increased regulatory and media scrutiny that Chinese corporate actors face in Europe — choosing a provider that is fully transparent about its legal structure and can document its compliance posture is not a minor preference. It is a due diligence requirement.

A Note on Language and Institutional Fluency

I want to make a point that does not appear in most discussions of EOR services but that matters very much to Asian clients specifically: the value of working with a provider that has genuine multilingual operational capability.

European employment compliance generates documentation in local languages that is legally binding: employment contracts governed by German law must contain specific clauses in German; French termination letters must follow a specific formulation in French; Italian INPS notifications are issued exclusively in Italian. A company based in Beijing managing European HR operations through English as a working language will, at some point, encounter a document that requires interpretation — and in employment law, mistranslation of a notice period, a probation clause, or a dismissal reason is not an academic problem. It produces legal exposure.

A quality EOR provider has native-language HR and legal operations in each country where it employs workers. This is distinct from having a multilingual sales team. The operational capability — the person who drafts the German employment contract, handles the French Urssaf query, navigates the Italian INAIL accident notification — must be legally literate in the relevant language. For Asian companies whose internal European operations may initially be staffed entirely by people working in Mandarin or Korean, this institutional fluency is a genuine value transfer, not a peripheral feature.

The Right Infrastructure for the Right Phase

The wave of Asian corporate expansion into Europe — driven by Chinese EV manufacturers seeking to circumvent tariffs through European production, by Korean technology companies building R&D centers in Germany and the Netherlands, by Indian IT service firms establishing delivery hubs in Eastern Europe, and by Chinese consumer brands attempting to build direct-to-consumer operations in France and the UK — is not a temporary phenomenon. It represents a structural reorientation of where globally competitive Asian companies need operational presence to remain competitive.
What has not kept pace with this commercial ambition is a clear-eyed understanding of what it costs, in legal and tax terms, to operate an employment relationship in Europe correctly. The European Union’s employment framework is not punitive toward foreign companies — it is simply comprehensive, locally administered, and enforced with increasing rigor. Companies that treat it as an obstacle to be worked around will find that the cost of non-compliance consistently exceeds the cost of compliance. Companies that treat it as a known, manageable set of obligations — and engage the infrastructure to manage those obligations correctly from the beginning — will find that European market operations are commercially viable and legally sustainable.

The Employer of Record model, when implemented through a provider with genuine local entity presence, country-specific legal expertise, and a service architecture designed for international mobility rather than domestic staffing, is the most efficient way to build that infrastructure for a company in its market-entry phase. It does not eliminate the complexity of operating in Europe. It absorbs it.

ⓘ This article is produced in association with Acvian (acvian.com), an Employer of Record operating through registered legal entities across European jurisdictions, providing payroll compliance, work permit support, and mobility tax services for international companies entering the European market.
The views expressed are those of the contributing author and do not constitute legal advice. Companies should seek qualified local counsel for jurisdiction-specific employment and tax guidance.

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India’s payments banking experiment has run its course — at least for Paytm. On April 24, the Reserve Bank of India cancelled the banking licence of Paytm Payments Bank Limited (PPBL) under Section 22(4) of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949, with immediate effect. Paytm notified in a press release on Friday, 24 April. The central bank said it will approach the High Court to begin winding-up proceedings, marking the most decisive regulatory action taken against a payments bank in the country.

The RBI’s order was direct: the bank’s operations were conducted in a manner detrimental to the interest of depositors, and the general character of its management was found prejudicial to both depositor and public interest — specific grounds under Sections 22(3)(b) and 22(3)(c) of the Banking Regulation Act. The regulator concluded that no meaningful public purpose would be served by allowing the bank to continue.

This did not come as a surprise to anyone who had been tracking the bank’s regulatory journey. Scrutiny of Paytm Payments Bank dates back to 2018, when an RBI audit uncovered significant gaps in KYC compliance. Key violations included linking a single PAN to multiple customer accounts and allowing transactions beyond prescribed limits — raising concerns about potential money laundering. The bank was also flagged for failing to maintain adequate separation between its operations and parent company One97 Communications. In March 2022, the RBI directed the bank to stop onboarding new customers. In early 2024, it went further — barring the bank from accepting fresh deposits, credits, or top-ups in customer accounts, wallets, and prepaid instruments. Each restriction narrowed the bank’s room to operate, and by the time the licence was pulled, PPBL had already been functionally hollowed out.

For depositors, the RBI has offered some reassurance: Paytm Payments Bank holds enough liquidity to repay its entire deposit liability upon winding up. The bank will continue limited operations in the interim — primarily to facilitate withdrawals — while the High Court oversees the resolution process.

One97 Communications moved quickly to distance itself, stating it has no financial exposure to PPBL, having written off its investment in the entity as of March 31, 2024. The company confirmed that the Paytm app, UPI, QR, Soundbox, and Payment Gateway would continue without disruption. Vijay Shekhar Sharma had held a 51% stake in the payments bank, with One97 holding the remaining 49%.

What the cancellation ultimately reflects is not a one-off governance failure but a structural mismatch. Instead of growing into a full-service bank, PPBL ran into repeated regulatory headwinds — compliance failures, KYC issues, and technology infrastructure concerns — that progressively stripped it of the ability to grow, and ultimately, to operate. The RBI’s action signals that in India’s tightly regulated financial sector, scale is not a shield. For the fintech ecosystem, that is perhaps the more lasting lesson.

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LightFury Games, the Bengaluru-based AAA gaming studio behind the upcoming cricket title eCricket, has closed an $11 million pre-Series A round — with a cap table that doubles as a cricket all-stars list. The round was led by Blume Ventures, V3 Ventures, Japanese gaming major MIXI, and Times Internet, with cricketers including MS Dhoni, Jasprit Bumrah, Hardik Pandya, Shreyas Iyer, Ravindra Jadeja, Tilak Varma, and Sai Sudharsan joining as strategic investors.

The announcement brings LightFury’s total funding to $19.5 million, less than two years after the studio was founded. The company had previously raised $8.5 million in a seed round in April 2024, led by Blume Ventures, with participation from MIXI and Gemba Capital. The pre-Series A capital will go toward completing development of eCricket and building out its live operations infrastructure — the post-launch content pipeline that sustains engagement and monetisation in free-to-play titles.

By signing a global player roster licence covering over 600 professional cricketers — including international names like Chris Gayle, Ben Stokes, Pat Cummins, and Andre Russell alongside the Indian investor-athletes — LightFury is building both the IP rights and the community credibility that cricket games have historically struggled to secure. The decision to bring in active players as equity stakeholders, rather than paid brand ambassadors, signals a distribution strategy as much as a funding one.

LightFury was founded in 2024 by Karan Shroff, the former CMO and Partner at Unacademy, alongside gaming industry veteran Anurag Banerjee — who built renowned titles including Assassin’s Creed and Batman: Arkham Asylum at Ubisoft and Rocksteady Studios — and Tina Balachandran, formerly a senior VP at Unacademy and an ex-Tencent Games executive. Together, the founding team has worked across more than 40 AAA titles. Shroff’s cricket-specific institutional knowledge runs deep: at Unacademy, he had led the brand’s IPL association and signed Sachin Tendulkar and MS Dhoni as ambassadors — the same Dhoni who is now an investor in his next act.

Also Read: Bengaluru mobile gaming startup Spill Games raises $3.1 million in seed round

eCricket was first publicly unveiled at GDC 2025 in San Francisco, developed in collaboration with Amazon Web Services and powered by AWS’s Amazon GameLift Streams — a cloud-streaming layer that lets players access high-fidelity gameplay through a browser on any device, bypassing the hardware limitations that have kept console-grade gaming out of reach for most Indian users. The game is built on Unreal Engine 5 and will feature physics-driven gameplay, AI commentary, tactical batting and bowling systems, and a broadcast-style presentation. It will follow a free-to-play model with in-app purchases — player cards, cosmetics, stadium upgrades, and season passes — with no real-money gaming element, keeping it fully compliant with India’s Online Gaming Act, 2025.

The timing matters. India’s mobile gaming revenue grew 15% year over year in Q1 2026, significantly outperforming the global rate of 0.4%, and the broader Indian gaming market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 14.52% through 2031, reaching nearly $10 billion. Yet no Indian studio has credibly produced a AAA title at commercial scale. LightFury is making the most deliberate attempt yet — and with this round, it has the runway, the roster, and the regulatory tailwind to find out if the market is as ready as the numbers suggest.

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Chupps Footwear, a Bengaluru-based D2C open footwear brand, has onboarded former Indian cricket captain Ajinkya Rahane as an equity investor and strategic advisor as part of an ongoing pre-Series B funding round. The investment amount was not disclosed; existing investors also participated.

Rahane’s association with the brand pre-dates his investment — he was already a customer before coming aboard as an advisor. He will now work alongside the founding team on product development, with a specific focus on recovery-oriented footwear and enhancements to Chupps’ proprietary ERGO Charge technology. The funds will be deployed toward product innovation, offline retail expansion, and broader brand visibility.

India’s D2C footwear market has seen a wave of athlete and celebrity capital in recent years, mirroring a global pattern where sports personalities move from ambassadorial roles to equity stakes. Brands in the comfort and performance footwear category — a segment that has grown sharply post-pandemic as work-from-home habits mainstreamed athleisure — increasingly rely on credible, sport-adjacent figures to build trust with health-conscious consumers.

Chupps’ decision to bring Rahane in as an advisor, not just a face, signals a maturation in how Indian D2C brands are structuring celebrity involvement.

Bringing in a player of Rahane’s stature — known for grit and a long professional career rather than flashy celebrity — aligns with Chupps’ positioning around performance recovery and everyday comfort rather than aspirational luxury. His role in product development, specifically around recovery footwear, adds functional credibility that a pure marketing deal wouldn’t.

The UAE footprint also matters: the Indian diaspora there represents a high-spend consumer segment that trusts recognizable Indian sport icons. For a brand heading into a pre-Series B, this is as much a narrative play as a capital one.

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Spill Games, a Bengaluru-based mobile gaming studio, has raised $3.1 million in a seed funding round co-led by Centre Court Capital and PeerCapital. The fresh capital brings its total fundraising to approximately $3.85 million, following a $750,000 pre-seed round from All In Capital, M-League, and angel investors closed in December 2024.

The startup, co-founded in July 2024 by Om Misra, Tapan Ranjan, and Harsh Garg, builds casual and puzzle mobile games for a global audience. Proceeds from the seed round will be used to scale its portfolio of live and upcoming titles, deepen its internal technology stack, and selectively grow the team.

Spill Games operates a proprietary in-house engine called Spillway, which it says allows the company to modularise development across analytics, retention, monetisation, and live operations — enabling new titles to ship roughly 4x faster than a traditional studio workflow. The company currently has five live games, with three having reached positive unit economics.

Mobile gaming globally is projected to exceed $107 billion in revenue in 2026, according to market research cited by the company. Within that, casual and hybrid-casual formats have emerged as the most capital-efficient entry points for new studios, given lower development costs and broad demographic appeal. Indian gaming startups have increasingly attracted early-stage institutional capital as investors look to back studios that can punch above their weight through proprietary tooling rather than marketing spend.

Statista projects global mobile games revenue to reach $134.22 billion in 2026, making it the largest segment in the overall gaming industry. Spill Games’ bet on an in-house engine — rather than relying on off-the-shelf platforms — places it closer to a technology company than a traditional game studio, a positioning that typically commands better multiples at later stages.

Most early-stage studios burn cash testing concepts; Spill Games’ Spillway engine is designed to compress that cycle. The plan to test 20-plus prototypes over the next 18 months is aggressive but internally consistent with that model. The more interesting question is whether the studio can maintain capital efficiency as it moves into hybrid-casual and in-app purchase formats, which require deeper content investment than the ad-led model that currently drives its revenue. Competitors like Tripledot Studios and Playrix scaled precisely by owning this transition.

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AITS (Affordable Innovative Techno Services), the parent company behind the Rysen Group of Schools network, has raised $4 million in a pre-Series A funding round. The round was led by Big Capital and Redbrook Fund, with participation from Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar, Livspace co-founder Ramakant Sharma, and Unacademy co-founder Roman Saini.

Founded in 2023 by O.P. Godara, Kapil Arya, Dr. Kapil Jain, and Pritesh Meena, AITS has established 15 campuses across nine cities in Rajasthan, enrolling over 10,000 students. The company combines structured academics, experiential learning, and technology-enabled instruction within an asset-light operational model.

According to the company, the capital will be used to expand Rysen School’s campus network across emerging cities, strengthen its technology-led learning infrastructure, and scale standardised school operating models. The company aims to enrol 100,000 students within three years by adding 100 new campuses across Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets.

India’s private K-12 schooling market is undergoing a structural shift as affordable, tech-integrated chains move into cities that legacy private school networks have historically ignored. Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets — where income levels are rising, but quality school infrastructure remains scarce — have become a target for venture-backed operators who see the segment as both a social and commercial opportunity. The involvement of angels like Roman Saini, Ramakant Sharma, and Sujeet Kumar signals that edtech founders who built large consumer platforms are now backing infrastructure plays, reflecting a maturation in how education capital is being deployed in India.

AITS is one of the more interesting education bets in recent Indian startup history — not because of what it is, but because of what it’s attempting. Running 15 campuses across nine cities within three years of founding, while maintaining an asset-light model, is operationally demanding. The 100-campus target over the next three years implies roughly 28 new campuses per year — a pace that will test whether the standardised operating model can be replicated without quality dilution.

The presence of angel investors like Saini and Kumar also raises the possibility of future ecosystem linkages: Unacademy’s content stack and Udaan’s supply-chain expertise could theoretically complement AITS’ infrastructure play in ways that go beyond capital. That said, the edtech-to-school-network crossover has claimed casualties before, and execution in Tier 3 India remains the hardest variable to predict.

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Mira Murati‘s Thinking Machines Lab has signed a multibillion-dollar cloud infrastructure agreement with Google, even as the 14-month-old AI startup faces a relentless talent drain from Meta. The deal, announced at Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas on April 22, signals that Murati is moving to fortify her startup’s technical foundation regardless of who is walking out the door.

Under the agreement, Thinking Machines Lab will expand its use of Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure, including systems powered by Nvidia’s latest GB300 GPUs, with the deal valued in the single-digit billions. The GB300 chips can double training speeds compared to previous GPU generations, and the deal makes Thinking Machines Lab one of the first startups to access these systems.

The timing matters. The contract makes Thinking Machines Lab the third frontier AI developer lining up for Google’s Blackwell and TPU capacity this month, behind Anthropic and Meta. In a sector where compute access is increasingly a competitive moat, being in that cohort matters — especially for a company still in early-stage model development.

What Tinker needs this infrastructure for

Wednesday’s deal provided some insight into what Thinking Machines is building. Google noted in a press release that it can support the startup’s reinforcement learning workloads, which Tinker’s architecture relies on. Tinker, launched in October 2025, is a tool that automates the creation of custom frontier AI models — the startup’s first commercial product after nearly a year of secrecy following its founding.

The deal is not exclusive, so Thinking Machines may continue to use other cloud providers over time. Earlier this year, the lab had also partnered with Nvidia in a separate deal that included an investment from the chipmaker.

Also Read: Mira Murati, Ex-CTO of OpenAI launches AI startup Thinking Machines Lab

A company building under pressure

The Google deal arrives as Thinking Machines Lab contends with a sustained talent exodus. Of the startup’s original founding group, five have gone to Meta, three have returned to OpenAI, and one has joined Elon Musk’s xAI. The Next Web Meta’s recruitment push followed Mark Zuckerberg‘s reported attempt to acquire the startup outright — an offer Murati declined.

Despite that churn, the company has taken active steps to rebuild. It brought in Soumith Chintala, creator of PyTorch, as CTO, and has expanded to roughly 130 employees within a year of its launch. The Google Cloud deal now adds a critical compute layer to that rebuilding effort.

Thinking Machines Lab was reportedly in talks for a new funding round at a $50 billion valuation by November 2025 — a figure that, if realised, would rank it among the most valuable private AI companies in the world. Whether the infrastructure bet and the fundraising narrative can survive the ongoing attrition at the top is the question that now hangs over the startup.

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India’s Enforcement Directorate has filed a supplementary prosecution complaint before the Special PMLA Court at Rouse Avenue, New Delhi, naming Sachin Dev Duggal — co-founder of collapsed UK tech unicorn Builder.ai — as an accused in the Videocon Industries money-laundering case. The agency alleges Duggal was “the key beneficiary” of a calculated scheme through which funds from the bankrupt electronics conglomerate were siphoned and laundered through a chain of overseas entities — a probe that now stretches from a Swiss holding company to a London startup that no longer exists.

The Videocon case is one of the largest money-laundering investigations in Indian corporate history. The conglomerate’s collapse in 2018 triggered PMLA proceedings that have since ensnared its promoter Venugopal Dhoot and, in a separate but related thread, former ICICI Bank CEO Chanda Kochhar over allegedly quid pro quo loans. Wednesday’s complaint against Duggal — filed as a continuation of the original chargesheet submitted against Dhoot and 12 others in December 2024 — extends that reckoning to a founder operating out of Britain, underscoring the ED’s increasing willingness to pursue cross-border PMLA cases irrespective of where the accused is based.

At the centre of the allegations is Duggal’s earlier cloud-computing venture, Nivio, and a Swiss holding company he chaired, nHoldings SA. The ED says Videocon began advancing interest-free loans to Nivio’s Indian entity as early as 2008, without a formal loan agreement. A loan agreement was then hurriedly signed in May 2011 — and the very next day, an overseas Videocon entity invested SFr 3.79 million into nHoldings SA at what the agency describes as a heavily inflated valuation, despite the company being loss-making. Between 2011 and 2014, a further $3.7 million was allegedly routed to nHoldings SA and directly to Duggal personally through a deliberate five-entity overseas chain.

“A loan agreement was hurriedly signed on 24 May 2011, and the very next day, an overseas Videocon entity invested in Duggal’s Swiss company at a heavily inflated valuation, despite the company being lossmaking.” — Enforcement Directorate, prosecution complaint (April 2026)

The agency also noted that in the financial year ending 2012, Nivio’s Indian arm received funds from nHoldings during “the exact same period when Videocon Group was transferring money into nHoldings” — a timing the ED says points to deliberate layering. Despite multiple PMLA summons issued since January 2022, Duggal is said to have failed to appear before investigators and provided only partial, evasive responses via email. In March 2024, the Financial Times first reported that his status had been upgraded from witness to suspect. A subsequent arrest warrant was cancelled by the Delhi High Court in December 2024 on jurisdictional grounds. In the US, the FBI had separately been examining circumstances around Builder.ai’s collapse, stopping at least one former senior employee at a US airport transit to appear before a grand jury; no charges have been reported from that investigation.

Builder.ai — which Duggal co-founded in London in 2016 and grew to a $1.5 billion valuation on the back of $445 million from Microsoft, the Qatar Investment Authority, and SoftBank — entered insolvency in May 2025 after creditors seized $50 million in borrowed funds. An internal investigation had found evidence of potentially bogus sales, and the company restated revenues to roughly a quarter of prior estimates. Duggal had stepped down as CEO in February 2025, retaining the title of “chief wizard.”

The ED’s complaint still requires the court to accept its merits before Duggal is formally accused. A representative for Duggal said they could not comment before the complaint was heard by a judge, but expressed confidence that “these baseless charges shall be dismissed.”

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Emversity, a Bengaluru-based higher-education embedded training and employability platform, has acquired Lanstitut Technologies, a healthcare mobility startup that trains Indian nurses in German language skills and places them in hospitals across Germany. The deal is valued at approximately $4.25 million, structured as a mix of cash and stock through a share purchase agreement.

Founded in 2022 by four Delhi University alumni—Khubaib Abdul Salam (CEO), Murshid Ibinu Rahman (CBO), Yasin Bin Saleem (CMO), and Abdul Vajid (CHRO)—Lanstitut has bootstrapped to profitability, training ~3,000 nurses in German (A1-B2), handling visas, placements, and more for 200+ employees. Now, it stays independent under Emversity’s wing, tapping global demand where nurses earn 14-18x Indian salaries.

This marks Emversity’s first acquisition. Lanstitut will continue to operate independently under its existing brand, with all four co-founders remaining in their current roles. Founded in 2022, Lanstitut has trained close to 3,000 nurses and employs around 200 people. Beyond language training, it also offers visa processing, credentialing, relocation assistance, and on-ground support in Germany.

Back in January, Emversity raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Premji Invest, with participation from Lightspeed and Z47.

For Emversity — founded by former Unacademy COO Vivek Sinha — the acquisition unlocks an international employment corridor for the talent base it trains through its university partnerships. The platform already operates across healthcare, hospitality, engineering, and data centre sectors. Germany is the first international expansion market, with more geographies expected to follow.

Germany faces a structural healthcare staffing crisis: ageing demographics and stagnant domestic nursing supply have made international recruitment a policy priority rather than an edge case. Indian nurses have emerged as a preferred source pool — English-educated, clinically trained, and willing to relocate — but the bottleneck has consistently been language certification and visa processing complexity.

Startups like Lanstitut have built their entire model around removing that bottleneck, and their success has attracted Indian edtech platforms looking to monetise global labour market mismatches. Emversity’s acquisition is part of a broader pattern of India-origin employability platforms expanding into outbound placements — treating the Indian talent surplus as an exportable asset rather than a domestic-only opportunity.

Also Read: Mumbai’s Shortgun Games Acquires 30% Stake in Creative Studio GiantDot

The Lanstitut deal is strategically coherent in a way that many edtech acquisitions are not. Emversity is not buying a competitor or a content library — it is buying a distribution pipe into a country that actively needs what it produces. Germany’s healthcare worker shortage is not a cyclical problem; structural demographic decline makes it a decade-long demand signal. By keeping Lanstitut independent with its founders intact, Emversity avoids the integration risk that has sunk similar deals and preserves the operational credibility that Lanstitut’s hospital partners have come to rely on. The bigger question is whether the Germany corridor is repeatable: Japan, Canada, and the Gulf have similar structural nursing shortages, and if Emversity can templatise the Lanstitut playbook, this acquisition will look less like a one-off and more like a replicable international expansion model.

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Zerodha, India’s largest stock broking firm, has wound down Zero1, its creator partnership program that supported independent content creators working on finance, health, and climate topics. The initiative, which ran for over a year and reached significant scale, has been shut down amid regulatory concerns, the company confirmed.

“There was a lot of regulatory uncertainty around the entire initiative and we took a call to wind this down.” — said Zerodha, in an official statement

Zero1 was conceptualised as a departure from the short-form fin-fluencer ecosystem that dominates financial content in India. It backed long-form, storytelling-driven creators across multiple sectors — an unusual bet for a broking firm navigating SEBI’s increasingly tight framework around financial influencer regulation.

Going forward, Zerodha says it will consolidate all content under its own direct ownership. The company already operates a wide education and content footprint, including Varsity (available in English and Hindi), Rainmatter, Markets by Zerodha, and several Zero1-branded channels. It also funds LearnApp, a startup it backed in 2018, which will continue building Zero1-branded and company-owned financial literacy properties. In 2023, Zerodha partnered with LearnApp to launch Zero1.

SEBI’s evolving stance on financial influencers has created significant uncertainty for platforms and companies that operate at the intersection of content and financial advice. The regulator has repeatedly flagged the risks of unregistered investment advisors using creator frameworks to reach retail audiences — and Zerodha, as a regulated entity, would be acutely sensitive to any initiative that could attract scrutiny.

Zero1’s model, while explicitly focused on storytelling rather than stock tips, likely created operational grey areas around creator independence, content approval, and liability. The shutdown is less about Zero1’s performance — Zerodha says it achieved significant reach — and more about the risk calculus of maintaining an arm’s-length creative network while operating a licensed financial services business.

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