AI led digital food labelling SaaS for the world. The goal is to transform food labels required by regulators from a manual to automated process - it streamlines label generation and artwork validation, and most importantly ensures compliance with regulation. This reduces the time taken to ensure compliance from hours to under 30 minutes. $500K seed round from undisclosed investors. Founded in June 2018. Founders: Partho was the head of marketing for Mahindra's tractor and agri business for 15 years, followed by the same role for 7 years at International Tractors (Sonalika/Solis brands); Rashida was a nutritionist in the same business unit at Mahindra, developing a new product range for their healthy food cafe brand, Saboro.

Insurance-tech platform that connects businesses and insurance providers, in order for businesses to secure surety bonds backed by insurers as an alternative to traditional bank guarantees. 75 surety bonds have been issued through the platform so far. ₹23.5CR seed round. Other investors in the round: Supermorpheous. Founded in Aug 2024. Founders: Aditya (CEO) was a co-founder at NH1Design (brand consultancy) for 12 years, Rajeev (COO) was Co-Founder & COO at Numberz (receivables platform backed by Peak XV (Sequoia at that time) and acquired by Chargebee), Mukund (CRO) was an SVP at Aon and VP at Tata AIG.

Chain of ayurvedic clinics starting out with its first clinic in HSR, Bangalore. The goal is to provide structured, doctor-led ayurvedic care to urban consumers. $800K seed round. Founded in Mar 2024. Founders: Puroo (IIT Kharagpur, IIM Ahmedabad), was at Flipkart Ventures before which he was an investment banking analyst at JP Morgan; Rahul (also IIT Kharagpur) was with Deutche Bank in London for 8 years, most recently as Vice President. He left DB at the end of 2024 to join Puroo as a co-founder. Comps: Kerala Ayurveda.

Aerospace company developing unmanned HALE (high altitude, long endurance) aircraft that deliver real-time geospatial intelligence, replacing expensive satellites or existing aerial defense systems. Its aircraft will fly at 45,000 feet for up to 24 hours with 250kg of payloads (imaging equipment). Imagery can be delivered at $100 per hour for 500 square km in coverage, compared to $500-$10,000 in cost per hour charged by satellite providers. Its current aircraft fly at above 10,000 feet. $2.6M pre-seed round. Other investors in the round: Balaji Srinivasan, Srinivas Narayan, angels from Bounce Infinity, Boom Supersonic, Ather. Founded in Jan 2024. Founder Shreepoorna graduated from IIT Madras that year. During college he founded Flex Finance, a DeFi neobank.

Lab-grown diamond jewellery brand, with four stores in Bangalore that are profitable and are collectively at a run rate of ₹2CR per month, within 11 months of launch. ₹5.5CR pre-seed round. Angels in the round: Vijay Arishetty, Abhishek Kumar, Shreyans Daga, Rohit Jindal (the four founders of MyGate), Amal Mishra (UrbanVault), Alkendra Pratap Singh (Crescendo Industries). Founded in Oct 2024. Founders Himani (IIT Guwahati) and Gaurav (IIT Kanpur) worked together as product leads at xto10x (startup scaling tools + education). Himani then led product for the Resident App for MyGate. Both also had brief overlapping stints as PMs at Ola.

Broking platform. No information on current scale. It has a suite of trading and investing tools, including its options analytics platform Opstra, momentum and technical analysis tools and mutual fund research. First round of an undisclosed amount. Angels in the round: Hemant Luthra, Ajay Srivastava, D. Prasad, Nitin Agarwal, Madhusudan N. Sarda. Founded in 2015. Founders: CEO Prashant spent a decade at IIFL before founding Definedge; no background information available on co-founder Rajesh.

Hydrogen production company which uses microwave plasma to convert methane into hydrogen, an approach which is in its early days. This process also produces solid carbon nanopowder, which can be used towards making composites and advanced material applications. The company started out in providing microwaves for industrial use cases, with 400 installations since they started in 2007. It is part of Maxcel, an accelerator program created by Capital A and SanchiConnect. ₹16.5CR seed round. Founded in August 2007 by Prakash, an engineer by background who stepped down from CEO to a CSO role in 2023, handing over the CEO role to incoming co-founder Kirankumar. Kirankumar was Group Manager at Bosch (9 years) and team lead at Continental.

Robotic track inspection systems for railways, using automation and AI to scan tracks and undertake predictive maintenance assessments for safety critical operations. ₹5.5CR invested by Pontaq between this venture and Edgehax, which has the same founders but operates as a separate company. This is its second round of investment in both companies, the split and structure is undisclosed. Founders: CEO Prabhu is a software engineer from EMC and Siemens; COO Savitri is a software engineer who worked as a systems analyst in the Karnataka Government. They built a delivery platform for bottled water together.

Edge AI computing platform for consumer IOT applications and robotics. It provides industrial grade boards for OEMs and end users to build gateways, robots, smart homes and other IoT products. ₹5.5CR invested by Pontaq between this venture and Dweepi, which is run by the same founders but runs independently. This is its second round of investment in both. Founded in Jan 2025. Founders: CEO Prabhu is a software engineer from EMC and Siemens; COO Savitri is a software engineer who worked as a systems analyst in the Karnataka Government. They built a delivery platform for bottled water together.

AI-native B2B procurement platform. Procurement processes have remained largely manual - this platform has onboarded more than 100K vendors, with automated workflows for supplier discovery, RFP creation and multi-round negotiations. This helps customers procure faster as well as save up to 15%. It has 100 enterprise clients globally, including Bacardi India and Benetton. This is a Dubai based company with Russian founders. Why is it being covered here? India seems to be their primary focus. $8M seed round. Founded in 2022. Founders: Anton built Eapteka, Russia's largest online medicine delivery platform, with 20M monthly visitors, and 1 hour delivery in 100 cities; Andry built Bidzaar, a B2B procurement platform in Russia which got to $7B in GMV and $11M in ARR. Anton was on the board of this business.