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Over the past nine days, the rapid advance of private companies into India’s space programme has been under sharp scrutiny. Nine ISRO employee associations sought clarification from the national space agency’s chairman V Narayanan on the government’s plans to transfer manufacturing and operational functions to private entities – an exercise that has been underway for six years. The concerns were triggered by earlier remarks from Pawan Goenka, chairman of IN-SPACe, which promotes and regulates private participation in the space sector, that ISRO would eventually phase out routine rocket and satellite manufacturing.

Even as the government moved swiftly to allay concerns, private capital pushed deeper into the sector. Bangalore-based Pixxel closed a $100 million Series C round led by Singapore’s Temasek Holdings and British specialist spacetech investor Seraphim Space. This was the single largest funding round raised by an Indian spacetech company, taking the total capital deployed this year alone to over $300 million. The universe of private players now spans every layer of the space value chain from satellites and launch vehicles to ground infrastructure and surveillance.

Pixxel, born in a BITS Pilani dorm room, exemplifies how India’s space programme has shifted in less than a decade. In August last year, IN-SPACe selected a Pixxel-led consortium, comprising Dhruva Space, PierSight and SatSure, to design, build and operate India’s first privately-led national Earth observation constellation of 12 satellites at an investment outlay of Rs 1,200 crore. The project will reduce India’s dependence on foreign satellite imagery and aims to enable applications such as precision agriculture, water quality monitoring, land-use mapping and disaster assessment.

Pixxel’s current operations comprise six Firefly satellites, launched in two batches, that capture hundreds of layers of the electromagnetic spectrum simultaneously, turning each image into a chemical map of the surface below. The company calls it a “health monitor for the planet.” It also has a contract with NASA under its Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition programme and was awarded a contract by the US National Reconnaissance Office in May this year for hyper spectral remote sensing capabilities.

The Series C round, which also saw participation from 360 One Asset, IMM Investments, Radical Ventures and GrowX Ventures, will be deployed towards funding a next-generation Honeybee constellation, further development of Aurora, its Earth intelligence software platform, and expanded satellite manufacturing capacity in India and the US.

Including Pixxel, the week closed with 21-odd deals that saw private capital move into airports, workplace safety, hospitals, food, consumer brands, enterprise software and financial services. Excluding Adani Airport Holdings’ $1 billion haul, the remaining 20 companies raised a total of $431 million.

Also notable were three liquidity events. Let’s begin there.

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→ Secondaries and Acquisitions

First up, women’s hygiene products maker Nua raised a $50 million Series C led by Peak XV Partners and Filter Capital. Existing investors Mirabilis Investment Trust and Footpath Ventures participated in the round which included primary and secondary capital. Early investors Kae Capital and Lightbox booked partial exits.

Kae said it realised an 18x MOIC (multiple on invested capital) on its Fund II stake from the partial exit in the Series C round. The Sasha Mirchandani-founded venture capital firm wrote Nua’s first institutional cheque, investing Rs 5 crore (about $0.8 million) in early 2018 in its seed round. The following year it joined the company’s $4 million Series A. In June 2021 it participated in the company’s $7 million pre-Series B round.

Mumbai-based Nua claims to be profitable on an annualised revenue run rate at Rs 500 crore. The latest round follows a Rs 35 crore ($4 million) pre-Series C led by Mirabilis in early 2025.

Kotak Alternate Asset Managers (Kotak Alts) took the M&A route, selling its stake in HKR Roadways to I-Squared Capital-backed Cube Highways, realising Rs 1,650 crore (about $173 million) and a 2x return on its Rs 800 crore ( approximately $108 million) investment, it said in a statement.

The PE firm, through its Special Situations Fund, had acquired a majority stake in HKR in May 2021. The asset, a 206 kilometer four-lane toll road in Andhra Pradesh operating under a BOT concession till 2021, had become non-performing after the company defaulted on debt. The turnaround involved completing capital expenditure, improving toll efficiency and restoring financial health, Kotak Alts partner Pratik Parekh said in a statement.

Singapore-based Cube separately acquired promoter Gayatri Highway’s 49% stake, completing the transaction earlier this month, according to a regulatory disclosure.

And in a potentially profitable outcome for Peak XV Partners, cross border payments company Tazapay is being acquired by Circle Internet Group, the NYSE-listed issuer of the USDC stablecoin, for $400 million in stock.

Peak XV Partners, which led Tazapay’s Series A (in 2023) and co-led its $36 million Series B, is among the early backers.

Singapore-based Tazapay provides cross border payments infrastructure across more than 100 markets. The company began integrating USDC settlements in 2025. Stablecoins now account for about 60% of its $25 billion annualised payment volume. For Circle, the acquisition plugs in the last mile delivery network – Tazapay’s banking relationships with over 60 institutions and on-ground infrastructure across more than 100 markets including Canada, Australia and the United States.

→ Premji Invest joins Adani Airport investor consortium

The big deal of the week was Adani Airport Holdings (AAHL), the airports business of Adani Enterprises, raising Rs 9,825 crore ($1 billion) from Alpha Wave Global, Premji Invest, Temasek and funds managed by BlackRock. The deal values the company at about $18 billion, pre-money, the company said in a regulatory disclosure.

• The investors will subscribe to new shares in three stages and are expected to own a combined 5.54% stake on completion. The final tranche is expected to be completed by July 2027, subject to customary conditions and regulatory approvals.

• The capital will be used to modernise and expand airports, develop about 22 million square feet of mixed-use projects around them in the first phase of the Adani Airport City programme, and expand ground handling and other non-aeronautical operations.

• AAHL operates eight airports in India and handles more than 23% of the country’s passenger traffic, the company said.

→ Hospitals

Healthcare, especially regional hospital chains, has been getting a lot of attention from private equity lately. Marengo Asia Hospitals raised $40 million from LeapFrog Investments. The multi-specialty hospitals platform, backed by Samara Capital and the family offices of the Godrej and Havells groups, operates five hospitals across Gujarat and Delhi NCR with approximately 2,000 beds.

The deal expands LeapFrog’s healthcare investing thesis for Asia and Africa and comes on the heels of “recent investments in GCMC, a leading hospital chain in the Philippines, and Pharmacity, Vietnam’s second largest pharmacy retailer,” partner and global healthcare lead Biju Mohandas said in a statement.

Marengo has built its platform through a build-and-buy strategy, acquiring established regional hospitals and strengthening their clinical capabilities across cardiology, oncology and neurology. It also has a strategic partnership in Saudi Arabia. The company plans to double its bed capacity to 4,000 over the next two years, Samara Capital managing director and Marengo chairman Abhishek Kabra said.

→ Busy week for enterprise tech

San Francisco-based Lightsage closed a $4 million seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners. Executives and operators from the software and AI industries including former Salesforce CTO Steven Tamm, Postman CEO Abhinav Asthana, Apollo CEO Matt Curl and DocuSign president Robert Chatwani participated. It’s developing software that helps businesses measure and improve how AI agents find, assess and use their products.

QNu Labs, a Bangalore-based quantum-safe cybersecurity company that was incubated at IIT Madras, raised Rs 200 crore ($21 million) in a Series A1 round led by the National Quantum Mission and Speciale Invest. Sony Innovation Fund, Gaja Capital and Artha Ventures joined the round. QNu Labs builds quantum-safe cryptography products that are deployed across government, critical infrastructure and banking and financial services. The capital will go towards research and development, global go-to-market expansion and contribution to India’s Quantum Secure and Sensing Networks project under the National Quantum Mission, which has set a 2029 deadline for quantum-safe migration across sectors.

TrueFan AI, a video generation platform, raised an undisclosed sum from Bajaj Finance, the NBFC subsidiary of Bajaj Finserv, in lieu of a 5% stake. Gurugram-based TrueFan AI builds enterprise-grade personalised video generation tools that support more than 175 languages. It claims over 100 enterprise customers and over 8 lakh paid users. The investment follows an existing commercial relationship with Bajaj Finance which has deployed TrueFan’s platform for customer engagement and dealer communication. In June this year, TrueFan closed a $10 million Series A led by Baring Private Equity Partners India and Z3 Partners.

Digital Paani, which sits at the intersection of enterprise tech and climate-tech, raised $2.3 million in a round led by Navam Capital. Co-investors in the round included Enzia Ventures, Chakra Growth Capital, 3one4 Capital and Momentum Capital. The Gurugram-based water infrastructure software company combines real-time asset monitoring with AI-powered diagnostics to help utilities, municipalities and industrial users improve water recycling and automate maintenance decisions.

Fundly, which serves India’s pharmaceutical supply chain, raised $4 million in a pre-Series A round led by returning investor Accel (India) and Multiply Ventures. Venture debt firm Alteria Capital joined the round. The Mumbai-based company provides pharmacies and distributors with an integrated platform for ordering medicines, making supplier payments and accessing working capital credit.

Navana closed a Rs 40 crore ($4.2 million) Series A round led by upGrad co-founder Ronnie Screwvala. Antler India, Sharad Sanghi and Paula Mariwala were among investors who joined the round. The Bangalore-based startup builds voice AI infrastructure for the BFSI sector, with an emphasis on on-premise deployment for data privacy and compliance. Its Bodhi speech model covers 12 Indian languages and 45 dialects. Clients include Bajaj Finserv, Protean eGov Technologies and Ujjivan Small Finance Bank.

→ Industrial workforces

Two companies that address workforce safety and wellbeing at industrial sites raised big-ticket cheques.

• HerSpace Manufacturing, a Bangalore-based startup that designs, develops and manages accommodation for industrial workers, raised $40 million from Gray Matters Capital. The startup deploys the modular units at industrial sites and provides services such as security, housekeeping, food and welfare.

• Karam Safety raised Rs 600 crore ($63 million) from Motilal Oswal Alternates. The Noida-based workplace safety equipment company makes equipment such as helmets, footwear, respiratory protection and fall protection gear. Motilal Oswal Alternates invested from the India Business Excellence Fund V, for which it raised Rs 8,500 crore ($939 million) in February.

→ Other deals

Quick food delivery startup Swish raised $24 million in a new funding round led by Bertelsmann India Investments. Accel, Bain Capital Ventures and Hara Global were returning investors in the round, which came within six months of a $38 million Series B. The Bangalore-based startup makes fresh food available to consumers within 10 minutes. It claims to be serving over a million orders a month and the fresh tranche of capital will be used to expand its kitchen network and supply chain infrastructure.

Carrum Mobility raised $10 million in a Series B round from Uber. The Gurugram-based B2B fleet management company had raised a Series A round from Uber in January.

Quick service restaurant company Popo Global, known for gourmet restaurant brands The Pizza Bakery, Paris Panini and Smash Guys, raised Rs 532 crore ($55.6 million) from Artal Asia. Singapore-based Artal Asia, which operates in partnership with New York-based Invus Group, is an investment vehicle of Luxembourg-based Artal Group. The firm’s other investments in India’s food and consumer sector include Jumbotail, a B2B food and grocery platform, and Capital Foods (the company behind Ching’s Secret and Smith & Jones which was acquired by Tata Consumer Products).

Gaming hardware startup ARC raised Rs 10.5 crore ($1.09 million) in a pre-seed round co-led by gaming-focused early stage investor Chimera VC and MIXI Global Investments, the venture arm of Japanese gaming and social entertainment group MIXI. Meta (APAC) managing director Dhruv Vohra joined the round. The Bangalore-based company is building a handheld gaming device aimed at players underserved by existing hardware.

Iztri, an on-demand steam ironing service, raised $1.1 million in a seed round led by All in Capital and Suashish Group. A roster of angel investors including WhatsApp CEO Kunal Shah, Shaadi founder Anupam Mittal, YouTuber Tanmay Bhat, and the JK Tyre family office, joined the round. The Bangalore-based startup offers same-day delivery and claims to serve 25,000 customers across the city.

Lickicious raised Rs 19 crore ($2 million) in a mix of debt and equity. Prath Ventures led the round and ISV Capital participated. The Mumbai-based company sells food and nutrition products for dogs and cats.

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Former PAG executive Gauravjit Singh has joined India’s sovereign-anchored alternative asset manager Nation Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF) to lead capital formation across investment strategies. Singh was head of investor relations and fundraising for PAG’s private equity division in Singapore. His prior stints include True North and KKR. Mumbai-based NIIF is currently raising its Infrastructure Fund II and recently announced the fund’s first close at Rs 19,000 crore ($2 billion), more than 60% of its targeted Rs 30,000 crore ($3.2 billion) corpus.

Healthcare-focused W Health Ventures closed Fund II at Rs 700 crore ($74 million), exceeding its initial target of Rs 630 crore, it said in a statement. The new fund will expand what the firm dubs its “company creation model” which involves identifying structural gaps in the healthcare delivery domain, pressure-testing the opportunity for 12-18 months and recruiting a founding team to build and scale the venture. It aims to build 8-10 such companies, both in India and in the US-India corridor, over the next four years. Fund II has already backed two companies – patient-centred oncology care startup Everhope Oncology, founded with Narayana Health, and mental health focused startup Everbright Health.

Have a nice weekend.

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Welcome to Edition #46.

New to the The Runway? Subscribe for a comprehensive view of the deals, strategies and people shaping private equity and venture capital in India every week. Find us on LinkedIn and WhatsApp if you want to keep track of updates on future editions.

Three private equity-backed companies are among the six IPOs set to open for subscription on a single day next week, as India’s public market pipeline accelerates into what’s shaping up to be one of the busiest listing months this year. Rentomojo, Karamtara Engineering and Manipal Payment and Identity Solutions all have private capital on their cap tables.

The one to watch is Karamtara Engineering, a picks-and-shovels play on India’s renewable energy and power transmission build-out. The Mumbai-based company makes steel structures and components for solar power projects and electricity transmission networks. It aims to raise Rs 675 crore in a fresh issue at a price band of Rs 241-Rs 254 a share, alongside a Rs 200 crore offer-for-sale. Private investors in the company aren’t selling. The IPO at Rs 875 crore is considerably smaller than originally planned. The company had filed its DRHP in January 2025 for a Rs 1,750 crore offering.

In terms of PE-VC backing, Karamtara raised nearly $8 million from Amara Partners in July this year in a pre-IPO round. Earlier investors include Singularity AMC, the Famy Care Group’s Taparia family-backed Ananta Capital, Trust Group founder Utpal Sheth and CaratLane founder Mithun Sacheti.

Manipal Payment and Identity Solutions is seeking to raise Rs 805 crore, of which Rs 320 crore is a fresh issue. The price band has been fixed at Rs 322-Rs 339 a share. Promoter Manipal Technologies is selling 1.43 crore shares in the offer-for-sale. Existing financial investors, including Amicus Capital Partners, are not selling. The Manipal, Karnataka-based company makes payment and identity cards and related security products for the banking and financial services sector. This too is a sized down offering from what was originally planned.

Rentomojo is set to raise Rs 1,255.6 crore at a price band of Rs 384-Rs 404 a share. The offering comprises a fresh issue of Rs 150 crore and offer-for-sale of Rs 2.74 crore shares worth Rs 1,105.6 crore at the upper end of the price band.

The listing is primarily an exit for existing shareholders who have been on the cap table for years. Accel, Edelweiss Discovery Fund, Chiratae Ventures, Madison India Capital are among the selling shareholders.

The Bangalore-based company operates a technology-enabled rental and subscription platform for furniture and appliances.

Overall, a total of 11 listings are planned next week and nearly $4 billion is expected to be raised via public market offerings this month, Reuters reported, including Hero Motors and the National Stock Exchange.

JM Financial Asset Management moved quickly to capitalise on the pipeline, raising commitments worth Rs 700 crore (about $74 million) in the first close of its maiden pre-IPO fund, against a target corpus of Rs 1,500 crore and a further Rs 1,000 crore greenshoe option. Announced in February this year as JM Financial India Pre-IPO Fund I, the fund will back companies that are in line to list within 18 months and will be sector agnostic, the firm said in a statement.

PE-VC investors, meanwhile, deployed approximately $183 million across 14 deals in a relatively quiet week for funding activity. Wearables maker Ultrahuman’s $70 million Series C accounted for nearly two-fifths of the total capital deployed. Notably, the week’s largest two rounds – Ultrahuman and battery swapping company Yuma Energy – were both led by returning investors. And in consumer, Sugar Cosmetics closed a bridge round at a valuation less than a quarter of its 2022 peak.

On to the deals from the week.

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→ Connected devices

Two hardware companies raised capital this week – one making a comeback in its largest market, the other bringing sensor-driven baby products to new parents.

• Ultrahuman raised $70 million in a Series C led by Qualcomm Ventures, with diagnostics company Labcorp joining as new investors alongside returning backers Alpha Wave, Blume Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. Venture lender Alteria Capital participated. The Bangalore-based company makes smart rings and offers a continuous glucose monitor and blood diagnostic service. The round is its first since a US court imposed an import ban last October after Finnish rival Oura won a patent infringement ruling. Ultrahuman re-entered the US market in May this year with a redesigned product. Provisional financials cited by the Times of India based on regulatory filings show the company posted a net loss of Rs 176 crore in FY2026, reversing a Rs 73 crore profit the prior year.

• Cradlewise raised $12 million in a Series A co-led by 3one4 Capital and Prudent Investment Management. The company, based in San Francisco with manufacturing in Pune, makes a smart bassinet that converts to a crib and uses sensors to detect early signs of stirring and respond with motion before the baby is fully awake.

→ Spacetech and deep tech

Six companies across satellites, aerospace navigation, autonomous flight systems, EV charging, industrial efficiency and semiconductor metrology scooped up investor cheques. Early stage dominated with five rounds at seed or pre-Series A.

Kepler Aerospace raised $8 million in seed funding led by Blue Ashva Capital, with Finvolve and India Accelerator participating. The Bangalore-based company is developing a six-satellite autonomous constellation for surveillance, intelligence and reconnaissance, as a precursor to a 64-satellite cluster. Blue Ashva is also a backer of Dhruva Space.

Aeron Systems raised Rs 45 crore ($4.7 million) in a pre-Series B round co-led by Riverwalk Holdings, a venture capital fund anchored by the Thakral Group, and MGF-Kavachh. The Pune-based company develops navigation, avionics, weather-sensing and monitoring technologies.

Alteon raised $2.5 million in a pre-seed round from angel investor Lachy Groom and Together Fund. The Bangalore-based company is developing autonomous fixed-wing aircraft that use dynamic soaring to extract energy from wind gradients, drawing on the flight mechanics of albatrosses.

Zenergize Technologies raised $4 million in a pre-Series A from returning backer Giraffe Studios. The Gurugram-based company develops AC and DC chargers for electric vehicles and solar inverters for homes and small businesses.

Minimac Systems raised Rs 30 crore ($3.2 million) in a pre-Series A from Rainmatter. The Pune-based company makes equipment that analyses oil conditions, removes impurities and returns treated lubricant to machinery.

Makr Microsystems raised $1.07 million in seed funding led by Bluehill VC, with Artha Venture Fund participating. The Bangalore-based startup develops 3D metrology solutions for semiconductor manufacturing.

→ Sneakers and namkeens

Three consumer deals this week. A homegrown sneaker brand, a beauty brand recapitalising at a fraction of its peak valuation, and decades-old regional snack brand.

• Comet raised Rs 100 crore ($10.5 million) in a Series B led by Verlinvest, and returning investors Elevation Capital and Nexus Venture Partners. The Bangalore-based sneaker brand had raised a $5 million Series A led by Elevation in 2024. The deal marks Belgian family investment firm Verlinvest’s second consumer transaction in ten days, following a $20 million secondary in dairy products maker Epigamia.

• Sugar Cosmetics raised Rs 144.5 crore ($15.3 million) from existing investor A91 Partners. Regulatory filings cited by Entrackr put the post-money valuation at approximately Rs 755 crore – a steep markdown from its Rs 3,000 crore peak in 2022, when it raised a Series D led by L Catterton. A91 will hold about 20% in the Mumbai-based beauty products company after the transaction.

• Jagdish Farshan, a Vadodara-based maker of namkeens (salted snacks) and sweet founded in 1938, raised Rs 43.5 crore ($4.6 million) from Sharrp Ventures, the family office of Marico founder Harsh Mariwala. The company is targeting distribution expansion beyond Gujarat. The investment follows Bharat Value Fund’s Rs 300 crore investment in Karnataka-based regional brand Dharwad Big Mishra Pedha in August.

→ Electric mobility

Yuma Energy raised $35 million in a Series A round from returning backer Magna International. The battery swapping company, a joint venture between Canadian automotive components maker Magna and Bangalore-based electric two-wheeler company Yulu, was set up in 2022 with an initial investment of $77 million. The company says it has delivered over 60 million battery swaps across more than 2,500 stations. The capital will go towards network expansion with Yuma targeting EBITDA-positive operations by FY2027.

→ Other funding deals

Business NexGen Finance, a Mumbai-based NBFC focused on secured credit for SMEs, closed a Rs 215 crore ($22.7 million) round led by Beams Fintech Fund. Baring Private Equity Partners India, Saison Capital and Unleash Capital Partners participated. DocPharma, a Bangalore-based healthcare supply chain startup, raised $2 million in a pre-Series A led by Equentis. Yoga Clean Air closed a $2.1 million Series A led by Info Edge Ventures.

→ M&A

Two of the most notable deals of the week didn’t have a direct PE context but marked important developments in areas of interest for private capital.

ITC Infotech announced the acquisition of Happiest Minds Technologies through a two-part transaction.

• In the first leg, founder Ashok Soota, who holds a 22.1% stake, agreed to sell in entirety to ITC Infotech for Rs 1,329.72 crore, structured across two tranches.

• Simultaneously, the Happiest Minds board approved a scheme of amalgamation under which the Bangalore-based company will be absorbed into ITC Infotech and cease to exist as a listed entity.

• Public shareholders will receive 25 ITC Infotech shares for every 81 Happiest Minds shares held. ITC Infotech, currently unlisted, will list on BSE and NSE once the scheme becomes effective. For institutional shareholders in Happiest Minds, there is no cash exit. Liquidity depends on when the ITC Infotech listing happens.

GRT Jewellers announced a share purchase agreement to acquire 74.12% of Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri (TBZ) from the Zaveri family promoter group for up to Rs 1,033.71 crore at Rs 209 a share. A mandatory open offer for the remaining public shareholding follows at Rs 249.61 a share. TBZ is one of Mumbai’s oldest gold jewellery houses and the deal transfers a business built over five generations and 162 years. For Chennai-based GRT, also a family-owned chain with 68 stores, the deal buys a pan-India retail footprint that would have taken years to build organically. TBZ’s 37 stores gives it a presence outside South India.

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NIIF Infrastructure Fund II, the second fund from India’s sovereign-anchored alternative assets manager National Investment and Infrastructure Fund, raised commitments worth Rs 19,000 crore ($2 billion) for its first close, more than 60% of its targeted Rs 30,000 crore ($3.2 billion) corpus. Overseas investors in the fund so far include the AustralianSuper, CPP Investments, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Temasek. Indian institutions including ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, and Kotak Life Insurance are also committed to the fund alongside the Government of India. It also aims to mobilise up to Rs 9,000 crore ($950 million) in co-investment capital for bets in energy, transports, urban infrastructure and electric mobility.

Until next week.

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Welcome to Edition #45.

New to the The Runway? Subscribe for a comprehensive view of the deals, strategies and people shaping private equity and venture capital in India every week. Find us on LinkedIn and WhatsApp if you want to keep track of updates on future editions.

Badminton legend Pullela Gopichand was among investors who backed a physical AI startup, one of two intriguing startups that raised capital this week. The other was a spacetech startup that’s building in-space servicing architecture for satellites. Overall, it was an outlier week for India’s PE-VC market with $635 million deployed across 24 deals, including two secondary-only transactions – Hero Motocorp’s stake increase in Ather Energy and a shareholder reshuffle in Epigamia.

Consumer was the busiest sector. Deals spanned coffee, skincare, pet care, astrology and kitchen appliances. The energy transition thesis widened to include companies addressing emissions embedded in construction materials and building materials.

Kedaara Capital’s investment for a controlling stake in a family-owned orthopaedic products company accounted for over a third of the total capital deployed during the week.

Apart from that deal, early stage investments dominated in volume terms with 13 deals at the seed through Series A stages.

→ Consumer

Nine consumer businesses closed deals worth over $116 million (including secondary transactions) with coffee chain Third Wave Coffee cornering nearly half of the capital deployed. The remaining deals, spread across pet care and astrology to kitchen appliances and skincare, were chiefly at the seed and Series A stages.

• Third Wave Coffee raised a Rs 408 crore ($42.6 million) Series D led by existing investor WestBridge Capital, with Creaegis also returning to the cap table. The round included a secondary transaction. The Bangalore-based coffee chain operates more than 200 outlets and last raised capital in 2023 when Creaegis led a $35 million Series C.

• The beauty and personal care category scored three deals. Asaya raised a $9.1 million Series A from RPSG Capital, OTP Ventures, Huddle Ventures, Hyperscale Ventures and 72 Ventures. The Bangalore-based skincare company develops products for Indian skin tones. Be Clinical, another skincare brand, raised a $2.1 million seed round led by Sauce VC, with V3 Ventures and Titan Capital participating. Kolors Healthcare, which provides weight loss, skin care and hair loss solutions at its offline clinics, raised Rs 215 crore ($22.5 million) from Piramal Alternatives.

• Kitchen appliances brand Curaa raised $4.1 million in a Series A led by 3one4 Capital, with Kae Capital, Lumikai Fund and Better Capital returning.

• Pet care and boarding company Scooby’s Club closed a $0.25 million pre-seed round with TDV Partners, the latest to raise capital in a category that’s started to draw investors again.

• Online platforms offering astrology and spiritual services raised substantial rounds. InstaAstro (astrology) raised $12 million in a Series A led by Singularity AMC and Artha Venture Fund. Utsav, which facilitates spiritual and religious services, raised a Rs 36 crore ($3.8 million) Series A led by Atomic Capital, with Indian Quotient and Equanimity Investments participating.

• Epigamia was a secondary deal. Early backers exited the company through a transaction valued at $20 million. Existing investor Verlinvest, Sauce VC and late founder Rohan Mirchandani’s family acquired stakes from DSG Consumer Partners and Deepika Padukone’s family office KA Enterprises, among others. Sauce VC founder Manu Chandra was an early angel investor in the dairy products company when it was known as Hokey Pokey.

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→ Spacetech and physical AI

The most interesting companies that raised capital this week were InspeCity and Water Robotics.

InspeCity, incubated at IIT Bombay, is building spacecraft and robotic systems that can operate around satellites already in orbit, starting with inspections and lifespan extensions. The startup raised $10.5 million in a pre-Series A round led by existing backers Speciale Invest and Ashish Kacholia, the prolific public and private markets investor.

Antler India and Shastra VC were returning investors in the round, while Antler Elevate, Antler’s growth investments platform, came in as a new investor. The round followed a $5.6 million seed led by Kacholia last May.

InspeCity’s longer term ambition is to enable more complex in-space servicing, including docking, refuelling and de-orbiting. It has completed functional and environmental testing of its propulsion system and is planning four in-orbit missions over the next 12-18 months.

Water Robotics raised $2.5 million in seed funding led by Endiya Partners, with participation from Pullela Gopichand, Darwinbox founder Rohit Chennamaneni, Swiggy co-founder Nandan Reddy and other angel investors.

The physical AI company, headquartered in Delaware with its primary R&D operations in Hyderabad, is applying robotics and machine learning to furniture with the aim of making physical surfaces responsive to the humans who use them.

It is starting with furniture – FLOW, an adaptive chair focused on posture and movement, and CAMA (in pic above), an adaptive bed designed around sleep and recovery. The technology behind both products is a foundational model called VORTEX. The focus on consumer products gives the company access to data on how people interact with its systems and improve the underlying intelligence.

→ Peak XV, Nexus push deeper into the US AI stack

Indian venture capital firms continued to deploy into US-based companies. Peak XV Partners followed on in healthcare AI company Arintra and Nexus Venture Partners joined a round in AI research lab Deep Cogito.

• Arintra raised $25 million in a Series B led by Define Ventures, with existing investor Peak XV Partners returning alongside YNHH Center for Health Care Innovation, Endeavour Health Ventures, Y Combinator, Counterpart Ventures, Ten13 and Spider Capital. The San Francisco-based company uses AI to automate medical coding and other parts of the revenue cycle for American health systems. It says its platform processes more than $5 billion worth of claims annually. The Series B takes the total funding raised to $51 million.

• Deep Cogito, also based in San Francisco, is an AI research lab founded by former Google AI search executives. The company raised $43 million in a Series A led by TQ Ventures. Nexus Venture Partners participated alongside Benchmark, Atreides Management, South Park Commons and Zscaler. It’s developing post-training technology that aims to make AI models better at reasoning.

→ A control deal in healthcare

In the week’s biggest deal, by ticket size, Kedaara Capital deployed $200 million in Tynor Orthotics, its tenth bet in pharma and healthcare, in a transaction that multiple reports said would give it a controlling stake and provide an exit to Lighthouse Funds.

Mohali-based Tynor makes orthopaedic supports, mobility aids and rehabilitation and sports performance products. It operates a 6.5 lakh square feet manufacturing facility and retails through 300,000 outlets and 8,000 hospitals in India and overseas.

Lighthouse Funds and French medical textiles and orthotic soft goods maker Thusane, which entered in 2010, had co-invested Rs 143 crore in the company in 2019.

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→ EVs and energy efficiency

Capital found its way into energy transition, but the week’s deals extended beyond electric vehicles (EV) and into technologies aimed at reducing energy consumption and industrial emissions. The mix suggests that investors are looking beyond the headline EV opportunity and at the underlying infrastructure needed to make the energy transition work.

• Matter raised Rs 240 crore ($25 million) in a growth round anchored by existing investors. The company didn’t specify which of its investors had doubled down. The cap table includes Helena, Capital 2B and Japan Airlines. The Ahmedabad-based company manufactures electric motorcycles and has drawn up plans to launch four new motorcycle variants over the next two years.

• Omega Seiki Mobility, which makes commercial EVs, raised $5.2 million from a group of investors including Sanjeev Agarwal Family Office, Unistone Capital and Brijesh Parekh Family Office.

• CarbonStrong raised a $1.3 million seed round led by IAN Angel Fund and Rainmatter. The company is developing low-carbon concrete, targeting one of the construction industry’s largest sources of embodied emissions.

• Akron AI raised $1 million in a pre-seed round led by Theia Ventures. The company is developing “high efficiency, electronically commutated (EC) fans”, which it says account for about 40% of building energy consumption.

• Hero Motocorp disclosed that it would invest $184 million in EV maker Ather Energy through a secondary transaction, increasing its stake to 32.8%.

→ AI at the workplace

Three enterprise technology deals from the week focused on applying AI to specific operational tasks such as logistics, business processes and voice-based customer interactions.

• Airbound, a startup that’s developing autonomous drones for logistics operations, closed a $37 million Series A round led by Greenoaks. DoorDash, the food delivery platform, joined as a new investor. Existing investors Lachy Groom, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Humba Ventures participated.

• Runable closed a $21 million Series A led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners. Existing investors Together Fund and Array VC participated. The company, headquartered in Delaware with primary operations in Bangalore, offers small businesses general-purpose autonomous AI agents to run multiple tasks and processes.

• Ringg AI raised $10 million in what it termed an “extended Series A” round, led by Peak XV Partners. The Bangalore-based voice AI startup had raised a $5.5 million tranche in January from Arkam Ventures, Groww Founder Fund, Whitecap Ventures, Capital2B and Cred founder Kunal Shah.

→ Other funding deals

Nexedge Capital raised $20 million from Mirae Asset Venture Investment and Elev8 Venture Partners in its first institutional round. The Delhi-based company offers wealth management solutions for affluent individuals and family offices. Logistic platform Oorjaa raised $1 million in a Series A round led by Equentis Angel Fund.

→ Two mergers and a deal gone sour

Healthify merged with Berry Street. C2i Semiconductors was snapped up by Infineon, delivering early exits for investors. And, Mamaearth called off its acquisition of Fluence.

• Fabless chip company C2i Semiconductors agreed to be acquired by Munich-based Infineon Technologies. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Bangalore-based startup, which designs power management systems for AI data centres, had raised $16.7 million in a Series A round led by Peak XV Partners in February this year.

• Fitness and nutrition services platform Healthify agreed to merge with Berry Street, a New York-based nutrition care company, in an all-stock deal. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Investors in Bangalore-based Healthify include Khosla Ventures, LeapFrog Investments, Blume Ventures and Claypond Capital. The company’s last funding round was in 2024 when it raised $45 million led by Khosla Ventures and LeapFrog.

• Mamaearth parent Honasa Consumer called off its proposed acquisition of a 58% stake in nutraceuticals company Fluence Pharma, citing “non-fulfilment of closing conditions specified under Share Purchase Agreement…,” in a regulatory disclosure. When the deal was announced in June this year, Delhi-based Honasa had said it would establish a subsidiary, Honasa Health, to expand into the nutraceuticals market. The company said it would continue to evaluate opportunities, organic and inorganic, in nutraceuticals.

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Siguler Guff is considering a $350-400 million India-focused continuation vehicle to stay invested longer in four assets – Bazaar Retail, Sterling Hospitals, Luker Electric and Relisys, Mint reported. Just last week, the New York-based alternative assets manager, which invests both through a fund-of-funds strategy and direct investments, closed $500 million in India-focused mid-market commitments for its Global Emerging Markets Growth Opportunities Fund (GEMGO II) and related co-investment vehicles.

Continuation funds have become popular lately as a liquidity mechanism for ageing portfolios. They allow fund managers to hold on to trophy assets and deliver exits to existing limited partners.

AI-focused venture capital firm Boundless VC closed its maiden fund at Rs 300 crore ($35 million), exceeding its original target of Rs 200 crore. Founded by former Kae Capital partner Natasha Malpani, the fund will invest primarily at the pre-seed and seed stages across the AI stack from infrastructure and chips to applications. It has already backed 10 companies.

Catch you again next week.

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Andra co-founded Endiya Partners in 2015 out of Hyderabad, at a time when the city was not yet the startup hub it has since become, and when backing India-born deep tech and enterprise software startups was still considered unusual. Across three funds and a portfolio of 30-plus companies, including Darwinbox, SigTuple Technologies and Kissht, the strategy has earned the venture capital firm outcomes with a consistency that’s a bit rare for a specialist technology investor in India.

In his first guest article for The Runway, Andra revisits the framework he articulated about 15 months ago about where India should stake its claim in AI. The question he keeps coming back to is bigger than any individual opportunity: can India win this cycle as an ecosystem?

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India’s Right to Win in AI. Revisited

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I have watched technology cycles since the mid-nineties. Something is happening in the current cycle that has no historical precedent.

The repercussions, for every layer of the technology stack and for every Indian company operating within it, will play out over the next few years in ways we cannot yet fully visualise.

It also forces a harder question than the one I asked about a year ago in my article The AI Gold Rush: Where Should Indian Startups Stake Their Claim? The question today is not whether India can win in AI but whether we can win as an ecosystem.

To understand what makes this moment different, it's important to track back to how we got here. The technology industry has reinvented itself roughly every decade. From 2000 onwards, we've moved from the client-server world to the internet and then on to mobile, the cloud and now AI.

Each reinvention has been defined by a single dominant question: what is the computer?

The first cycle belonged to the workstation. Sun Microsystems running Solaris. Silicon Graphics running Unix. Microsoft running Windows. The computer was a physical machine. Compute and operating system bundled together. Then the network became the computer, omnipresent, a shift Sun Microsystems first called out in the eighties, and Cisco helped make real. Amazon with AWS, Microsoft with Azure and Google changed the rules again. This time, the cloud was the computer. Infinite, on-demand and accessed over a network.

In every prior computing shift, the companies that built the foundational technology mostly stayed within their layer, or expanded into adjacent ones over years, not months. They built the base and let software vendors, implementation partners and application companies build businesses on top of it.

That's what created room for ecosystems to grow. A thousand companies could build viable businesses on top of a stable foundation.

Today, NVIDIA with Anthropic or OpenAI or Google Gemini are the computer and operating system. But, here's where it diverges from prior cycles.

Anthropic and OpenAI are going to Salesforce and saying: adopt me, use me as your AI layer. They are then going to TCS and saying: when you implement Salesforce for your clients, use me. But it doesn't stop there. Anthropic and OpenAI are also going direct to the end-customer, the enterprise, with their own services capability. At the same time, they are deepening partnerships with TCS, Accenture, Deloitte and others.

In a single motion, one technology company is capturing value as the software vendor, the implementation partner, and a direct competitor to the client's own internal capabilities, simultaneously. That, for me, is unfathomable. This time something profound is happening. And, it questions India's right to win as an ecosystem.

When I wrote that first article in April last year, we mapped where value was being created in AI into four buckets – trailblazers, innovators, amplifiers and users.

• The Trailblazers are companies building the fundamental infrastructure – large language models, compute chips, inference chips, vector databases, and so on. These companies are concentrated within a 10-mile radius of San Francisco and require extraordinary capital. So, for example, Anthropic crossed a $50 billion run rate in mid-2026, even as it locked in $200 billion in compute spending with Google alone over five years.

  That’s not India’s game, for the most part.

• Then we have Innovators, which includes vertical AI application companies. These are AI-native from the ground up. This is the layer, where technology meets human beings directly, at which you typically derive the most value.

  These are the companies that Endiya Partners is backing most actively. We have Maieutic, a kind of Cursor/Claude for chip design. Then there’s Perceptyne in physical intelligence for automotive and electronics manufacturing assembly lines, Matters in security, and ThirdAI in industrial predictive maintenance.

• Under Amplifiers, we have two kinds. First, established software companies such as Salesforce or Darwinbox (from the Endiya portfolio) which are embedding AI into products that already sell to existing customers. Second is what I call services software. A new category that is structurally inverting the old BPO (business process outsourcing) model. Previously, services implied people implementing a process leveraging technology. Now it’s flipped. AI drives the process and workflow, with humans in the loop when needed. An inverted pyramid.

• The last bucket is Users. That's everyone. Just as we all became internet users, we are all AI users today, whether it's for coding, customer support, marketing, sales, back-office, or research, in the enterprise scenario. It's faceless for the consumer but AI is at work behind the scenes.

The framework still applies. But the stakes have changed.

My belief is that good Indian companies, the truly AI-native ones, will go to half a million revenue per FTE (full-time-employee). In our own portfolio, I wouldn’t be surprised if teams of 20-25 people hit $10 million in revenue. For these companies, AI is not a product feature. It is the operating model.

Microsoft and Google used to benchmark at roughly a million dollars of revenue per FTE (full-time-employee). That number has moved up nearly 2x. VMware under Broadcom cut its workforce by more than half while pushing margins up sharply and targeting a doubling of EBITDA. AI-native companies such as Anthropic are reportedly already operating at close to $8-$9 million per FTE.

The big question for India is whether we can manifest success in AI as an ecosystem. Take SaaS as a reference point. How many real winners do we have even today? Maybe 15-20 over a decade. In AI, it isn’t clear yet what form the disruption will take. Will there be a long tail of small companies, each doing $10 million revenues or would you see consolidated players?

My honest answer – I don’t have clarity right now.

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The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of The Runway, its editors, or any organisation the author is affiliated with. This article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. The author may have direct or indirect interests in companies or sectors discussed.

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Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) is leading a fresh bid to take one of India’s largest renewable energy companies private.

CPP Investments and ReNew founder Sumant Sinha signed a definitive agreement on August 11 to acquire all shares of Nasdaq-listed ReNew Energy Global not held by the consortium.

The transaction values the company’s fully diluted equity at $2.8 billion and implies an enterprise value of $10.2 billion, regulatory disclosures showed. Non-consortium shareholders will receive $7.02 a share in cash, a 24.7% premium to the one-month volume-weighted average price of $5.63 a share for the period ended May 28, 2026.

The scheme is expected to become effective in the first quarter of 2027, subject to shareholder and regulatory clearances.

Non-consortium shareholders have the option to either take the $7.02 a share in cash or roll over their stakes into the private company. Among those, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) and Japan’s JERA Co have agreed to vote in favour of the scheme and roll over their stakes. Indian residents will not be able to participate in the rollover and can only take cash. If the total number of remaining shareholders post-rollover exceeds 200, smaller holders will revert to cash.

This will be Gurugram-based ReNew’s second major bid to go private. In December 2024, a broader consortium comprising new investor Masdar – the UAE-based clean energy company owned by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Mubadala Investment Company and Abu Dhabi National Energy Company PJSC) – and existing shareholders CPP Investments, ADIA and Sinha had submitted a non-binding proposal at $7.07 a share. The deal collapsed a year later when Masdar decided to pull out.

Sinha and CPP Investments regrouped and submitted a fresh proposal in May this year at $6.75 a share, which was raised to $7.02 a share in July.

Why ReNew is going private

Gurugram-based ReNew listed on the Nasdaq in August 2021 through a SPAC merger with RMG Acquisition Corporation II at an equity value of $4.4 billion and an enterprise value of $8 billion. The stock has largely underperformed since listing, trading as low as $4.04 a share in early 2023. It is currently trading at around $6.81 a share, close to the offer price of $7.02 a share.

In December 2024, when the Masdar-led delisting bid was in play, Sinha told the Financial Times in an interview that the markets were undervaluing renewable energy companies and hampering the green transition. Speaking to CNBC-TV18 at Davos this January, he was more direct, pointing to compounding headwinds including the US Federal Reserve’s rate hike cycle, the withdrawal of capital from sustainability funds, and inadequate understanding among investors of the context in which the company operates. “Our sense is that it’s probably better to just not be listed there,” he said.

Asset sales ahead of delisting

Separately, a day before its filing on the take-private scheme, ReNew sold 1,055 MW of solar assets in Rajasthan and Karnataka to Purvah Green Power, a subsidiary of RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group owned CESC at an enterprise value of Rs 5,080 crore ($532 million), an August 10 filing showed. This includes a Rs 230 crore ($24 million) earn-out contingent on change-in-law orders being granted.

The sale is one of a series of asset transactions the company has committed to execute ahead of the closing of the take-private offer.

These include the divestment of transmission assets, solar asset sales totalling over 1,655 MW across multiple Solar Energy Corporation of India projects, a capital raise in the commercial and industrial business and the sale of a stake in the manufacturing arm.

The company is selling mature, contracted assets that generate stable, predictable cash flows to reduce its debt load and free up capital to finance the next generation of projects.

Beyond wind and solar

In its next phase, ReNew is looking beyond traditional solar and wind energy generation. The filing identifies three new business initiatives. The first is a 1 GW pumped hydro storage project under a Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation tender with a 40-year power purchase agreement. The second is a green hydrogen project with a 2,000 tonne per year capacity under a Chennai Petroleum Corporation tender on a 25-year build-own-operate basis. The third is 200 MW of data centre capacity. In addition, the business plan includes a 6.5 GW solar wafer-ingot manufacturing facility.

The CPP Investments-led consortium agreement requires the board, within 12 months of the scheme becoming effective, to begin preparing for a listing on a recognised stock exchange. An Indian listing is the most likely destination. But Sinha stopped short of committing to it at Davos in January.

For now, ReNew must first complete the task at hand – going private in the US.

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The Week in Deals

GEF Backs Yulu; Premji Invest Joins Databricks’ $5B Round

From enterprise technology and electric mobility to wealth management and medical devices, what private market dealmaking missed this week in volume terms, it made up for in the diversity of bets.

Electric mobility scored again. Bike rental platform Yulu closed a Series C round at $93 million led by GEF Capital Partners. The equity and debt round involves a $63 million equity portion, the company said in a statement. The round valued the company at $170 million, post-money, TechCrunch reported.

The Series C capital will be used to grow its fleet to 20,000 vehicles within the next two years and expand service hubs. It’s also entering the intra-city mobility market with the launch of Yulu Express, a full-sized, long-haul electric scooter built for ecommerce logistics, bike taxis and express parcel delivery, the statement said.

The Bangalore-based company last raised equity capital in 2024 when existing investors Magna International and Bajaj Auto invested $19.2 million in a bridge round. This followed a $82 million Series B led by Magna International in 2022. Bajaj Auto got on board as an investor in 2019.

Investor interest in electric mobility has been on an upswing this year with 14-odd companies across the spectrum raising 700 million so far.

In offshore funding deals, Peak XV Partners, Lightspeed India, Premji Invest and Titan Capital put money to work across the technology spectrum.

• Blacksmith, a software infrastructure company, raised a $45 million Series B round led by Peak XV Partners. Y Combinator and GV (Google Ventures) were return investors in the round which valued the startup at $550 million. The round closed in March but was disclosed this week. The San Francisco-based company sells faster, cheaper computing infrastructure to software engineering teams whose automated testing pipelines are straining under the weight of AI-generated code.

• Discovered Materials, a San Francisco-based startup building AI agents to find new materials for semiconductor chips, raised a $9 million seed round led by Lightspeed (India fund). Y Combinator and Peak XV Partners joined the round alongside angel investors Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram and Thariq Shihipar.

• Premji Invest joined Databricks’ $5 billion funding round led by Coatue, Blackstone, MGX, T. Rowe Price and Sixth Street Growth. The San Francisco-based company is a cloud-based data intelligence platform built on a “lakehouse” architecture.

• Wipro Ventures joined Skan AI’s $63 million round, which was led by Cathay Innovation and Dell Technologies Capital. The Menlo Park, California-based company uses AI to observe how employees work across software systems and maps workflows to improve, automate and deploy AI agents.

• Titan Capital and Neon Fund co-led a $1 million round in San Francisco-based market research platform Echovane.

Centricity raised Rs 280 crore ($29 million) in a Series A round led by SMBC Asia Rising Fund. Returning investors in the round included Lightspeed Venture Partners, Burman Family Holdings and RAAY Investments, the Amit Patni Group’s family office. The Gurugram-based company offers wealth management services to affluent individuals and family offices.

NDR Smart Spaces, an arm of the NDR Group, raised Rs 225 crore ($23 million) from World Bank affiliate International Finance Corporation. The Chennai-based company is developing 20 million square feet of warehousing infrastructure across 14 cities.

Sub-$5 million funding deals: Home cleaning products maker Scrubsy raised $3 million from V3 Ventures. Diabetes-focused medical devices maker Ayati Devices closed a $1.57 million pre-Series A round led by Inflexor Ventures. Voice AI company Wippi raised $1.2 million in a seed round led by 12 Flags. Driving intelligence platform Lane raised $0.9 million in a pre-seed round led by Kae Capital. Financial services sector-focused enterprise technology startup Vecton AI raised $0.6 million in a pre-seed round from Zeropearl VC. Surface care products maker Invisel raised $0.4 million in a seed round led by IAN Angel Fund.

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Zetwerk filed updated IPO papers, moving closer to a public listing. The Bangalore-based company, which runs a managed marketplace for contract manufacturing, aims to raise Rs 2,600 crore ($272 million) through a fresh issue, alongside an offer for sale (OFS) of up to Rs 96.8 million shares.

• Selling shareholders include Peak XV Partners, Accel India, Lightspeed Venture Partners and KAE Capital. Founders Amrit Acharyra and Srinath Ramakkrushnan are also selling, offering 51.4 million shares, which works out to roughly 53% of the OFS.

• The bulk of the IPO proceeds, Rs 1,800 crore, will go towards repaying debt. The company’s consolidated borrowings stood at Rs 4,607 crore as of May 2026. It also plans to raise up to Rs 520 crore through a pre-IPO placement.

• Founded in 2018, Zetwerk reported revenues from operations at Rs 15,913 crore in FY2026 against Rs 11,332 crore in FY2025. The company posted a restated loss of Rs 1,606 crore in FY2026, weighed down by debt servicing costs, depreciation and charges from businesses it is winding down. Adjusted EBITDA, however, was positive at Rs 421 crore.

South Korean conglomerate Mirae Asset Global Investments’ India venture capital arm Mirae Asset Venture Investments (India) raised Rs 1,125 crore ($117.8 million) in the first close for its new fund. Mirae Asset Venture Opportunity Fund II (MAVOF II) aims to raise a total of Rs 1,800 crore ($188.6 million). Krafton and Naver-backed Unicorn Growth Fund, launched in April this year to back startups in India, is an anchor investor in MAVOF II.

The target corpus is a significant expansion from MAVOF I, raised in 2021, with a Rs 370 crore corpus. MAVOF II will back companies in technology, including deeptech and AI, consumer discretionary and manufacturing at the Series B through D stages, Puneet Kumar, CEO at Mirae Asset Venture Investments, said in a statement.

Also, Bluehill VC closed its maiden fund at Rs 400 crore to back frontier technology companies. And, Accel raised a $550 million new India fund, it’s ninth for this market, as part of larger $3.5 billion global fundraising exercise.

NVIDIA is betting on Wall Street bankrolling the AI buildout. It announced this week that it has signed memorandums of understanding with six of the world’s largest alternative asset managers. Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR will establish independent financing platforms with the stated aim of mobilising more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure over an unspecified timeframe.

Each platform will work with NVIDIA to create dedicated capital pools for its customers including frontier AI labs, enterprises and AI cloud operators at what the company described as “attractive rates.”

The capital requirements of AI buildouts are humungous. In March this year, Morgan Stanley Research estimated global data centre construction costs at $2.9 billion. Of that, $1.4 trillion is expected to be spent by hyperscalers (Google, Meta and Amazon) for their internal buildouts. The bulk of the remaining $1.5 trillion is expected to come from private investors, credit and equity capital. NVIDIA’s argument is that compute should be treated as infrastructure the same way that roads and power grids are – long duration, productive, investible assets.

Alternative investors seem to have bought into the argument. Whether that will play out as anticipated or blow up into a credit bubble, as DealBook’s Andrew Sorkin frames it in his newsletter, remains an open question.

See you next week.

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Lead

What River Mobility’s $120M Raise Says About India’s EV Market

The first time I found myself in an electric vehicle was in 2002. This was the Reva. It was smaller than an autorickshaw and could barely fit two fully grown adults. I remember fretting about the battery dying in the middle of the Western Express Highway’s rotting evening traffic. The other enduring memory is the curious looks from fellow road users.

Electric mobility has accumulated a lot of miles on the odo since then. Today, if you want to go electric, you’re fairly spoilt for choice. The ecosystem, from vehicles to charging infrastructure, has expanded rapidly over the past few years, fuelled to a great extent by private capital. Investor interest in the space has been on an upswing this year with 14-odd companies across the spectrum raising nearly $700 million so far (Source: The Runway Deals Tracker).

This week, Bangalore-based River Mobility scooped up a $120 million Series C cheque, led by Elev8 Venture Partners and Claypond Capital, Manipal chair Ranjan Pai’s family investment vehicle. They join a crowded cap table that already includes Yamaha Motor Co, Al-Futtaim Group, Toyota Ventures, Mitsui & Co and Lowercarbon Capital.

Yamaha, Al-Futtaim Group and Mitsui & Co were return investors in the latest round, while Singularity AMC, Anicut Capital, 360 One Asset, JIF Capital (earlier JAFCO Asia) and HDFC AMC got on board as new investors. Roughly 80% of the round is equity capital while the balance came from venture lenders Alteria Capital, Innoven Capital and Stride Ventures.

The deal marks Elev8’s first electric mobility bet from its debut fund, which closed at $160 million last September. Though primarily a technology growth-stage investor, managing partner Navin Honagudi said the firm is “category-agnostic enough to lean into a strong theme when the tailwinds and the asset both line up.”

While the adoption of electric vehicles, both cars and bikes, has been gathering momentum for a few years, there’s been a big shift this year in consumer sentiments on account of the ongoing West Asia conflict which has driven up fuel prices.

Growth, Honagudi added, has moderated from the earlier subsidy-driven spikes into a more stable, demand-led phase. “It’s (electric mobility) one of the clearest structural growth stories in India,” he said in an email, pointing to the 22% year-on-year increase in electric two-wheeler registrations to 1.4 million units at the close of FY2026 and sales accelerating further in the current financial year.

So what makes River Mobility, founded about six years ago, special enough to corner one of the largest funding rounds this year in the electric mobility segment?

To begin with, the company has taken its time designing its first product, the Indie, specifically for the Indian market. The 14 inch alloy wheels to navigate potholes and rumble strips, 55 liters of lockable storage, the front-foot pegs, and a flat floorbed wide enough for a heavy goods (or a pet), are some of its practical features. “They’re not in a hurry to roll out multiple variants. Very similar to the way Ather Energy was built,” says automotive journalist Amaan Ahmed* who test rode the scooter in 2023 when it launched.

The big validation came in 2024 when Yamaha Motor Co led a $40 million Series B round in the company – the Japanese two-wheeler giant’s first-ever investment in an Indian startup. But, Yamaha didn’t stop there. “The EC-06, Yamaha’s first electric scooter for India, has been made by River Mobility and is based on the Indie. Being a Yamaha, it can’t be practical (from a design standpoint), so they’ve made it more about style,” Ahmed says. Read his detailed review of the EC-06.

The utility-first product differentiation is what resonated with Elev8. “That product strength shows up in the numbers. It’s a Top-7 electric two-wheeler brand nationally despite operating far fewer retail outlets than the incumbents,” Honagudi said. The company’s monthly sales recently touched 5,000 units. Following the Series C round, it aims to go from 75 outlets to 350 by March 2028, according to a statement.

The challenges ahead, though, are significant. River Mobility comes in as the seventh largest national electric two-wheeler brand by monthly sales behind players such as TVS Motors, Bajaj Auto, Ather Energy and Hero MotorCorp. These companies have a head start in terms of brand recall and access to deep resources. “They’re (River) still playing catch-up. Electric two-wheeler penetration is low and the market will grow. But the established players have the resources to push prices down. Also, the Indie is not easily available everywhere in the country,” Ahmed says. The bulk of the company’s retail outlets are concentrated in the southern states.

That said, the company does have several deep-pocketed investors on its cap table. Coupled with the tailwinds currently driving the electric mobility market, capital isn’t likely to be a constraint for the company in the near-to-medium term. It’s going to need that comfort as competitors also bulk up on resources. Last month, publicly listed Ather Energy raised Rs 1,200 crore ($124 million) in a round led by existing investor Hero MotoCorp and another Rs 1,300 crore via a qualified institutional placement.

*Amaan Ahmed is an assistant editor at car&bike where he focuses on electric vehicles. He’s spent nearly a decade covering the country’s automotive sector for leading publications including BBC TopGear and FirstPost.

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In other notable deals this week:

InRisk Labs raised a $27 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Northpoint Capital. The Ahmedabad-based company leverages technology, including AI, to predict insurance risk and offers reinsurance solutions for natural calamities, market volatility and other extreme events.

KKR announced an agreement to acquire Swedish healthcare and diagnostic services provider Medicover AB’s hospital operations in India. The deal includes 24 multi-speciality hospitals and 4,800 beds across South and West India.

In sub-$5 million deals, concierge services startup Hulp raised $2.6 million in a seed round led by Sparrow Capital and BITKRAFT Ventures. Peer-to-peer marketplace for pre-owned products Vingo raised Rs 10 crore ($1 million) in a seed round led by India Quotient. Lithium batteries maker Adiabatic Technologies raised $0.8 million led by Malpani Ventures and Avinya Ventures.

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Second Lead

IPO Spotlight on Temasek Portfolio Cos

After Manipal Health Enterprises, two more Temasek Holdings-backed companies will test the public markets next week — dairy products company Milky Mist and ecommerce logistics platform Shiprocket. Both go to market with a smaller offering than originally planned.

• Milky Mist’s initial public offering (IPO) is slated to open for subscription on August 11 after cutting the size of the offering by Rs 482 crore.

• The reduction is on account of a pre-IPO deal with Temasek affiliate Jongsong Investments. The Singapore-based investor picked up a 5.16% stake in April this year through a Rs 357 crore primary investment and a Rs 125 crore secondary sale by promoters Sathishkumar T and Anitha S.

• The IPO, set at a price band of Rs 133-140 a share, is aiming to raise Rs 1,553 crore, comprising a fresh issue worth Rs 1,428 crore and an offer-for-sale (OFS) of Rs 125 crore by the promoters.

Milky Mist started as a small milk trading centre in Erode, Tamil Nadu, over two decades ago and hadn’t raised any significant private capital till Temasek came along. Earlier in 2019, it raised Rs 19.5 crore from Anicut Capital. The company reported revenues from operations at Rs 3,138 crore for FY2026, against Rs 2,350 crore the previous year. Profit after tax stood at Rs 127 crore against Rs 46 crore in FY2025. A significant portion of the fresh issue proceeds will go towards repaying debt which stood at Rs 1390.72 crore as on May 2026.

Shiprocket is raising Rs 1,617 crore against an originally planned Rs 2,342 crore. The offering comprises a fresh issue worth Rs 885.5 crore and a Rs 731.99 crore OFS. The issue is slated to open on August 12 at a price band of Rs 92-97 a share. Among selling shareholders notable private equity and venture capital (PE-VC) sellers include Lightrock, Tribe Capital, March Capital and 500 Startups.

Bertelsmann India Investments, which was listed as a seller in the draft prospectus, is sitting it out. Temasek, which holds a 4.4% stake through its affiliate MacRitchie Investments, entered the company in late 2021 and is not a selling shareholder.

Founded in 2012, Delhi-based Shiprocket reported revenues from operations at Rs 2,024 crore for FY2026 against Rs 1,632 crore the previous year. It restated its losses at Rs 79.25 crore for the year.

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Recco | Notes on Culture, Craft and the Considered Life

Hyderabad Gets The Bar it Deserves

Planning a trip to Hyderabad? Don’t miss these two places: Theta Theta Telugu (T3) and Bar Stormy. One is a restaurant that reimagines Telugu cuisine with an assurance that is severely lacking in many of Mumbai’s much-hyped restaurants. The other, the more recent opening, is Bar Stormy, a new bar by Yangdup Lama, India’s most influential bartender.

Lama — and his business partner Minakshi Singh — are among the country’s most influential bar entrepreneurs. Over the last 15 years, they’ve built several highly rated bars, including Sidecar (Delhi), Cocktails & Dreams Speakeasy and The Brook (Gurgaon). At their core, these are all comfortable neighbourhood bars, and Bar Stormy, the duo’s first venture in South India, stays true to that template.

The bar takes its name from the classic Dark ‘n Stormy—a mix of dark rum, ginger beer and fresh lime juice — and the drinks menu draws heavily from Hyderabad and the wider region.

Stormy Signatures incorporates ingredients such as curry leaves, and there’s even a playful nod to the city’s iconic Osmania biscuit. We especially loved Stormy Shenanigans (gin, raspberry, blueberry and chilli tincture), while the Bone Marrow Nihari deserves a mention from the kitchen.

Bar Stormy sits in Hyderabad’s Financial District, home to many of the city’s largest technology companies, multinational firms and startup offices. It’s the sort of neighbourhood that comes alive after work rather than after dark—a natural fit for a bar built around conversation, good cocktails and regulars rather than loud music and one-night crowds.

Recco is a column by Murali K Menon. Murali has spent a career paying close attention to how things are made, where they come from, and why some of them endure. Every edition, one recommendation: a maker, an object, a place, a practice.

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Norwest’s Precision Manufacturing Play

Manufacturing isn’t cool. Not like consumer brands or quick commerce or even enterprise technology riding the AI wave. Yet, in the last eight months, Norwest Venture Partners has put over $100 million to work in manufacturing companies that provide the nuts and bolts for OEMs in aerospace and defence, two-wheeler and commercial vehicle makers, and oil and gas companies.

This week, the venture capital firm co-led a $40 million Series B in Raghu Vamsi Aerospace Group with Skegen Asset Management, an investment firm backed by the founders of Bharat Biotech. Hyderabad-based Raghu Vamsi manufactures aero-engine components, sub-assemblies for aerospace OEMs and tools for energy corporations.

The deal marks Norwest’s second in precision manufacturing this year. In January, it entered aerospace components manufacturing with a $30 million investment in JJG Aero’s Series B round. The Bangalore-based company’s clients include Boeing, Collins Aerospace, GE Aerospace and Safran. Earlier in December last year, it closed its first automotive components investment with a Rs 750 crore (around $84 million) bet on Gurgaon-based Padmini VNA Mechatronics. Together, the three deals represent a coherent thesis at work.

Not surprising given that manufacturing is now part of the stated mandate for the Silicon Valley-based firm’s investment strategy for India, even as consumer and financial services bets remain its mainstay. The overall portfolio includes food delivery platform Swiggy, wearables maker Gabit, media industry focused cloud platform Amagi, and a host of financial services companies.

The timing of the three bets in manufacturing are a response to structural shifts in global supply chains. OEMS (original equipment manufacturers) across aerospace, automotive and energy are seeking to diversify away from incumbent manufacturing operations. India’s precision manufacturers have over the years built the capabilities to qualify for contracts at scale and meet that demand.

• JJG Aero, at the time of the Series B, had over 30 NADCAP-approved special processes, including electroplating, anodising, paint and NDT. It is targeting annual revenues at Rs 1,000 crore by FY2033 and claimed a 33% CAGR over the past three years.

• Raghu Vamsi employs over 1,200 people and operates 10 facilities across three countries. It’s among the few homegrown companies that offer full stack aerospace manufacturing capabilities from design and engineering to manufacturing testing and assembly. It claims an order book of over Rs 2,500 crore.

• Padmini VNA positions itself as an R&D-driven manufacturer for auto components with over 100 patents to its name. “With its differentiated mechatronics across powertrains, vehicle segments and OEMs, Padmini VNA is well positioned to benefit from India’s transition to EV and connected technologies,” Norwest managing director Niren Shah said in a statement in December.

Norwest isn’t the only one making inroads into precision manufacturing.

In January Singularity AMC led a $11 million round in aerospace components maker Lohia Aerospace. Premji Invest led a $33 million growth round in precision iron casting manufacturer JS Auto Cast Foundry in February. The same month, ChrysCapital made an undisclosed investment in Nash Industries. Avataar Ventures invested $28.5 million in multi-axis CNC components manufacturer Ethereal Machines in the company’s Series B in June.

Investors are also going in earlier. Z47 got on board at Wootzwork leading its $6.6 million Series A in February. In May, IvyCap Ventures led a $8 million Series A in Tiea Connectors and in January, IAN Alpha Fund led a $2.7 million seed round in D-Propulse Aerospace.

It’s early days. But, precision manufacturing and the broader manufacturing space is growing as a significant playing field for private equity and venture capital investors.

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The Week in Deals

IFC’s Busy Week; Quick Commerce for Medicines

Four growth-to-later stage deals out of 15 makes for a pretty good week for dealmaking in India. Precision manufacturing, hospitals and wealth management were among the sectors that scored sizeable cheques. Also, a travel company that curates vacation experiences for couples.

Veriqus Group raised $40 million in its first institutional round from Norwest Venture Partners. The Mumbai-based company offers an integrated wealth and asset management platform supported by an AI layer.

BusinessNext raised $40 million in a Series C round from ServiceNow Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of enterprise software company ServiceNow. The round valued the Noida-based autonomous banking solutions company at $700 million, post-money.

KIMS Hospitals, a multi-speciality hospitals chain, raised $15.5 million in an equity funding round from World Bank arm International Finance Corporation (IFC), according to a disclosure. The Secunderabad-based company, which went public in 2021, has earlier raised capital from leading PE firms including General Atlantic and ChrysCapital.

Plazza, a quick commerce platform for medicines, raised a $15 million Series A led by Accel, Elevation Capital and Nexus Venture Partners. Existing investors All In Capital and Better Capital participated. The Bangalore-based startup combines “AI driven inventory and assortment intelligence, deep medicine availability and 15-30 minutes delivery…” it said in a statement. Instant delivery is the next frontier for e-pharmacies, a sector that has undergone significant upheaval on both the regulatory and operational fronts.

30 Sundays raised $6.7 million in a Series A round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Info Edge Ventures and Eximius participated. The Gurugram-based company provides travel and vacation services focused on couples. The travel and hospitality segment has seen a smattering of early stage deals this year including Warburg Pincus’ $106 million investment in Lemon Tree Hotels, DSG Consumer Partners’ WanderOn (led a $5.8 million round) and Susquehanna Asia VC’s $36 million bet on Atlys.

Sub-$5 million deals: Biofuels company FarmWatt raised $3.36 million from IAN Alpha Fund and Rainmatter. B2B installation services provider Wiffy Technologies raised $3 million in a Series A round led by Earth Fund. Non-invasive medical device company Bioscan Research raised $1 million in a seed round from Unicorn India Ventures. Skincare products company LNGVTY raised $0.5 million in a seed round from Rukam Capital. No-code AI casual decision intelligence platform FireAI raised $0.2 million from SucSEED Ventures. Insuretech company NeuralKart raised $0.2 million in a seed round from Inflection Point Ventures. Extracurricular skills learning platform UpKraft raised $0.1 million in a pre-seed round from PedalStart.

In overseas funding deals, Stellaris Venture Partners participated in a $10 million Series A round for Cupertino, California-based Carpl. IFC led the round in the company, which offers a radiology AI marketplace. Bangalore-based Stellaris first invested in the company in 2023 in its seed round.

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HCLTech disclosed plans to set up its first AI data centre in partnership with Sarvam and the Odisha state government. The capital outlay for the project is Rs 14,257 crore (nearly 1.5 billion), it said in a statement. HCLTech picked up a 10.46% stake in Bangalore-based Sarvam in June.

Over the weekend (July 18), Skyroot Aerospace launched India’s first privately developed orbital rocket Vikram-1, lifting off from ISRO’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre. The Hyderabad-based spacetech startup became the first private Indian company to successfully launch to orbit. Skyroot was valued at $1.1 billion in May when it raised a $60 million round led by Singapore’s GIC and Sherpalo Ventures.

After Blackstone, Singapore’s Temasek has set its sights on buying into India’s IPL cricket league, Reuters reported, citing India managing director Vishesh Shrivastav. “For the right opportunity, we would jump for it,” he told the new agency in an interview.

Transition VC is raising a Rs 1,500 crore ($155 million) Fund II. The Bangalore-based firm raised Rs 700 crore ($77 million) for its first fund in December last year. It positions itself as an ‘energy transition fund’ backing early stage startups across e-mobility, green hydrogen, energy storage and climate-tech focused on decarbonisation.

Recco | Notes on Culture, Craft and the Considered Life

India's Breakout Microbrand Watch

The last five years have seen a proliferation of Indian watch microbrands, but very few have attracted as much international attention — and appreciation —as Delhi Watch Company’s Terra.

You won’t find anything extraordinary under the Terra’s hood—it is powered by a Miyota quartz movement. But for a watch that costs just ₹4,500, it looks like a million dollars.

The watch’s titanium case is inspired by a carabiner and “draws directly from the geometry, structural logic and functional simplicity” of the metal hook. The strap is made of parachute fabric, and the Terra is water-resistant to 30 metres. Only 5,555 pieces have been produced so far, and all of them have been snapped up by eager enthusiasts. It’s not difficult to see why—the Terra looks unlike anything else around, and we mean that in a good way.

The Terra was recently featured by Teddy Baldassarre, one of the world’s biggest watch YouTubers. Delhi Watch Company has also entered it into this year’s Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève (GPHG), often described as the Oscars of the watch world. The travelling GPHG exhibition will visit Mumbai later this year.

Thinking of getting one? Try the aftermarket route.

Recco is a column by Murali K Menon. Murali has spent a career paying close attention to how things are made, where they come from, and why some of them endure. Every edition, one recommendation: a maker, an object, a place, a practice.

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Family Offices Step to the Front of the Cap Table

A vibe coding startup in Silicon Valley. A contract cosmetics manufacturer in Jammu. A healthy snacks brand in Mumbai. Three businesses with nothing obvious in common. Except that this week, their latest funding rounds were all led by Indian family offices.

First, the Emergent deal.

The San Francisco-based vibe coding startup sprinted into the unicorn club after a $130 million Series C round valued it at $1.5 billion. Among the lead investors in the round was Manipal Group chair Ranjan Pai’s family office Claypond Capital (MNI Ventures-Claypond Capital).

• Creaegis and Sentinel Global were the other co-leads. Khosla Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Lightspeed and Y Combinator were returning investors.

• Earlier media reports, citing sources, said the startup was in line for a $250 million Series C. The company did not respond to queries from The Runway on why it decided to close a smaller round.

• The Series C comes six months after the startup raised a $70 million Series B. It didn’t disclose its valuation at the time. TechCrunch reported the valuation at $300 million, citing sources. The San Francisco-based company has raised $230 million to date.

• Since the public launch of its vibe coding platform a year ago, 12 million-plus applications have been built on the platform, it said in a statement. Founded in 2024, the company, which has a large operation in Bangalore, claimed an annualised revenue run rate of $50 million at its Series B round.

Naturis Cosmetics, a white label cosmetics and derma products manufacturer, raised Rs 100 crore ($10.4 million) led by Sharrp Ventures, Marico chair Harsh Mariwala’s family investment vehicle.

• Sharrp Ventures invested Rs 30 crore ($3.1 million in the round.

• Mirabilis Investment Trust (the family office of Infosys co-founder K Dinesh), Anicut Capital and Niveshaay joined the round.

• The Mumbai-based company, whose manufacturing facilities are located in Jammu, supplies to a host of homegrown brands such as Pilgrim, Nykaa, Plum, and Purplle.

• Sharrp Ventures’ portfolio already includes Nykaa and Purplle, making Naturis a vertical integration bet. The family office has profited from the D2C boom and is now betting on the manufacturing backbone.

Open Secret raised Rs 50 crore ($5.2 million) in an equity and debt round. The family office of Pune-based Desai Brothers Group, which has diversified interests across tobacco, snacks and hospitality, brought in Rs 30 crore ($3.1 million) as equity capital. Mumbai-based Open Secret, which counts Z47 as an early backer, retails healthy traditional snacks. The capital will be used to scale from Rs 200 crore ARR to Rs 1,000 crore ARR in three years, it said in a statement.

Direct investments as core strategy

Family offices backing private companies isn’t a recent pattern. Most continue to invest indirectly through PE-VC funds. But over the past few years direct investments have moved from occasional bets to core strategy. Poor returns from PE-VC funds has been a driving factor.

So far in 2026, deals tracked by The Runway show Indian family offices participating in 90-odd deals worth approximately $2.5 billion (disclosed value of deals). They led or co-led in 37 of those deals.

The 90 deals include bets on companies based overseas, largely in the US. The large-ticket leads – above $100 million – were concentrated among a handful of family offices. Premji Invest alone led or co-lead rounds worth over $800 million, all overseas. Smaller ticket sizes, where family offices led, were spread across a broader set of vehicles including Rainmatter, Sharrp Ventures, Titan Capital, and Narotam Sekhsaria Family Office.

Coming back to this week’s deals, a few things to watch:

• Emergent operates in a crowded field. Lovable, Cursor and Replit have all drawn lofty valuations as investors bet that vibe coding will reshape how software is built. Emergent’s multi-model orchestration approach will need a lot more capital to enable it to move fast enough to hold its differentiation.

• Desai Brothers’ strategic value to Open Secret depends on how effectively the startup is able to leverage the conglomerate’s existing distribution infrastructure.

• Naturis plans to use the capital to build a new production facility in Vapi, Gujarat, and establish an R&D centre in Mumbai. Sharrp’s operating network will be handy though it’s not clear yet whether this is a strategic investment or a financial one.

Most family offices, though noticeably more active now as direct investors, continue to co-invest alongside traditional PE-VC funds. That’s both a function of a natural risk-averseness and the absence of adequate institutionalised systems to manage such investments. In co-investments, family offices have access to the monitoring systems and teams of PE-VC funds. Direct investments require more robust control and monitoring mechanisms.

But, given the pace at which family offices are accelerating direct investments, that could change soon, especially if the returns live up to expectations.

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The Week in Deals

Hero MotoCorp Leads Ather’s Latest Fundraise; Warburg Pincus Buys a Pharma Co

From electric vehicles and financial services to enterprise technology and consumer, dealmaking in India’s PE-VC market served up a varied mix across 17 deals. The total capital deployed, however, remained modest – $260.5 million (not including a buyout whose value was undisclosed). Indian investors continued to deploy capital overseas, participating in four deals worth $282 million, including Emergent.

Ather Energy wrapped up a major capital-raising exercise this week. On Wednesday, the Bangalore-based electric two-wheeler maker’s board approved the raising of Rs 1,200 crore (approximately $124 million) through a preferential issue of shares. Separately, it launched a QIP (qualified institutional placement) at a floor price of Rs 1,169 a share to raise Rs 1,300 crore.

• Under the preferential issue, existing stakeholder Hero MotoCorp is investing Rs 960 crore, raising its stake to 30.68%. India-Japan Fund, managed by the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund, is bringing in Rs 200 crore. Founders Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain are investing Rs 20 crore each.

• Hero MotoCorp’s relationship with Ather, starting from 2016, is one of the longest running strategic commitments in India’s EV (electric vehicle) market. For the Delhi-based two-wheeler major, the investment is part of a broader EV strategy that includes Vida, a portfolio of motorcycles developed in partnership with Netherlands-based Zero Motorcycles, and Euler Motors, a commercial electric three-wheeler and four-wheeler maker. In March it joined Euler’s $46 million Series E round.

• Ather reported Rs 3,671.76 crore in revenues from operations for FY2026, up 63% year-on-year. Net losses narrowed to Rs 517.17 crore from Rs 812.28 crore. The company's stock price climbed to an all-time high of Rs 1,345 on July 16.

Integrace, a Mumbai-based pharmaceuticals company, is being acquired by Warburg Pincus. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The Economic Times reported, citing sources, that the deal values the company at Rs 1,200 crore. Existing shareholders True North and Temasek, who together invested nearly Rs 1,300 crore, will exit as part of the transaction.

• Integrace was formed in 2018 by True North under a collaboration with Glenmark Pharmaceuticals. Under the terms of the collaboration, Glenmark’s orthopaedic and pain management business, valued at Rs 635 crore ($92 million at the time), was transferred to Integrace. In 2020, True North, through Integrace, acquired Glenmark’s gynaecology business for Rs 115 crore (about $16 million).

• Singapore’s Temasek entered the company in 2021, investing Rs 540 crore (about $73 million) in a primary and secondary transaction, creating a partial exit for True North.

Neo Group raised Rs 350 crore ($36 million) in a new funding round from existing investor Peak XV Partners. The Mumbai-based company, which provides wealth and asset management services, had raised $53 million from TVS Capital in March.

Vorflux raised $15 million in its first institutional round from Y Combinator, Peak XV Partners, Powerset and Alliance, alongside a handful of angel investors. The Bangalore-based company provides cloud-based, autonomous AI coding agents for enterprise engineering teams.

Parag Parikh Financial (PPFAS) raised $14.5 million from Avendus’ Future Leaders Fund III. Avendus is acquiring a 1% stake. The Mumbai-based equity-led asset management company has been promoter-owned since its inception in the early nineties. It has grown its AUM (assets under management) at a 70% CAGR over the past five years, Avendus said in a statement. The growth comes on the back of household savings moving to financial assets at scale driven by buoyant public markets. PPFAS, according to reports, is planning for a public market listing by 2030.

QuickClean raised $14 million in a Series B round led by Stakeboat Capital. Alkemi Growth Capital and Blue Ashva Capital participated. The Gurugram-based company provides on-premise laundry infrastructure and services at hotels and other commercial establishments.

E3 Electric raised $10.4 million in a Series A round from BlueVenture Holdings. The Bangalore-based electric two-wheeler company is building AI-powered, modular electric scooters.

Groyyo raised $9.3 million in a round led by Cornerstone Ventures. This is the first tranche of the Gurugram-based company’s Series B round. It offers a fashion and retail focused supply chain platform.

SwitchOn raised a $8 million pre-Series B round led by IvyCap Ventures. SIG Tattva and venture debt firm Trifecta Capital joined the round. The Bangalore-based company offers an AI-powered vision platform that enables manufacturers to detect defects on the shopfloor and improve efficiency.

Sub-$5 million deals: Biomass supply chain platform BiofuelCircle raised $3.6 million led by Spectrum Impact. Clean-label staples retailer Anmasa raised a Rs 37.5 crore ($3.4 million) seed round led by Fireside Ventures. Maternity and baby care products company Promom raised $3.1 million from Fireside Ventures. Biotech company Mankdrake Bio raised $1.6 million in a pre-seed round led by Activate and Antler. Data centre infrastructure company KuhlTherm raised $1.1 million in a seed round led by Arkam Ventures. Pod hotel chain NapTapGo raised $0.8 million in a seed round from Inflection Point Ventures.

In overseas funding deals, Peak XV Partners led a $135 million Series E in San Mateo, California-based Alpaca, a brokerage platform that provides access to financial markets through developer-friendly APIs. Elevation Capital led a $11.3 million Series A in San Francisco based, developer-focused marketing intelligence startup Reo.dev. Heavybit, India Quotient and Foster Ventures were returning investors in the round. Uncorrelated Ventures joined as a new investor. Redstart Labs (Info Edge subsidiary) and 360 OneAsset led a $5.5 million round in Aina which is building human-computer interface devices.

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Elevation Capital raised $500 million for Fund IX to invest at the seed and Series A stages. It follows the $400 million Elevation Holdings fund raised last year to back later and growth stage companies.

Avendus announced that it would close the Future Leaders Fund III at Rs 1,800 crore ($187.3 million) by the end of the month. The fund is already 30% deployed and expects to make 5-6 additional investments over the next 12 months. The fund had a Rs 1,500 crore greenshoe which it appears to have decided not to exercise.

Blackstone sharpened its Asia Pacific infrastructure strategy with the appointment of Ami Momaya as managing director and head of infrastructure for India. Momaya joins Blackstone from KKR India where she served as a managing director.

Recco | Notes on Culture, Craft and the Considered Life

When Royal Enfield Met Rough Crafts

You don’t need to be a rider to be moved by a motorcycle as thunderous as the Royal Enfield x Rough Crafts Shotgun 650.

The motorcycle, among the many variants built on the manufacturer’s 650cc twin-cylinder platform, is its most recent partnership with talent on the custom scene. Rough Crafts is a Taipei-based, multi-disciplinary design firm that specialises in everything from custom motorcycles to streetwear.

The bobber-inspired cruiser is based on Caliber Royale, a bespoke build created by Rough Crafts founder Winston Yeh. Finished in gloss and matte black with hand-applied gold-leaf detailing, it also features a cast brass tank badge, bar-end mirrors, machined aluminium parts and a quilted seat. Mechanically, it remains unchanged, powered by Royal Enfield’s familiar 648cc parallel-twin engine.

Priced at ₹5.75 lakh (ex-showroom), it is the most expensive Royal Enfield currently on sale in India. Just 100 individually numbered motorcycles will be built worldwide, with 25 allocated to India. Registrations are now open through Royal Enfield’s online drop, with successful applicants invited to complete their booking through a dealership.

Like we said earlier, you don’t need to be a rider to appreciate this motorcycle. Then again, if you manage to get your hands on one, you just might find yourself back in the saddle.

Recco is a column by Murali K Menon. Murali has spent a career paying close attention to how things are made, where they come from, and why some of them endure. Every edition, one recommendation: a maker, an object, a place, a practice.

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Raising Elephants

In 2021, an American entrepreneur and impact investor, Luni Libes, proposed a new animal for the startup menagerie. Instead of unicorns or zebras, what the investing world needed, he argued, was elephants – companies that grow steadily, scale and have a big impact on their surroundings.

The idea sat in a corner of the impact investing world until July 2023 when Erica Wenger, general partner at New York-based venture capital firm Park Rangers Capital, published her ‘Elephants, Not Unicorns’ essay pitching the elephant as the defining company archetype for the next decade – community-driven and purpose-led, in contrast to the growth-at-all-costs unicorn.

Neither Libes nor Wenger was thinking specifically about India. But the metaphor was always going to land differently here — elephants are not abstract in this country.

Next Bharat Ventures CEO Vipul Nath Jindal made the connection explicit a year ago. “We don’t want to raise unicorns, we want to raise elephants. We want to build companies that move slowly but can surely reach their goal,” he told Nikkei Asia in an interview last year. Next Bharat Ventures, a 100% subsidiary of Suzuki Motor Corporation, was established in July 2024 with a specific mandate – back social entrepreneurs working towards improving livelihoods in rural India, tier 2 and tier 3 cities and the informal economy in larger cities. The first fund, with a $40 million corpus, backed over 20 companies.

This week, the Bangalore based firm announced the close of its second fund at $200 million. The fund is structured for 15 years instead of the standard 10. The goal is to “build 200 to 300 profitable elephants” over the fund’s life, it said in a statement.

The current portfolio offers a window into what that looks like in practice. Manikstu Agro provides vaccinated livestock to small and marginal farmers alongside veterinary care, market access, and ayurvedic animal health products. MuddleArt is the only formal player in pre-consumer textile waste management in India which integrates marginalised waste workers into a traceable, accountable system. Atypical Advantage is a livelihood platform for persons with disabilities.

Next Bharat Ventures’ close comes in an environment when fundraising in India is slower and more selective. Investors and fund managers are still putting capital to work, but with greater discipline on deployment timelines.

Staying with impact funds, Lok Capital’s fifth fund, which is targeting $250 million, received a $40 million commitment from World Bank arm IFC – $20 million as a direct commitment and up to $20 million as a co-investment envelope. Lok aims to back businesses in financial services, climate and sustainability from the new fund, which has been on the road since last year.

In the broader market, Nandan Nilekani’s The Fundamentum Partnership launched Fund III with a target corpus of Rs 2,200 crore ($230 million), including a Rs 400 crore greenshoe. Nilekani will anchor the fund as a limited partner, stepping back from his general partner role. The Infosys co-founder is also an anchor in Fundamentum Frontier Advisors, a spin-out launched in May by co-founder Ashish Kumar specifically for AI bets.

And NIIF, the sovereign-backed alternative investment firm, secured an AU$500 million ($347 million) commitment from Australian superannuation fund AustralianSuper, taking the latter’s total India exposure across asset classes to AU$3.3 billion ($2.3 billion). AustralianSuper had previously committed $250 million to NIIF’s first fund, with co-investment rights of up to $750 million.

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The Week in Deals

Early Stage Startups Shore Up a Quiet Week

Over 14 companies raised capital this week, most of it at the early stages — seed, pre-seed and pre-Series A. Dealmaking overall has been slower over the past few weeks with the gap most prominent at the early-growth and growth stages. Dive into this week’s round-up.

Aseem Infrastructure Finance, incubated by India’s sovereign-anchored alternative asset manager NIIF, is being acquired by an investor consortium led by TPG. Singapore’s GIC and ICICI Bank are part of the consortium, which will pick up a 100% stake in the Mumbai-based debt financier creating an exit for NIIF.

• ICICI Bank is slated to own a 5% stake. Further financial details were not disclosed. Media reports estimate the size of the deal at between Rs 4,800-Rs 5,000 crore ($500-$526 million).

• NIIF owned a 59.05% stake in the company at the close of March 2026, according to regulatory disclosures. Japan’s SMBC owned 10% and the Government of India held 30.95%.

• The company has disbursed loans worth over Rs 40,000 crore to date, including 27 GW of renewable energy projects, it said in a statement.

• NIIF recently secured an additional $3.2 billion investment commitment from the Government of India and $347 from AustralianSuper, a returning investor, for its Fund II.

Iswarya Fertility Center raised a $36.7 million growth round from OrbiMed. The Chennai-based company has been providing IVF treatment services for three decades and operates over 80 fertility centres concentrated in the southern states. It also has a presence in Maharashtra and Kolkata. India’s declining fertility rates have become a concern lately while spelling growth opportunities for private sector players in the IVF and fertility treatment space.

Adage Automation raised Rs 230 crore ($24 million) in a growth round led by InCred Alternative Investments. Global South Capital and Prachetas Capital participated in the round. InCred contributed Rs 180 crore to the round. The Goa-based company designs and manufactures advanced industrial gas analyser systems for sectors such as oil and gas, cements, chemicals, power and energy.

Elevate Education (formerly known as Sunstone) raised a $17.7 million Series D from returning investor WestBridge Capital. The Gurugram-based company offers independent degree programmes, runs programmes for undergraduate and post-graduate education, and assists students with job placements.

Edtech deals have been sporadic for the past couple of years following the spectacular implosions of Byju’s and Unacademy. The latter is being acquired by rival upGrad (the CCI approval came in this week) for a reported Rs 2,055 crore (about $218 million), a 90% slide from its peak valuation.

Karamtara Engineering raised $7.8 million from Amara Partners in a pre-IPO round. The Mumbai-based company manufactures solar mounting structures and tracker components for the renewable energy sector. It filed draft documents for a Rs 1,750 crore initial public offering last year.

Sub $5 million deals: Sustainable packaging solutions company Econovus raised $4.2 million in a pre-Series A round led by Rainmatter. Physical AI company Mowito raised $3 million led by Version One Ventures. Dairy products company Doodhvale Farms raised $1 million from existing investor Atomic Capital. Skincare brand Neothera raised $0.9 million in a pre-seed round led by Blume Ventures. AI-led diagnostic technology startup eNLife Research raised $0.6 million in a seed round led by Piper Serica. Spacetech startup BAAS Technologies raised $0.5 million in a pre-seed round led by Inflection Point Ventures. Loyalty rewards platform Onpoint raised $0.6 million in a pre-seed round co-led by India Quotient (via its First Cheque platform) and Whiteboard Capital. AI-led customer research company Alchemic raised $0.2 million in a pre-seed round led by AJVC.

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Recco | Notes on Culture, Craft and the Considered Life

The Rainwater Gin

This week’s recommendation isn’t just a gin. It’s the company behind it. Cherrapunji Eastern Craft Gin is made by Meghalaya-based Raincheck Earth, which raised $1.2 million in funding last February. The idea behind the company is beautifully simple: if you’re going to make a gin in one of the wettest places on Earth, why not use rainwater?

That’s exactly what it does.

The rainwater is harvested, treated and used in the distillation process. Ironically, Cherrapunji, despite being among the rainiest places on the planet, faces water shortages every winter because most of its rain runs off the rocky terrain instead of being stored.

The gin itself is bright, citrusy and smoky, with botanicals sourced from across the Northeast, including Khasi mandarin, Kaji lemon, smoked tea, Himalayan juniper, black pepper and cardamom. There’s also Berry Blossom, a second, more recent expression that combines sweet-tart wild Sohiong berries, a black mountain fruit native to Meghalaya, with delicate pink cherry blossoms.

Raincheck Earth also recently picked up a prestigious Red Dot Design Award for its recyclable stainless-steel bottle, a clever alternative to the heavy glass bottles that dominate premium spirits. It is available in major metros, including Mumbai and Delhi.

The gin is excellent, and the story behind it is even better.

Recco is a column by Murali K Menon. Murali has spent a career paying close attention to how things are made, where they come from, and why some of them endure. Every edition, one recommendation: a maker, an object, a place, a practice.

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Enterprise Tech, Financial Services, Consumer Lead a Slower Q2

Packaged snacks, dairy products and instant home services competed with data centres, AI and home finance for attention in a slower market for private equity and venture capital (PE-VC) investments in India during the first six months of 2026.

While nearly $13 billion was deployed across 431 deals between January and June, investments dropped 32% in the second quarter and capital concentrated around fewer businesses. The sharpest decline was in April when investments plunged to $1.65 billion from $4.11 billion a month ago. The decline continued into May, falling well below $1 billion.

The headline numbers aren’t encouraging.

But there were some winners.

India’s consumption economy was the busiest in terms of the number of deals struck, cornering 33% of the 431 deals in the first six months.

Capital flows into homegrown consumer businesses (consumer brands and consumer-tech) increased from $760 million in Q1 to $1.03 billion in Q2.

From packaged food and personal care to ride hailing apps and quick commerce, investors spread their bets across the spectrum.

Consumer businesses, however, accounted for only 14% of the total capital deployed during the first six months. Financial services and enterprise technology were investor favourites in terms of attracting capital at scale – $2.7 billion and $3.2 billion respectively. The concentration of capital was also high in these two sectors – 47 deals in financial services and 59 in enterprise technology.

Specific to enterprise technology, the largest deals involved data centre companies riding on the AI infrastructure momentum – Nxtra Data ($1 billion), CtrlS ($741 million) and Neysa ($600 million).

The slower investment environment in India is in line with a downturn in PE-VC markets around the world. Global deal value declined 22.8% quarter-on-quarter to $419.8 billion in Q2 2026, primarily due to disruptions caused by geopolitics and AI, according to PitchBook. Liquidity was a concern as exits dropped 19.7% to $275 billion, which in turn impact fundraising by PE-VC firms.

Exits are a concern in India as well with the public markets less receptive this year to initial public offerings (IPOs) by PE-VC-backed companies. More than a few such companies listed at significant discounts to their offer prices and several others have delayed their IPOs to muster better valuations. In parallel, exits via secondary deals have become more frequent with fund managers under pressure to deliver returns to limited partners from ageing portfolios.

Despite weaker market conditions, early stage investing remained resilient in the second quarter. While the early stage (pre-seed to Series A) deal count in Q2 dropped to 95 from 140 in Q1, it was still the most active category in the first six months.

Going into the second half of the year, investments are expected to remain under pressure as investors recalibrate their deployment strategies around external and internal disruptions.

We’re already witnessing one defining pattern as an outcome of the disruption caused by AI. An increasing number of homegrown investors are striking deals overseas. May (11 deals) and June (14 deals) were exceptionally busy months for investments in largely AI-related companies based primarily in the US.

We’ll share a more detailed analysis of Q2 2026 in the next edition Signals, our quarterly reading of India’s PE-VC market, soon. Stay tuned.

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The Week in Deals

Adar Poonawalla’s Renewables Bet; Leg Up for Elder Care

A quieter week for funding activity in India’s PE-VC market, with just $185 million invested across 18-odd deals. Last week, of course, was an outlier because of Cred’s mega raise. The surprise deal this week was Ninjacart, which came out of the woodwork to raise a $6 million bridge round from existing investors.

Inox Clean Energy raised Rs 700 crore ($73.4 million) in a new funding round from Rising Sun Holdings, an investment vehicle for Serum Institute promoter Adar Poonawalla’s family office.

• The round values the Noida-based company at Rs 70,000 crore (approximately $7.3 billion), it said in a statement.

• In January, the company, part of the INOXGFL Group, raised Rs 3,100 crore (approximately $343 million) from an investor group led by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), a long-time investor in India’s PE market.

• Inox Clean Energy manufactures solar modules and cells which are used to establish captive hybrid renewable power generation capacities.

The Indus Valley raised $17 million in a Series B round led by Gaja Capital. Existing investors DSG Consumer Partners and Rukam Capital joined the round. The Bangalore-based company manufactures and retails toxin-free cookware.

Incuspaze raised $15.8 million in a new funding round from Bharat Value Fund. The round comes shortly after the Gurugram-based co-working and office solutions provider acquired Hyderabad-based peer iKeva to grow its presence in the country’s southern markets.

BatX Energies raised $11 million in a Series A round led by IvyCap Ventures. Co-investors in the round included Zephyr Peacock, and the family offices of the promoters of Mankind Pharma and Excel Industries Family Office. The Gurugram-based company recovers and recycles minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel from end-of-life batteries.

PlayBlue raised $11 million in a seed round led by Centre Court Capital and MIXI Global. WEH Ventures joined as a co-investor. The Ahmedabad-based company is building an omnichannel retail platform for sport and sport-related products.

Dovetail Capital, a Mumbai-based firm that helps global and domestic asset managers set up and operate investment funds in India, raised $10.4 million in a Series A round from Elev8 Venture Partners.

Kapture CX raised $10 million in a pre-Series B round led by Bajaj Finserv Ventures. Existing investors Cactus Venture Partners and India Alternatives joined the round. The Bangalore-based company offers a SaaS customer experience automation platform for enterprises.

Phitku, a Gurugram-based company that retails alum-based skincare products, raised an undisclosed amount from Ananta Capital. The investment firm, backed by the Taparia Group (Famy Care) picked up a majority stake in the company. Multiple media outlets put the deal size at Rs 100 crore ($10.4 million).

Age Care Labs raised about $9 million as part of the first tranche of an ongoing Series B round. Rainmatter, Pegasus Finvest and Shrem Group invested in the current tranche. The Gurugram-based company caters to the elder care market through two platforms – Epoch Elder Care and Emoha, which provides assisted living and residential care homes, and Emoha, a membership-based platform that delivers health monitoring, emergency response and concierge services. The Age Care Labs platform was launched and anchored by Lumis Partners. Epoch Elder Care was acquired by the platform in 2021.

Ninjacart raised $6 million in a bridge round from existing investors Accel, Tiger Global and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani. The round is the first tranche of a larger infusion and comes over four years after it last raised capital. The Bangalore-based company claimed that it had turned EBITDA-profitable.

Supply6 raised $5 million in a new funding round led by Unilever Ventures. Existing investor Zeropearl VC participated. The Bangalore-based company retails nutritional products and supplements.

Sub-$5 million deals: Consumer brands venture studio BCT Ventures raised $4.4 million in a seed round from 3one4 Capital. Banking infrastructure company Spense raised $2.8 million in a seed round led by Arkam Ventures. Industrial process air conditioners maker Albatross Energetics raised $1 million from Transition VC. AI-led test-prep startup Lytmus AI raised $0.5 million from Boundless Ventures. Lifestyle brand Cunin raised $0.4 million from All In Capital and Huddle Ventures.

In overseas funding deals, Venture Catalysts led a $0.5 million round in Singapore-based AI startup Clairva.

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Recco | Notes on Culture, Craft and the Considered Life

The Shirtmaker Chanel Wanted

Chanel’s acquisition of Charvet earlier this week is as good a time as any to spotlight this venerable, nearly 190-year-old brand that still does things the old way.

Charvet is not just among the world’s finest luxury shirtmakers; it was the world’s first specialist shirtmaker. Its home remains the same townhouse in Paris, where generations of statesmen, industrialists, royalty and exceptionally well-dressed men have commissioned shirts.

Marcel Proust was a patron, and so were John F. Kennedy, Yves Saint Laurent and Coco Chanel, who was introduced to the shirtmaker by her lover — and British polo player — Arthur Capel.

Charvet is famous for its impossibly soft cottons, Sea Island fabrics, hand-finished details and an astonishing library of colours and patterns. Some of its ready-to-wear shirts, slippers and accessories can be purchased online. But if you’re looking to go bespoke, you’ll have to visit 28 Place Vendôme, where you can choose from more than 6,000 fabrics. A ready-to-wear shirt starts at around €500. Bespoke costs considerably more.

Chanel didn’t acquire Charvet because it needed to make better shirts. It acquired Charvet because heritage, when it’s genuine, is almost impossible to recreate.

Also read: 100 Hands Comes Home

Recco is a column by Murali K Menon. Murali has spent a career paying close attention to how things are made, where they come from, and why some of them endure. Every edition, one recommendation: a maker, an object, a place, a practice.

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EXL Buys iMerit. MoEngage Scoops Up Aampe. Honasa Buys Into Nutraceuticals

Metiabruz in Kolkata isn’t a place you’d expect to find the back-office of a Silicon Valley AI model training company. Located in the city’s historic Garden Reach neighbourhood, it’s known for its small scale garment factories and largely low-income population. Back in 2012, it became the location of choice for San Jose, California-headquartered iMerit’s earliest data annotation centre with the express intent of bringing marginalised citizens into the mainstream workforce.

On Wednesday, iMerit agreed to be acquired by Nasdaq-listed business process management company EXLService Holdings.

• The $310 million acquisition is being structured as an upfront consideration of $170 million and an additional $140 million paid out over two years, subject to achieving specified milestones.

• The deal delivers an exit for British International Investment (BII). The UK government-backed impact investor led a $20 million Series B round in the company in 2020. It was joined by iMerit’s existing investors Khosla Ventures, Omidyar Network and Dell Foundation. The three entered the company in 2015 with a $3.5 million Series A.

What does iMerit do and what’s EXL buying?

Shaped in the classic mould of the back-office operations that have fuelled India’s nearly $300 billion information technology (IT) services industry, iMerit, simply put, trains AI models on behalf of other enterprises.

• Its proprietary Ango platform evaluates how well a model reasons through a problem and probes its for weaknesses. The company’s Scholars network, a roster of external experts such as doctors, scientists, engineers and linguists, checks the model’s responses and helps fix what’s wrong.

• Founded by Radha Ramaswami Basu, a former Hewlett-Packard executive, and her husband, Dipak Basu, a former Cisco manager, the company today operates a dozen-odd delivery centers in India across cities such as Ranchi, Bhubaneswar, Shillong, Visakhapatnam, Hubballi and Kolkata. It also has operations in Bhutan.

• EXL’s chief financial officer Maurizio Nicolelli told analysts this week that iMerit’s preliminary, unaudited revenues for the year ended March 2026 was approximately $59 million.

• CEO Rohit Kapoor said, on the same analysts’ call, that roughly 3,600 of iMerit’s full-time employees would move to EXL as part of the acquisition, working across clients that include large AI labs building general-purpose models, “the Mag 7” (Wall Street jargon for the seven big US technology companies that dominate the bourses), self driving car companies and healthcare providers.

Apart from iMerit, two other M&A deals worth noting from this week:

MoEngage-Aampe: SaaS company MoEngage acquired Aampe, a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company that assigns automated decision-making agents to enterprise customers. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Aampe, according to reports, raised about $28 million across three funding rounds over its lifetime from Peak XV Partners, Z47 and Theory Ventures. Mumbai-based Z47 is also an investor in MoEngage, entering at the company’s Series B in 2018.

MoEngage last raised $280 million in a Series F round last year from an investor group that included Goldman Sachs, A91 Partners, ChrysCapital and Dragon Funds. The Aampe acquisition comes months after MoEngage secured the National Company Law Tribunal’s approval for a reverse merger under which MoEngage Inc., the company’s Delaware-incorporated US parent, will merge into MoEngage India Private Limited, its Bangalore-based Indian subsidiary. Reports frame the move as preparation for a potential IPO in India.

Honasa-Fluence: Beauty and personal care brand Mamaearth’s parent Honasa Consumer acquired a 58% stake in Fluence Pharma, a nutraceuticals company. Following the acquisition, Delhi-based Honasa will establish a subsidiary, Honasa Health, to cater to the nutraceuticals market, it said in a regulatory filing. Fluence Pharma offers OTC supplements for complex hair and skin conditions.

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Off-Lead | By Murali K Menon

Sweat Equity

Word on the street is that L Catterton wants a bite of Hyrox.

Hyrox is a structured global race format – eight runs of one kilometre interspersed with eight functional workout stations – that has grown from a Hamburg startup in 2017 to a $130 million revenue business operating across more than 30 countries.

It’s gaining momentum in India, too, and not just in our big cities. Its most recent event in Bengaluru earlier this year pulled in 8,200 participants from 240 towns. Hyrox’s Mumbai event in September – to be held over four days and with about 15,000 participants – sold out in May. The company expects 1.3 million athletes competing across 85 cities globally.

Hyrox is also, increasingly, a sport, with participants across the world – your cousin in Chicago, that couple you know in Berlin – competing against each other on a global leaderboard. And it is becoming something of a social phenomenon. Earlier this week, Business Insider described Hyrox as “the hot new dating scene”, chronicling the rise of Hyrox blind dates and fitness-first matchmaking.

In startup circles, meanwhile, Hyrox is increasingly being compared to padel – another activity that has evolved into an informal networking venue. One LinkedIn post even coined a term for the phenomenon: “sweatworking”.

So, it’s perhaps not surprising that it has caught the attention of private equity, which has been pouring money into sport, especially in the recent past. Otro Capital raised $1.2 billion for the largest dedicated sports buyout fund ever. KKR acquired Arctos Capital, which holds stakes in professional sports franchises, for $1.4 billion, while Apollo is building a $5 billion sports investment platform. And we’re all aware of the billion-dollar buyouts in the IPL. (If you are looking for some numbers, participation sport is expected to touch $379 billion by 2030, according to industry intelligence provider MarketResearch.com.)

For a luxury-focused consumer private equity firm backed by LVMH, Hyrox sits at the confluence of sport and premium consumption, an intersection increasingly occupied by luxury brands themselves. Gucci recently announced a $150 million title sponsorship with Alpine F1, while Louis Vuitton is now the title partner for the Monaco Grand Prix.

Hyrox, if L Catterton does move, would represent something different in this landscape — a bet not on a franchise or a league, but on a sport that has built itself from the ground up, with no teams, no owners, and no broadcast rights. Instead, it is built on people paying to compete, alongside sponsorships from brands such as Puma.

Could it go the way of CrossFit, once worth billions and now being dressed up for sale by Berkshire Partners? Possibly. For now, investors appear willing to wager that Hyrox is building a sport rather than merely riding a fitness trend.

The Week in Deals

Meta’s Bet on Cred; Bessemer Leads Two Deals

At over 800 million monthly active users, India is Meta-owned messaging platform WhatsApp’s largest market. But it has struggled to monetise that user base, notably on the payments front, lagging rivals such as Google Pay and PhonePe. Meta hopes to rectify that with the induction of Cred founder Kunal Shah into its global leadership team as head of WhatsApp.

Alongside, Meta is investing $900 million in Cred in its Series H round for a reported 20% stake.

• The transaction, a combination of primary and secondary share purchases, values the Bangalore-based fintech at Rs 43,239 crore ($4.5 billion) – a downward revision from its peak at $6.4 billion but higher than the $3.5 billion it was valued at when it raised last raised capital.

• Prior to the Meta round, Cred raised over $1 billion from investors such as GIC, Peak XV Partners, and Tiger Global. The secondary portion, reported at about $400 million, creates exits for some of those investors.

• Founded in 2018, Cred is a members-only club that rewards consumers for strong credit scores. Members have access to services such as loans, payments, insurance and wealth management.

Square Yards raised Rs 900 crore ($95 million) in an equity and debt round. EAAA Alternatives brought in Rs 600 crore ($63 million) through its Special Situations Strategy. Muzinich & Co anchored the debt component. The Gurugram-based proptech platform offers consumers solutions across the stack from search and discovery to transactions and property management.

Recykal raised $23 million in a bridge round, which was a combination of primary and secondary capital. The company’s existing investors and a group of new family offices invested in the round, it said in a statement. According to the Times of India, new investors in the round include Biological E and the family office of Biological E managing director Mahima Datla. Returning investors include 360 One Asset and Pidilite Industries vice chairman Ajay Parekh’s family office. Early investor Circulate Capital exited its investment completely, scoring a 5x return, the Hyderabad-based waste management company said in the statement.

AllHome, a platform for sourcing interior materials for homes, raised $21 million in a Series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The round, according to reports, values the startup at Rs 2,000 crore (about $211 million). The Mumbai-based startup was founded in 2025 by the founders of online pharmaceuticals and wellness products app PharmEasy.

Mitigata raised $15 million in a Series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Titan Capital and WEH Ventures joined the round. The Bangalore-based company is building a AI-native cyber resilience platform that enables enterprises to combine cyber insurance, security operations, compliance automation and incident response in a single decision layer.

Bodycraft Salon Spa and Clinic raised $12.7 million from Singularity AMC. The Bangalore-based company provides hair and skin care, cosmetology and wellness services across 70 offline centers in Bangalore, Mumbai, Gurgaon, Delhi and other cities.

SuperLiving, a Bangalore-based startup that operates a lifestyle services app, raised $7 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed. Existing investors Kae Capital and All in Capital joined the round.

Sub $5 million deals: Managed vacation homes operator SaffronStays raised $3.5 million from Infinity Ventures. Deep tech startup Qosmic raised $3.3 million led by Prosus and Accel. GPS-enabled smart locks solutions provider Ikin Global raised $2 million led by Unicorn India Ventures. Toys and learning products startup LiLLBUD raised $0.6 million led by Zeropearl VC. AI-powered shopping assistant Zave raised $0.5 million led by Inflection Point Ventures.

In overseas funding deals, Premji Invest led a $190 million Series A-1 round in Santa Clara, California-based AI networking infrastructure company Upscale AI. The round valued the company at $2 billion. NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, Seligman Ventures and Temasek joined as new investors. Peak XV Partners joined San Francisco-based AI-led marketing platform JustAI’s $17.5 million Series A round and New York-based employee management platform Warp’s $60 million Series B. Sherlocks AI, a Palo Alto, California-based startup that offers AI-led SRE incident management solutions, raised $0.8 million from SenseAI Ventures and Uppekkha.

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Recco | Notes on Culture, Craft and the Considered Life

The Notebook That Refuses to Die

Chances are you’ll never actually use one. Your phone already remembers your appointments, stores your shopping lists and takes down your notes. But there is something undeniably old-world and deeply satisfying about putting pen to paper, especially when the pen is good and the paper even better. Which brings us to this week’s recommendation: a notebook from Smythson.

Founded on London’s Bond Street, Smythson has been making fine stationery for well over a century. Its notebooks are distinguished by their featherweight paper — remarkably thin yet resistant to ink bleed — and have found admirers ranging from royalty to politicians, writers and artists.

They’re also expensive. A simple notebook starts at around ₹5,000, while leather-bound editions can cost considerably more. The price reflects the materials and craftsmanship: featherweight paper, meticulous binding and supple leather covers. You’re also paying for nearly 140 years of heritage and the fact that, in a world where most notebooks are disposable, Smythson continues to make them as objects intended to be kept.

Will it make you a better writer? Probably not. But if you’ve been looking for an excuse to put your phone aside, uncap a good fountain pen and enjoy the simple act of writing, few notebooks do it with quite as much elegance.

Recco is a column by Murali K Menon. Murali has spent a career paying close attention to how things are made, where they come from, and why some of them endure. Every edition, one recommendation: a maker, an object, a place, a practice.

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HCLTech Vaults Sarvam AI Into The Unicorn Club

Sarvam AI is now valued at $1.5 billion following the first close of a targeted $300 million Series B round. The Bangalore-based company raised $234 million, of which $150 million is being invested by HCLTech for a 10.46% stake. Bessemer Venture Partners joined the round as a new investor. Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners were returning investors.

The Series B came just three days after Anthropic disabled access for all non-US users to Claude’s most advanced models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, acting on an order from the US government. Sarvam last raised capital over two years ago when Lightspeed Venture Partners led a $41 million Series A.

What’s HCLTech buying?

HCLTech generated $14.7 billion revenues in FY2026, the bulk of it from clients in the US and Europe. It already has what those clients need – a partnership with OpenAI, signed in June last year to deliver enterprise AI services. Infosys and TCS have equivalent deals with Anthropic. These are access arrangements whereby the information technology (IT) services firm gets to use a model it doesn’t own. The Sarvam investment gives HCLTech ownership and access.

What that ownership buys, specifically:

• A foothold in India’s enterprise AI market. Sarvam’s models are built for India-specific languages, data and regulated sectors. Its clients – SBI Life, LIC, IDFC, Tata Capital and CRED – are in banking and insurance where regulations on data residency make foreign-hosted models difficult to use regardless of their capability. HCLTech’s India business, though a much smaller part of its overall revenues, grew 5.7% in FY2026, faster than its US revenues at 2.3%.

• An opening in sovereignty-driven markets. HCLTech’s regulatory filing states that the investment will help the company build “sovereign AI solutions for governments, regulated industries and enterprises seeking localized, secure and compliant AI deployments.” Apart from the US and Europe, the Noida-based company has a presence in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and part of Africa.

• A hedge against limited access to foreign models: HCLTech’s annualised revenues for what it called its Advanced AI services crossed $620 million in the fourth quarter of FY2026 – revenue built on top of models it doesn’t own. If access to frontier models gets restricted further, HCTTech would need alternatives. Sarvam is one candidate. AI services are estimated to open up a $300-400 billion market for Indian IT services companies by 2030 despite a 2-3% projected annual revenue deflation in the near-term. Having options to address that market is good business.

What Sarvam brings to the table (or not)

Within its domain, Sarvam, according to its own disclosures, has built a few things:

• The 105B and 30B models have been trained from scratch in India.

• Its document processing tools have digitised over 35 million pages.

• Its conversational platform handles 2 million interactions a day.

• The voice platform has collected crop data from 17 million farmers for the Ministry of Agriculture and supported renewals for 45 million insurance policyholders.

But the numbers also show that the company is still at a very early stage. Sarvam’s unaudited FY2026 revenues were at Rs 45 crore (according to HCLTech’s regulatory filing), up from Rs 1.5 crore in FY2025. In terms of technical capability, the company claims that its flagship 105B model “matches or outperforms larger reasoning models on knowledge, reasoning and agentic benchmarks.”

“Sarvam’s moat is strong. Indian languages, Indian data, the regulated sectors that actually need it. But, in the agentic era, it’s well behind the giants winning enterprise right now,” technology journalist Shubham Sharma* tells us. He points to a specific gap. Sarvam’s 105B model scores 12 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, while Google’s Gemma 4 31B, under a third the size, scores 29.

“The market’s energy has broadly moved to two ends. Small, performant models that run on your device, and frontier or near-frontier models running agents that do that work – building apps, raising invoices, sending pitches. Not just answering questions. Sarvam’s flagship (105B) sits in between – neither cheap enough to run locally, nor capable enough to run advanced agentic capabilities. Two years ago this would have been a strong product. Now it feels like one that’s lagging behind.”

To win, Sharma adds, Sarvam will need to hold on to its moat and build towards what buyers actually need – a model that works with accuracy, speed and efficiency across all workflows, whether Indian-associated or just something as simple as logging data in an Excel sheet.

The same week Sarvam closed its round, China’s DeepSeek raised $7.4 billion at a valuation exceeding $50 billion, according to a Reuters report on June 16, citing The Information. Reuters said it had not independently verified the report. DeepSeek’s flagship V4 Pro – at roughly 1.6 trillion parameters against Sarvam’s 106 billion – scores 44 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. The two models aren’t a clean match: different scale, different cost and different design intent. DeepSeek’s V4 Pro aims at the general frontier while Sarvam’s 105B is for Indian languages and regulated sectors. The gap though is still informative as a measure of the distance between where each country’s best funded AI effort stands.

What to watch

Sarvam is backed by some of India’s most active venture capital investors. The same funds, along with corporate strategics, are also deploying significant capital overseas. Take Peak XV Partners, a returning investor in Sarvam’s Series B. The Bangalore-based venture capital firm has struck 27-odd deals this year and nearly half involve companies based in the US or in other overseas markets, The Runway reported earlier this month.

On June 12, the day Anthropic disabled Fable and Mythos, Bangalore-based IT services major Wipro joined Arcade.dev’s $60 million Series A, a San Francisco-based company building a security and authorization layer for enterprise AI agents.

What emerges is that India’s most capable venture capital firms and IT services majors are not converging on a single sovereign AI strategy; they are making different, sometimes opposite, bets at the same moment.

The question for Sarvam, and for the sovereign AI thesis more broadly, is whether the domestic ecosystem can generate the scale of capital that building and sustaining a frontier foundation model requires, or whether the funding will always be a fraction of what comparable efforts in the US and China attract.

Specific to the June 12 Anthropic suspension, whether the ban holds, expands to other models, or is reversed will determine whether it was a turning point for how Indian IT services thinks about its AI dependencies.

*Shubham Sharma is an India-based journalist and specialist technology writer focused on AI and Data. He is also a guest writer for The Runway. Read his articles: Utility Defines India’s AI Narrative and AI in India, For India.

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The Week in Deals

Family Offices Crowd Cap Tables; New-Age Consumer Scores Again

Homegrown family offices of varying sizes showed up in six deals this week, including two overseas. Overall, the investment momentum in India’s PE-VC market has picked up significantly over the last couple of weeks after a brief lull. Apart from a blockbuster datacenter investment, enterprise tech companies as a block had a decent outing. For next-generation consumer brands, it was a milestone week with a global cosmetics company swooping in to buy a homegrown personal care brand.

CtrlS Datacenters raised Rs 7,000 crore ($741 million) from Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments). The money, according to a statement, will be split two ways:

• Rs 4,000 crore ($423.4 million) will buy a 8.2% stake in CtrlS, valuing the company pre-money at about $4.8 billion.

• Rs 3,000 crore ($315.5 million) will be invested in a new joint venture to build hyperscale data centre campuses across the country. CPP Investments will own a 48% stake in the joint venture and CtrlS will hold the rest.

Founded in 2007, Hyderabad-based CtrlS runs 19 data centres across nine cities with a capacity of over 370 MW. It is adding another 4.4 GW across projects at various stages of execution and also plans to expand to the Middle East and Southeast Asia, starting with Thailand, it said in the statement. The investment from CPP Investments is the company’s first major institutional equity round, founder and CEO Sridhar Pinnapureddy told Mint, adding that it did a friends and family round four months ago which included Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath.

SolarSquare, a Mumbai-based company that provides rooftop solar solutions for homes and businesses, raised $53 million in a Series C round led by B Capital. Returning investors in the round included Lightspeed, Elevation Capital, Lowercarbon Capital, Rainmatter and Good Capital.

Vetic raised $40 million in a new funding round led by existing investor Bessemer Venture Partners. Greenoaks Capital, Lachy Groom and JSW Family Office were returning investors in the round. The Gurugram-based startup provides petcare services via an omnichannel presence. The round comes a year after Vetic raised $26 million in a Series C round led by Bessemer.

TruNativ raised $30 million in a Series B round from OrbiMed. The round included a secondary component that enabled exits for early investors. The Mumbai-based company makes and retails clean-label nutrition products.

Rusk Media raised $10.5 million in a pre-Series C round led by existing investor Nazara Technologies. Info Edge Ventures, IvyCap Ventures and Audacity Ventures joined the round. The Delhi-based mobile-first digital entertainment company develops and delivers serialised social OTT video content across fiction and non-fiction genres.

Karo Sambhav raised $5.9 million in a pre-Series A round from Rainmatter. The Gurugram-based startup collects and recycles waste across e-waste, batteries, glass and other end-of-life material streams.

Sub $5 million deals: Gourmet food and lifestyle platform Foodstories raised $5.3 million led by Nikhil Kamath. RFP and tender management software developer ContraVault AI raised $3.1 million led by Chiratae Ventures. Wealth management company Crest Capital raised $3.1 million led by BEENEXT. VR training platform AutoVRse raised $2.4 million from Singularity AMC and Lumikai. Used two-wheeler marketplace Speedioo raised $1 million led by Atomic Capital.

In overseas funding deals, Wipro went shopping for a stake in an AI infrastructure company, Premji Invest joined an investor group to back cancer therapies-focused biotech and Centre Court Capital struck a deal in Paris.

• Arcade.dev raised a $60 million Series A round, which IT services major Wipro joined as a strategic co-investor. The round was led by SYN Ventures and included Morgan Stanley. The San Francisco-based startup provides a secure action and authorization layer or MCP Runtime to enable AI agents to act on behalf of users in enterprises.

• Pramaana Labs raised $27 million in a seed round led by Khosla Ventures. Nexus Venture Partners, Premji Invest were among the co-investors in the round. The San Francisco-based startup is building the “verification layer for AI.”

• Rocapine, a Paris-based venture studio that develops wellness apps, raised a $13 million Series A round. Mumbai-based Centre Court Capital was among the investors in the round, which was led by Educapital.

• Zumutor Biologics raised $7.3 million in a pre-Series B round led by existing investors Accel and Bharat Innovation Fund. Premji Invest, public markets investor Ashish Kacholia and Dandu Family Office joined the round as new investors. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech company, which operates labs in Bangalore, is developing antibody-based cancer therapies that harness NK (natural killer) cells to detect and eliminate tumours.

A consumer brand acquisition marked M&A this week. French cosmetics group L’Oreal signed an agreement to buy a majority stake in Innovist, a Gurugram-based personal care startup known for brands such as Bare Anatomy and Chemist at Play. The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

• Post-acquisition, the brands will sit within L’Oréal’s Consumer Products Division portfolio. Innovist was founded in 2018 by Rohit Chawla, Sifat Khurana and Vimal Bhola who will remain on board as minority shareholders.

• As part of the agreement, L’Oreal has secured rights to buy out Innovist’s minority stakeholders, it said in a statement.

• The startup has raised about $26 million till date from multiple investors including ICICI Venture, Sauce VC, Accel, Mirabilis Investment Trust, family offices Niveshaay Investment and 72 Ventures, and Amazon Smbhav Venture Fund. Accel exited the company last year when ICICI Venture led a $15.8 million Series B round.

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Recco | Notes on Culture, Craft and the Considered Life

Give Rum Another Chance

The pleasures of a good rum are often overlooked in favour of whisky, especially in India. That is a pity because rum is among the world’s most diverse spirits, capable of expressing everything from rich molasses notes to grassy, almost vegetal flavours.

It’s not as if India lacks good rum.

Goa-based Maka Zai’s limited-edition, barrel-aged Mesma rum is a case in point. Then there is Camikara, which introduced many Indian drinkers to the world of rhum agricole, a style traditionally associated with the French Caribbean. Unlike most rums, which are made from molasses, rhum agricole is distilled from fresh sugarcane juice, producing spirits that are often fresher and more aromatic. More recently, Huli Spirits pioneered India’s first jaggery rum, a category that was later joined by Amrut Distilleries.

Our recommendation this week is Neoli from Himmaleh Spirits, the company behind the well-regarded Kumaon & I gin.

Neoli adapts the rhum agricole tradition to the Indian Himalayas, using sugarcane sourced from Uttarakhand. The result is a spirit that feels markedly different from the dark, sweet rums many Indians grew up drinking. More importantly, it demonstrates how Indian spirits makers are beginning to explore rum with the same seriousness that helped transform perceptions of Indian whisky over the past decade. Neoli is available in Uttarakhand, Goa and a handful of other markets.

If your bar is stocked entirely with single malts, this might be a good excuse to venture beyond whisky.

Recco is a column by Murali Menon. Murali has spent a career paying close attention to how things are made, where they come from, and why some of them endure. Every edition, one recommendation: a maker, an object, a place, a practice.

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It started with ecommerce, food delivery, cabs and entertainment and has expanded to just about any product from everyday essentials and medicines to gold coins. Today, we’re savouring the era of services-on-demand. Rent skills by the hour. And, it’s only just starting to take off.

Services such as plumbing, small repairs and pest control have been available on-demand for a few years. Urban Company put all those services on an app and solved the problem of dealing with the inconsistencies of an unorganised mass of service providers. In the past couple of years, that proposition has been expanded quickly to what is now termed ‘home services’, notably domestic help services, on tap.

The prices are sometimes ridiculously low. I once paid Rs 26 an hour (as part of a package deal) on the Snabbit app to have one of their professionals come in and wash dishes, sweep, mop and do the laundry.

India’s largely unorganised home services market was estimated at $60 billion in FY2025 and is tipped to grow at 10-11% CAGR over the next five years. Apps such as Snabbit, Pronto and Urban Company’s InstaHelp accounted for less than 1% of that market (Source: RedSeer).

Fuelled by venture capital, these apps are sprinting to outdo each other on market share, typically through heavy discounts and slick marketing.

The universe of services on offer is expanding. From domestic help and salon-at-home to soon, even robots, the possibilities seem endless as long as capital remains interested in bankrolling the urban consumer’s next fix. What’s that going to be?

In Edition #35, guest writer Keshav Lohia says that the “habit of paying to delegate the mundane,” is leading up to having sophisticated concierge apps run your life. “From needs to wants,” as he puts it.

When I invited Lohia to pen an article on how he viewed the home services opportunity, Snabbit and Pronto had just seen significant valuation bumps on new funding rounds. During the writing of the article, news emerged about Pronto’s push to capture real-world home data for robotics training – the story broken by Entrackr.

Lohia argues that the real asset being built is not market share but data – and the gap between what these platforms charge today for services and what they need to charge to survive is being quietly closed by something users did not sign up for.

A bit about Keshav Lohia. Home is Jodhpur in Rajasthan. He’s currently an early stage investor based in New York. He previously invested in consumer-tech startups at Kalaari Capital and was a product leader at Zomato. He is fascinated by how technology reshapes everyday consumer behaviour and writes about the businesses, technologies, and cultural shifts changing the way we live and work in his newsletter, Tech & Tonic. Give it a read. It’s what encouraged me to reach out to him.

His article is part of The Runway’s series of contributed essays, designed to curate and share insights and lived experiences from stakeholders in India’s private capital investment ecosystem. You could be an upcoming fund manager developing a thesis or marking patterns, an angel investor who’s seeing distinct shifts in specific market segments, a founder who’s building, a subject matter expert, or an independent writer who enjoys chasing a good story — write to me at snigdha@therunwaynews.com. I’d love to brainstorm with you on turning ideas into essays.

Now, dive into Lohia’s sharp and balanced take on where India’s home services market is headed.

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From Groceries to Judgement

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When I moved to New York in late 2024, I frequently joked to my mom that I missed Blinkit more than I missed her.

Such is the pull, retention and, may I say, dopamine hit of getting your groceries, that charging cable you forgot at the office, delivered to you in seven minutes, right at your doorstep.

In 2021, when the instant grocery segment was just kicking off, all the ‘experts’ were aligned on the fact that this is a money-losing business and it will never dislodge the ‘real’ grocery players. Quick commerce was meant to be a complementary product. But slowly, the catalogues of these players grew aggressively, the dark stores inched closer and closer to your home, and before we knew it, we were addicted to getting literally everything delivered in 10 minutes.

So, what’s changed today? We stand at a similar juncture in 2026, but this time, it’s not the products themselves, it’s about services.

Your maid didn’t show up in the morning? How will you pack your kids’ lunchbox while preparing for that important investor call and clean up the living room before your friends show up for dinner in the evening? Enter instant services. Open up a snappy looking app at 8AM, choose the earliest slot, pay less than $2 a hour and whoa an ‘expert’ shows up at your place before 9AM, ready to clean up your messy living room and help you organize your day.

Sounds perfect doesn’t it?

Upon returning to India for a couple of months in 2026, I could see the proliferation of ‘instant’ in all aspects of everyday life. The internet remained divided over labour laws but people kept using these apps to book house-help, dog walkers, bartenders, and even someone to help unpack their bags!

Very quickly, the second order effects of these apps became visible. Maids who would earlier work in three houses and earn Rs 5,000 per month from each job, were sitting comfortably in neighbourhood parks, waiting for the next request on their app, completing 4-5 such gigs for a fixed monthly pay of Rs. 18,000. The apps are a boon to urban professionals, who could pay often as little as Rs 150 an hour several times a month to solve daily, painful household chores. Everyone looks happy, right? The app has high retention, low churn, solves a critical pain-point for users, and the supply is plentiful and compensated, well-above market rates.

When does the music stop?

How we learned to delegate

Instant help as a concept has been around since the first wave of e-commerce. BookMyBai had raised a Series A round in 2017 along with others like MyChores and MyDidi. They started as part of the e-commerce boom and built up supply for ‘domestic-help-for-hire’ platforms but could never really scale.

So what changed in 2026? Three things:

1. Q-commerce has rewired expectations: Apps like Zepto and Blinkit have eliminated friction around delivery times and rewired the expectations of urban Indians. Need ice-cream and toys at the last moment for children of visiting guests? Order now and it will be delivered in nine minutes. At first, I thought this phenomenon would be limited to apartment complexes in metro cities and with 20-40 year olds who are crunched for time. But to my surprise, my mother in a tier 2 city in India places at least 1 Blinkit order every day, despite having a driver who could get the same items in similar time.

2. Opportunity cost thinking: Urban professionals now think in terms of opportunity cost. Rs. 150 per hour for household work is rational, not lazy. If you can use the same one hour that you would spend cleaning the house to improve that presentation or complete a home workout, you will be far better off in your life. Why not pay someone Rs.150 (4x a week) to take it off your plate? Surely, your time is more valuable than the cheap labour cost subsidized.

3. The market was always there: India’s home services market was estimated at $60 billion in FY2025 and is tipped to grow at 10-11% CAGR through FY2030, according to RedSeer. Online penetration stood at less than 1% of net transaction value but is projected to grow at a CAGR of 18-22% through FY2030. A sizeable portion of monthly household budgets is spent on cooks, maids, drivers and other service providers. In 2026, venture capital dollars collided with organized supply and the behavioural readiness of the urban consumer to create the perfect storm. The previous attempts like Housejoy and BookmyBai failed on infrastructure, not demand.

This small market has been on a tear in recent months, attracting massive investor interest. In the month of April, these apps clocked 3 million bookings, up from 2 million in February. The newest entrant, Pronto, scaled from 1,000 daily bookings in December to 25,000 in April and its valuation doubled in weeks.

Snabbit, an early mover started by ex-Zepto executive Ayush Agarwal, has raised $112 million so far and its valuation is at close to $400 million. Urban Company, the listed and incumbent home services player, grew Instahelp from near zero to 2.7 million orders in one quarter.

This is where a generation learned the habit of paying to delegate the mundane. And a handful of players are burning a combined $10-$12 million every month to capture the largest share of these wallets.

The cash burn is not cause for concern yet.

Capital is often the price of entry in operationally complex businesses and the burn is buying something real – habit formation and supply density that compounds over time.

Zomato and Rapido have proven unit economics can work pretty well at scale in India if you can crack wallet share and repeat purchase. The deeper concern is whether these players will be able to reach the Rs 250 per hour AOV threshold before the capital cycle turns.

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The economics don’t add up

The average order value of these chores currently is Rs 80-Rs 150 per hour (less than $2!), which makes it a losing game for these players. This market is heavily subsidised by venture dollars which are chasing the elusive top players in this category.

A recent BofA report noted the instant help sector must stabilize at a net average order value of roughly Rs 250 an hour to achieve sustainable long-term economics and healthy 50% gross margins. Even food delivery in India became profitable only when AOVs breached Rs 380-400.

This Rs 100 gap is behind the unsustainable $10 million monthly burn. Urban Company CEO Abhiraj Singh Bhal recently said during the company’s Q4FY 2026 analysts’ call that he was “optimising to win, not elegance” in this ultra-important segment for his company, in the context of losses riding up 57x.

I spoke with Sarita, 32, who actively completes gigs on Snabbit. She used to work in four households every day for about 1.5 hours each and made roughly Rs 16,000 a month. She told me after she started working with Snabbit, she left 3 of those household gigs and plied her trade through the platform, earning Rs 18,000 monthly for being online six hours everyday.

We have seen this movie before with ride hailing apps Uber and Ola. Subsidize demand to build the habit, juice incentives to build the supply, then pull the venture capital oxygen once the macro turns. Suddenly, the consumers are okay paying higher service rates because this has become their way of life. The workers, though disgruntled, continue to provide services as their livelihoods now depend on this ‘gig income’, which lured them to leave their stable jobs.

However, here the script diverges in one important way. Unlike the Uber driver who took out a loan against his car, these workers do not carry any debt. Their downside is a pay cut, not a default.

Sarita left three steady households for the platform. If the algorithm turns cold or wages compress, those houses won’t be waiting; relationships built over years don’t reappear with a fresh app login. The worker who diversified across employers had a cushion but the worker who went all-in on one pink app does not.

The million dollar question: Is your data training AI?

The question we should be asking ourselves: If nobody makes money at Rs 150 and capital keeps pouring in, what’s actually being bought?

When the math doesn’t make sense, something has to give. Something has to close the gap. That something is usually you. Or to be more specific, your data.

Pronto was caught in an online storm when a media investigation revealed that its service personnel were entering homes with a camera (only after a customer opted-in) to record everything and use that data to train physical AI models.

Now, it’s well-understood how critical real-life data is. Foundational labs, robotics companies and young startups would pay through their noses to acquire real-world data from people’s homes that can be labelled and used to train better models. The CEOs of Urban Company and Snabbit issued public statements that their companies don’t record or collect your data.

On Pronto, customers would opt-in for their data collection model unknowingly which makes the company legally clear but destroys trust in an industry based on hospitality.

You opened the app because your maid didn’t show up. You did not open the app to hand a robotics company the blueprint of your living room.

Another startup, called Shift in New York, launched recently with the premise of free home services, with a caveat – their service is recorded and data will be used to train AI models. Two companies in different geographies are employing the same model. The logic that pushed them into the data collection territory is about to climb up the ladder, into far more intimate territory.

Shift's model can work in the US. A house cleaner in New York runs $25 an hour and the data trade is the only way to make "free" pencil out. India is the opposite market. A large share of urban households already employ affordable, reliable help. It was never a luxury. The product these apps actually sell isn't cheap. It's reliable, verified, trained, and at your door in ten minutes. Price was never the unsolved problem. So closing the AOV gap by selling your household data solves a problem Indian consumers don't have.

It's a short-run compromise to patch unit economics and I don't see it scaling because the moment trust breaks, the one thing these apps are actually selling breaks with it.

Delegation goes intimate

If home services taught us to delegate the mundane tasks, a new crop of ‘concierge’ startups is betting we’re ready to delegate the more personal tasks.

Faff, a personal assistant app in Bangalore, lives entirely on WhatsApp with no app or booking flow. Just drop a message and a human books your dinner table, hunts down a last-minute birthday gift and even fights your airline for a refund. The app claims it is only designed for “hot people and nerds” and has raised $2.6 million.

You identified a need and ordered instant help from one of these home services players. Concierge takes it a step further. It decides what needs to be done.

You could soon outsource not just the chore but the judgement behind it – what’s worth gifting, what’s worth eating or which dinner is worth booking.

Vertical apps pick a single decision to make for you, whereas horizontal ones offer to ‘manage’ your home or office and take a series of decisions for you.

Seasoned founders are entering the fray and launching personal concierge services. M, launched by Dunzo co-founder Kabeer Biswas, wants to run your home. And then there are the oddly specific ones like Cookmate that will decide what your cook should make tonight, so you don’t have to suffer the daily toil of answering “khaane mein kya banana hain?” (what should I cook today?).

To be honest, I get the appeal. There is a real, grinding tax to running a life: the ten micro-decisions before 10AM, the mental tabs that never close, the refund you’ll get around to fighting for eventually. If someone can absorb all of that for the price of a nice dinner, of course you say yes. Affluent urban India is saying yes in growing numbers, and the investors circling these companies are betting the yes only gets louder.

We started by buying back an hour. Now it feels like we are buying our way out of the smallest frictions and calling it ‘optimisation’. Choosing the gift for your loved one, is the relationship. Deciding what to make for dinner and unpacking that suitcase from your work trip, is, in an unglamorous way, running your home.

Are we now paying to be absent from our own lives?

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Where does the buck stop?

Imagine you use these concierge services for a year, whether physically or digitally rendered. What gets left behind is the most detailed portrait of you that has ever existed.

Consider what makes a concierge actually useful?

Not just knowing your calendar and that it’s your mother’s birthday, but the fact that your mother likes tulips and you forgot her birthday last year. What you eat when no one’s watching. What are the shows and sports you enjoy in your downtime and other things you’d never ask another human to handle – handed over precisely because the assistant doesn’t judge or isn’t human at all.

We confess more to a chat window or a stranger than to our friends in real life. And this is not a bug. This is the entire reason why these products work.

We are voluntarily assembling the richest behavioural dataset a person can produce of desires, relationships, spending, weaknesses, and handing it to early stage companies whose long-term economics, like everyone else in this space, don’t obviously add up yet. We have seen before what happens when the math gets tight.

The service may be the product today. But if the economics never improve, companies will need another asset to monetise. Data is the most obvious candidate.

Data is the one commodity that only gets more valuable. Meta has been using pictures/videos captured by users of Ray-Ban smart-glasses as fodder to label and train AI models, processed by workers half a world away. Street-view imagery, ride histories, camera feeds, all of it now bought and sold to teach machines about the physical, human world.

A concierge holds something richer than any of that: not what you look at, but what you want. It is the perfect place for this bargain to happen next and we are walking right into it, with our eyes closed and our wallets open.

One core idea that has bugged me for long is that the data you generate trains the system that is meant to replace the person serving you. The assistant booking your dinner, the maid arriving in ten minutes, and every interaction teaches the AI model that aims, eventually, to do their job without them.

You are paying to automate away the very people you outsourced your life to.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of The Runway, its editors, or any organisation the author is affiliated with. This article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. The author may have direct or indirect interests in companies or sectors discussed.

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Welcome to Edition #34. Dive into the consumer rally that marked dealmaking this week. We put the spotlight on Peak XV Partners’ offshore forays, which are starting to look more like its primary strategy. And in Recco, we have eyewear for collectors.

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Peak XV Joins Helion Energy, Supabase Rounds

About four months after it raised $1.3 billion for its latest investment run, Peak XV Partners, true to form, has wasted no time putting that money to work. A lot of it has been going overseas. So far, out of the 27 deals* that the Bangalore-based venture capital firm has logged this year, nearly half involve companies headquartered in the US, in the US-India corridor, or in other overseas markets. They represent $1.4 billion of the $1.8 billion** in total round value across the firm’s 2026 portfolio.

This week it joined two large technology funding rounds overseas.

• Nuclear fusion company Helion Energy raised $465 million in a Series G. Peak XV was among the new investors in the round alongside Alta Park Capital, Anti Fund, BoxGroup, Lux Capital, and Ford Motor Company executive chairman Bill Ford. The Everett, Washington-based company, now valued at $15.5 billion post-money, is building its first fusion power plant, named Orion, which aims to start supplying power to Microsoft’s data centres by 2028. Companies such as Helion are high on the radars of investors backing AI companies which depend heavily on electricity-guzzling data centres.

• Supabase announced a $500 million Series F led by Singapore’s GIC at a $10.5 billion valuation. Peak XV was among the returning investors in the round along with Accel, Y Combinator, Craft, Felicis, and Coatue. The round follows a $100 million Series E in October last year that Peak XV co-led at a $5 billion valuation. Registered in Singapore with a large presence in the US, the company, which offers an open-source developer platform built on PostgreSQL, said over 250,000 customers currently use the platform as backend infrastructure for AI-native applications.

Helion Energy and Supabase follow a succession of overseas deals that the venture capital firm either led or co-invested through this quarter. Notable ones include a $50 million Series B in enterprise voice agents platform Vapi; a $125 million Series B in security startup Exaforce; health systems focused platform Luminai, in which it led a $38 million Series B; and a $100 million Series C in London-based payments infrastructure company Primer.

The overseas expansion runs alongside fairly robust dealmaking in India. Deals logged in 2026 include FirstClub (quick commerce, Scapia (credit cards and travel), Plum (health insurance), C2i Semiconductors (power management for AI data centres), and The Whole Truth (clean-label packaged food).

In playing for stakes in multiple markets, Peak XV is rewiring its own DNA. Probably inevitable in a world where the most consequential technology innovations don’t sit in any single market. Peak XV is not alone. Last week we wrote about how more and more India-born early stage investors are placing bets in US-based AI companies even as they continue to underwrite the application opportunity in India. What differentiates Peak XV is the scale and speed at which it is executing that strategy.

* Based on deals tracked by The Runway and may not capture all Peak XV transactions.

**Represents the total round size. Peak XV's individual cheque sizes are not disclosed.

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The Week in Deals

FirstClub, Agilitas, Anveshan Lead Consumer Rally

Three clean-label packaged food companies picked up sizeable cheques in a week that was dominated by consumer bets. Other categories included skincare, sportswear, fragrances and property search.

FirstClub raised $55 million in a Series B co-led by Peak XV Partners and Sofina. Accel, RTP Global and Paramark Ventures were returning investors. The round valued the Bangalore-based quick commerce company at $255 million, up from $120 million just nine months ago, according to media reports. FirstClub positions itself as an ecommerce platform for high-quality groceries and clean label products.

Innefu Labs, a Delhi-based data analytics and security company, raised $30 million in a Series B from Singapore’s Panthera Growth Partners. The company is preparing for a public market listing and has drawn up plans to expand into overseas markets (it already has a presence in the Middle East). Panthera’s prior bets in India include Bigbasket, Zivame, Of Business and Medgenome.

Simple Energy, a Bangalore-based electric two-wheeler manufacturer, raised Rs 250 crore ($26 million) in a Series B led by the family office of Thryocare Technologies founder Arokiaswamy Velumani, an existing investor in the company. The round combined equity with Rs 123 crore in debt from HDFC Bank, Capitar Ventures and other NBFCs. The broader electric mobility space has drawn capital at a steady clip this year: PMI Electro Mobility ($310 million); Euler Motors ($46 million); Statiq ($18 million); Turno ($4.7 million).

Agilitas Sports raised Rs 225 crore ($23.5 million) from Nexus Venture Partners and Rainmatter. Nexus put in Rs 200 crore as follow-on capital. Rainmatter is a new investor. The Bangalore-based sportswear company manufactures for Adidas and Puma via its Mochiko acquisition and holds the Lotto licence across India, Australia and South Africa. Sports became a high-interest investment theme this year with the mega acquisitions of cricket franchises Royal Challengers Bengaluru franchise ($1.77 billion) and Rajasthan Royals ($1.65 billion).

Anveshan, a clean label food staples brand, raised Rs 150 crore ($15.7 million) in a Series B round led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India.

• International Finance Corporation and Swiggy co-founder Sriharsha Majety joined the round. Wipro Consumer Care Ventures, Titan Capital Winners Fund, Force Ventures, and boAt founders Aman Gupta and Sameer Mehta were returning investors.

• Rainmatter-backed Two Brothers Organic Farms is a direct competitor in the clean label food staples category.

Truefan AI raised $10 million in a Series A co-led by Baring Private Equity Partners India and Z3 Partners. IAN Alpha Fund and 3Lines Venture Capital joined the round. The Gurugram-based company started as a celebrity-fan engagement platform, backed by upGrad founder Ronnie Screwvala, Saama Capital and Mayfield, and pivoted to AI video generation for enterprise marketing. Other recent deals in the enterprise marketing tools segment include Gushwork ($9 million), BambooBox ($6.6 million) and GobbleCube ($15 million).

WeRize raised $7 million in a pre-Series C led by Sony Innovation Fund, with 3one4 Capital returning. The Bengaluru company provides credit, insurance and savings products to middle-class consumers in smaller cities via an on-ground micro-entrepreneur network and an AI-native platform.

Sub $5 million deals: Mumbai-based protein snack brand Phab raised $4 million in a pre-Series A round led by OTP Ventures and Chona Family Office. Bangalore-based AI-led tutoring platform ProLearn raised $3.1 million in a pre-seed round led by BEENEXT. Delhi-based artisanal fragrance brand Fragnote raised $3 million in a Series A round led by V3 Ventures. Bangalore-based property search and advisory platform PropSoch raised $2 million in a seed round led by Athera Venture Partners, Sparrow Capital and Vakil Group. Dubai-based online gifting platform Zuvees raised a $1.5 million Series A round from IvyCap Ventures. Bangalore-based wealth management platform Rovia raised $1 million in a pre-seed round led by Antler. Noida-based battery energy storage systems developer VoltSeal raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed round led by Theia Ventures. Gurgaon-based Korean skincare products and services company KorinMi raised $1 million from the Lotus Herbals Innovation Fund. Delhi-based clean-label sweetener brand The Sweet Change raised $0.2 million in a pre-seed round led by Rebalance.

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Recco | Notes on Culture, Craft and the Considered Life

The World’s Most Desirable Sunglasses?

Capitalism has given us many things. A hotter planet is one of them.

Which means that besides water, we increasingly need another modern essential: sunglasses. Not that there’s anything wrong with your trusty Ray-Bans or that pair of Gucci shades you bought on holiday. But if you’ve ever wondered what sits at the very top of the eyewear world, allow us to introduce you to Jacques Marie Mage.

Founded in Los Angeles in 2014 by French designer Jérôme Mage, JMM has become one of the most sought-after names in luxury eyewear. Unlike mainstream brands that produce frames by the thousands, Jacques Marie Mage releases most models in strictly limited runs, often just a few hundred pieces worldwide, with each frame individually numbered.

Many are handcrafted in Japan using thick Japanese acetate, titanium and custom hardware, resulting in frames that feel more like collectible objects than everyday accessories. Prices start at around $800 and can easily cross $1,500, making them among the most expensive sunglasses on the market. Yet collectors continue to snap them up.

The future may be hotter, but at least you’ll look exceptionally good squinting into it.

Recco is a column by Murali Menon. Murali has spent a career paying close attention to how things are made, where they come from, and why some of them endure. Every edition, one recommendation: a maker, an object, a place, a practice.

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Early Stage Capital’s Dual Strategy for AI

Mumbai Tech Week is underway this weekend. If you’ve attended the conference in the past, you know that it’s a whirlwind of curated conversations, startup pitches and tons of networking if you can manage to navigate the chaos. The theme this year is India: AI in Action. At a time when global generative AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI are engaged in a frenzied valuation race – Anthropic just raced past OpenAI to touch nearly $1 trillion – India is making a bid to emerge as the next laboratory for AI at scale.

India has the data volumes, engineering density and the cost structures that make it an attractive deployment market for AI applications. The strongest argument for the country’s AI future is that it is building the physical infrastructure – data centres, servers, power capacity – that AI needs to run. Government and industry estimates put its installed data centre capacity at 9-10 GW by 2030.

Not everyone is persuaded. Indian equities could be headed for their first annual decline in over a decade, a Reuters poll of equity analysts found. India’s limited exposure to trade led by global AI innovation and a widening current account deficit in the wake of the West Asia crisis is leading foreign institutional investors to pull out capital.

Even GCCs (global capability centers), are undergoing a rethink on hiring. India’s appeal for GCCs has always rested on large pools of English-speaking engineers willing to run complex processes at a fraction of the cost of doing so in the US or Europe. Now the proliferation of AI is reshaping many of those jobs and there’s a real question on whether workforces can upskill fast enough to absorb talent at the scale and pace seen over the past couple of decades.

Against that backdrop, the role of early stage capital and what it backs becomes important. In recent weeks, a number of specialist funds targeting AI and deep tech investments have entered the market, in line with a steady flow of similar capital over the past couple of years.

The latest is F2A, short for Fundamentum Frontier Advisors, a platform launched by Fundamentum Partnership co-founder Ashish Kumar. Its first fund aims to raise Rs 2,000 crore ($209 million) with Fundamentum Partnership co-founder Nandan Nilekani as anchor investor. Additionally, it will facilitate up to Rs 1,000 crore ($104 million) in parallel co-investments.

Other new funds currently on the road include Piper Serica, which launched the Bharat Tech Fund with a Rs 800 crore ($83 million) target corpus to back companies across semiconductors, AI and spacetech; Shastra VC is raising a $100 million fund to back early stage startups in AI, spacetech, defence and climate science; and Speciale Invest, which raised a Rs 600 crore early stage fund last year, is currently on the road for a Rs 1,400 crore (about $150 million) growth fund.

India-born deeptech startups attracted $2.1 billion across 289 deals in 2025, with AI funding rising 58% year-on-year to $1.22 billion, according to the India Deep Tech Alliance’s AI and Deep Tech Investments Landscape report.

But Indian venture capitalists are also increasingly putting capital to work overseas, primarily in the US or within the US-India corridor. In recent months Peak XV Partners backed Vapi, Exaforce, Luminai, Archil and Clouted. Nexus Venture Partners joined rounds in Gumloop, Triomics and OpenObserve. A91 Partners led a round in Deccan AI; Elevation Capital backed Portkey and Z47 co-led a round in Coral.

Premji Invest leading a $450 million Series A in Rhoda AI and co-leading a $55 million Series B in Doss are the most prominent examples of Indian institutional capital chasing pureplay US opportunities this year.

Early stage capital clearly sees value in underwriting the applications opportunity in India. But equally, it sees value in hedging, placing bets in the US where the foundational layer of the AI stack is being built. Incidentally, many of those bets involve Indian-origin founders who started their careers here before moving out to build overseas.

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The Week in Deals

Biotech, B2B Quick Commerce Land Series A Cheques

Large Series A rounds in biotech, B2B quick commerce, precision manufacturing propped up the week. Nexus Venture Partners went shopping overseas this week, joining later stage investment rounds in two US-based companies.

Embio raised growth capital from private equity firm True North, which acquired a minority stake in the Mumbai-based active pharmaceuticals ingredients maker. True North invested from Fund VII, marking the fund’s third investment and the first in the pharmaceuticals sector, it said in a statement. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. The Economic Times reported the deal size at $50 million.

Fairdeal Market raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Bertelsmann India Investments. WaterBridge Ventures and Incubate Fund Asia were returning investors in the round. Gurugram-based Fairdeal Market is a B2B quick commerce platform that enables neighbourhood retail stores or kiranas to source FMCG products at wholesale prices within 60 minutes. It employs an inventory-owned, dark-store-led operating model to deliver over 1,000 SKUs to kiranas and has scaled to 20,000-plus active retailers across Delhi NCR, Bertelsmann said in a statement.

StrainX Bioworks raised $13 million in a Series A round led by Prime Venture Partners and Leo Capital. Good Startup, Sparrow Capital, Sun Icon Ventures, Dhoka Ventures and WindT Angels co-invested. The Bangalore-based startup is building a precision fermentation platform to produce alternative proteins and high-value biomolecules for application in food, nutrition and cosmetics. The deal marks Prime Venture Partners’ first in the biotech sector.

Tiea Connectors secured $8 million in a Series A round led by IvyCap Ventures, with participation from Jamwant Ventures and 8X Ventures. The Bengaluru-based company designs and manufactures high-performance connectors, precision contacts, and advanced connectivity solutions for OEMs in automotives, EVs and defence.

Abcoffee raised $6.4 million in a pre-Series B round led by Kliff Ventures, the consumer sector focused venture capital firm launched by K Hospitality Corp last week. Hero Enterprise Partner Ventures, Merisis Venture Fund and Stride Ventures joined the round. Mumbai-based Abcoffee sources and retails speciality coffee beverages online and via an offline chain of quick service outlets.

Yes Madam raised $5.2 million in a Series A round from Info Edge Growth Fund. The Noida-based startup provides on-demand salon and spa services at consumer homes and operates offline salons.

Sub $1 million deals: ZeroDrag, a startup that designs and manufactures components for drones, raised $0.7 million from Transition VC.

In offshore deals, Nexus Venture Partners joined Daloopa’s $47 million Series C round, which was led by Brighton Park Capital. Other investors in the round were Squarepoint Capital and Touring Capital. The New York-based company provides AI-led data infrastructure for investment research. Nexus first invested in the company’s seed round in 2019. It also joined Triomics’ $22 million Series B round, which was led by Battery Ventures. Triomics is a New York-based oncology AI company helping cancer centers operationalize complex clinical information.

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People Moves

EQT’s New Asia Private Capital Heads

Swedish private equity firm EQT elevated India head Hari Gopalakrishnan to Co-Head of Private Capital Asia. Nicholas Macksey, who led the firm’s mid-market opportunities in Asia, was appointed the other co-head for Asia.

The appointments came in the wake of Jean Eric Salata assuming the role of chairperson at EQT and the raising of a $15 billion Asia-focused buyout fund.

Gopalakrishnan was a founding member of Baring Private Equity Asia, which merged with EQT in 2022.

Recco | Notes on Culture, Craft and the Considered Life

Small Cars, Big Money

It’s after hours on LP day at your firm, and you’re shooting the breeze with an extremely important person. Turns out he’s looking for a gift for an automobile enthusiast friend. Something “different”, as they always say.

So no Porsche Design chronographs, no signed Ayrton Senna helmets, no scale-model Lamborghinis sitting under acrylic covers. Impressing this gentleman is important. So you nod knowingly and point him towards Hedley Studios.

Formerly known as The Little Car Company, Hedley builds officially licensed miniature electric versions of some of the world’s most iconic automobiles. And these are not toys in the Hamleys sense.

We’re talking hand-formed aluminium bodies, bespoke interiors, proper suspension engineering and collaborations with brands like Ferrari, Bugatti, Aston Martin and Bentley. A lot more soul-stirring than Ferrari’s recent Luce-era abstraction.

Its line-up includes the Ferrari Testa Rossa J, the Bugatti Baby II and the Aston Martin DB5 Junior — tiny, driveable electric recreations that cost as much as a luxury sedan. Clients reportedly include Rihanna, David Beckham and A$AP Rocky. Prices start at well over $100,000.

Recco is a column by Murali Menon. Murali has spent a career paying close attention to how things are made, where they come from, and why some of them endure. Every edition, one recommendation: a maker, an object, a place, a practice.

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In Recco, we tell you what’s more your money’s worth than a plastic pocket watch.

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Asia’s Private Capital Comeback and Where India Fits

Early this week, Bain Capital announced the final close of its sixth Asia-focused private equity fund at $10.5 billion, significantly exceeding the original $7 billion target. Asia Fund VI is the largest the Boston-based private equity firm has raised for the region in the 20 years that it’s been investing here.

The fund comes at a time when Asia Pacific-focused fundraising has been on a slide for a few years.

In 2025, private equity and venture capital (PE-VC) fundraising focused on the Asia Pacific region dropped to $58 billion (excluding RMB-denominated vehicles) – a 12-year low, continuing a decline that began in 2021, according to Bain & Company’s Asia Pacific Private Equity Report 2026. Further, dry powder across the region declined from $278 billion in 2024 to $240 billion. Asia Pacific-focused funds, which typically also invest in India, accounted for 22% of funds raised for the region in 2025, against 45% the previous year, the report said.

Starting this year, though, several global PE firms have either raised or are in advanced stages of raising their largest ever Asia Pacific-focused vehicles.

Swedish PE major EQT set the benchmark in April when its BPEA Private Equity Fund IX reached its hard cap at $15.6 billion – the largest Asia Pacific-specific fund raised to date. Launched with an initial target of $12.5 billion, the fund will focus on control investments across sectors such as technology, healthcare and services. Blackstone is expected to announce the close of the Blackstone Capital Partners Asia III fund shortly. Launched with a $10 billion target, it crossed that threshold late last year and has since drawn commitments worth $12 billion, Bloomberg reported in March.

KKR began marketing its fifth Asia buyout fund in November last year, targeting $15 billion, Reuters reported. It’s also on the road for the Asia Pacific Infrastructure Investors III fund, which has a target corpus of over $9 billion, according to media reports. Singapore-based Hillhouse Investment is in the market to raise a reported $7 billion for its sixth Asia buyout fund.

The Bain & Company report projects a rebound in Asia Pacific-focused fundraising starting this year with as many as 60 funds with $1 billion-plus target sizes currently on the road.

A rebound is significant for India, which has historically been one of the most consistent destinations for allocations from such vehicles. Blackstone’s India presence — the deepest of any global buyout firm in the country — has been a central part of its Asia fund marketing story. Bain Capital has backed businesses in India across healthcare, financial services, technology and consumer sectors. EQT’s BPEA platform has a long-standing India portfolio. And, KKR’s Asia funds have been involved in several of India’s most significant PE transactions.

India-specific fundraising had a strong run in 2025. ChrysCapital closed its tenth fund at $2.2 billion in November. Singapore-based Quadria Capital, the healthcare-focused investor which invests primarily in India and Southeast Asia, closed its third fund at $1.07 billion in May, exceeding its $800 million target. A91 Partners closed its third fund at $665 million in April last year. On the venture side, Accel closed its eighth India fund at $650 million and Bessemer Venture Partners closed its second India-dedicated fund at $350 million.

In February this year, Peak XV Partners raised $1.3 billion across three new vehicles — India seed, India venture, and Asia Pacific funds — its first independent fundraise since its separation from Sequoia Capital in 2023. The same month, Motilal Oswal Alternates closed its fifth vehicle, India Business Excellence Fund V, at Rs 8,500 crore (approximately $939 million), exceeding its initial target of Rs 6,500 crore.

The large India-specific closes of 2025 and early 2026 are unlikely to be repeated at the same scale in the near term. The macroeconomic and geopolitical environment has grown more uncertain, extending fundraising timelines. Limited partners will be inclined to concentrate capital with proven, high-performing managers.

India’s attractiveness as a private capital destination remains structurally intact. The depth and liquidity of the public markets, the pace of domestic institutional development, and the pipeline of IPO-ready companies all continue to register positively with global allocators. Whether that translates into accelerated deployment from pan-Asia Pacific vehicles will depend on the quality and momentum of returns from existing portfolios and how quickly the broader fundraising recovery takes hold.

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The Week in Deals

Spotlight on Fintech; Peak XV Continues Overseas Shopping Spree

A handful of fintech deals, mostly early stage, stood out in an otherwise lacklustre week for India-focused PE-VC investments. Peak XV Partners made a splash again with three more overseas bets.

Iscon Balaji Foods raised $150 million from Advent, which is picking up a significant minority stake in the Ahmedabad-based company. The investment was part of a $215 million round, which included a $70 million investment by 360 One Asset in January. Iscon Balaji Foods manufactures and exports processed frozen potato products.

Scapia raised a $63 million Series C round led by General Catalyst. Z47 and Peak XV Partners were returning investors in the round. Bangalore-based Scapia positions itself as a travel fintech and offers consumers co-branded credit cards optimised for travel spending, UPI-based payments, flight and hotel bookings and other travel-related products.

Anscer Robotics raised $5.4 million in a Series A round led by IAN Alpha Fund. Info Edge Ventures joined the round. The Plano, Texas-based startup, which also has operations in Bangalore, builds intelligent robotics solutions to automate warehouse and logistics operations.

Trackk raised $3.7 million in a seed round led by Lightspeed. Info Edge Ventures participated in the round, along with Unacademy founders Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini and other high networth individuals. The Mumbai-based startup offers AI-powered stock discovery tools to make investing more accessible for first-time investors.

ONO, a Bangalore-based agri-finance startup, raised $1.2 million in a pre-Series A round led by Aeravti Ventures. Tremis Capital participated in the round.

Sub $1 million deals: Music streaming and distribution platform Damroo raised $0.5 million from Hindustan Times. AI-powered stock investments platform Kalpi raised $0.4 million from Rainmatter. Apparel and accessories brand Meta Fashion raised $0.4 million in a pre-seed round led by Lumikai.

It was another week of overseas deals for Peak XV Partners. It joined London-based Primer’s $100 million Series C round led by Sofina. Balderton, Accel, ICINIQ, Tencent and Speedinvest were returning investors in the round. Primer is a payments infrastructure company that enables businesses to optimise how online payments are processed via a unified AI-powered software platform.

• The venture capital firm also doubled down on Variational, a Cayman Islands-based startup that’s building on-chain infrastructure for retail and institutional derivatives trading. Variational raised a $50 million Series A this week led by Dragonfly Capital.

• That’s not all. It joined Los Angeles-based AI-led content marketing tool Clouted’s $7 million seed round, which was led by Slow Ventures.

• The deals follow Peak XV’s overseas bets from last week on Vapi and Exaforce.

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Recco | Notes on Culture, Craft and the Considered Life

Skip the Queue. Buy This Instead

If you were among those who despaired at the sight of grown men crowding outside Swatch stores in Paris, KL, and Mumbai, you are not alone. The Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop drop was an outright farce. One can acquire several fine objects for the official retail price — around Rs 40,000 —of the pocket watch. Here’s one at half the price. Meet Decimo by Gritti Venetia.

Gritti is a small, family-run perfumery out of Venice. Luca Gritti selects his own materials, answers to no one, and wrote his own brief for the woody-spicy Decimo: “a man indifferent to the fashions, out of time, faithful to his identity, wild.”

It opens with bergamot before settling into something warmer. The birch and ambroxan do interesting things in the dry-down. It has the structural DNA of Creed Aventus, but costs considerably less. The entire Gritti line is available at niche perfume retailer Scentido.

And about what you’re not buying: bioceramic is a fancy word for plastic. The Royal Pop is a plastic pocket watch with an AP logo, built for people who queue on pavements at 6am to feel special. You are smarter than that.

Recco is a column by Murali Menon. Murali has spent a career paying close attention to how things are made, where they come from, and why some of them endure. Every edition, one recommendation: a maker, an object, a place, a practice.

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Times are hard but that’s no reason to stop appreciating the finer things in life – scroll down to the Recco section.

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Back to Basics for Consumer Businesses

When India’s Prime Minister urged citizens last Sunday to defer gold purchases, reduce fuel consumption and avoid non-essential foreign travel, it was a signal that the economy is under severe stress. Since then, import duties on gold and silver have been raised, petrol and diesel prices have increased, and the rupee has fallen to a record low.

For the private equity and venture capital (PE-VC) firms that deployed capital into India’s consumer sector, another recalibration of return timelines may be in the offing. The sector had only just emerged from a reset. It weathered a prolonged funding downturn and investments gained momentum again last year. The Runway tracked more than forty consumer-facing investment rounds since January 2026 alone, spanning food and beverages, beauty and personal care, apparel, travel and quick commerce.

All of those categories are expected to take a hit from slower consumer demand, particularly on discretionary spending. But each faces specific challenges in varying degrees.

A closer look at some of the key categories:

Food and beverages

Food and beverage (F&B) businesses are exposed to rising costs in crude-linked inputs — packaging laminates, polyethylene and surfactants. Edible oil prices, a key input across snack and condiment categories, have added further pressure. On the demand side, higher fuel prices translate into higher freight and last-mile delivery costs, which often tend to be passed on to the consumer. For cloud kitchen and quick-service restaurant operators, LPG costs are a direct operational line item. Franchise operators with royalty structures denominated in dollars carry an additional layer of currency exposure that widens with each move in the rupee.

Recent F&B deals:

• Fireside Ventures and Sharrp Ventures led a $5 million round in Troovy. Sofina and Sauce VC led a $51 million Series D in The Whole Truth. Both are clean-label packaged snacks brands.

• Playbook Partners led a $15 million round in Subway franchise operator EverBrands. Hara Global Capital Management and Bain Capital Ventures led a $38 million Series B in quick food delivery platform Swish. Bikaji Foods Family Office led a $7.5 million Series B in cloud kitchen Dil Foods.

• Temasek invested $50 million in dairy products maker Milky Mist’s pre-IPO round.

Beauty and personal care

Several homegrown beauty and personal care brands source active ingredients from Europe and Korea. The rupee's depreciation raises the effective cost of those imports. Polymer-derived packaging — tubes, pumps and laminate pouches — has become more expensive as crude prices rise.

Formulation costs and packaging costs are moving up together. Brands will either have to defer profitability milestones or raise prices and risk losing customers.

Recent deals in beauty and personal care:

• 360 One Asset led a $21 million round in Mosaic Wellness. Orbimed Asia Partners led a $32 million Series C in hygiene products brand PeeSafe.

• Fireside Ventures led a $5 million Series A in Chosen and a $3 million seed round in Antinorm.

• Dabur Ventures and Unilever Ventures led a $7.5 million Series B in RAS Beauty.

Apparel

Polyester is a crude oil derivative and accounts for a significant share of fabric input costs across fast fashion and athleisure categories. Rising polyester prices have already been flagged as a source of margin pressure going into early FY27, particularly for brands that have been expanding offline rapidly. The combination of higher fabric costs, elevated store rentals and a consumer whose budget is under pressure from fuel and food inflation creates a difficult operating environment.

Brands that have invested in distinctive positioning and compete on identity rather than price have more room to absorb or pass on cost increases than those whose primary proposition is value.

Recent deals in apparel companies:

• Jungle Ventures led a $25 million Series A in Escape Plan. Z47 and Accel led a $9 million Series A in Aramya.

• RPSG Capital Ventures led a $4.3 million Series A in MyDesignation. Sharrp Ventures led a $4.3 million Series A in Cava Athleisure.

• Fireside Ventures led a $3.8 million Series A in Kisah.

Quick commerce and consumer-tech

Ride-hailing and quick commerce platforms face a specific challenge from the fuel price increase: driver economics. Two-wheeler drivers, who form the backbone of delivery and ride-hailing supply in Indian cities, face a direct and immediate rise in operating costs. On-demand domestic services platforms are similarly exposed.

Quick commerce operators — whose gross order values have been among the strongest signals of India’s consumption momentum — may also see basket composition shift away from discretionary add-ons toward core essentials. The urban consumer remains willing to pay for convenience, but that willingness will soon be tested against a household budget simultaneously facing higher fuel, food and essentials costs.

Recent consumer-tech deals:

• Prosus led a $240 million round in ride-hailing platform Rapido.

• Susquehanna, Mirae Asset and Bertelsmann invested $56 million in on-demand household help platform Snabbit. Epiq Capital, General Catalyst and Lachy Groom invested $45 million in rival Pronto.

Familiar drill

India's broader consumption story is not broken. Private consumption is close to 60% of GDP, a sustained premiumisation trend is underway and brand consciousness is rising across income segments. But the near-to-medium term operating environment, across input costs, currency and consumer sentiment, is harder than the one in which most of these rounds were closed.

For businesses planning their next fundraise, the environment has shifted. Investors doing diligence will apply more conservative revenue growth assumptions and higher cost assumptions than they would have three months ago.

The good news is that consumer businesses — and the investors backing them — have been through this drill recently. The funding downturn that starved companies of capital for nearly three years sharpened the focus on unit economics and profitability pathways. That discipline will be tested again.

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The Week in Deals

Rapido Scores a Valuation Jump; Local VCs Go Global

Slim pickings this week in terms of PE-VC investment activity. Despite the immediate future looking a bit grim, consumer deals dominated the charts across brands, services and platforms. Also, in line with a growing pattern, two homegrown VC firms struck AI-related deals overseas.

Peak XV Partners had a busy week overseas. The Mumbai-based VC firm has been building out a largely AI-centric portfolio in the US for a couple of years, even as it continues to be a prolific investor across sectors at home. The firm’s deals from this week were:

• Vapi – Led a $50 million Series B round in the San Francisco-based enterprise voice AI startup. Bessemer Venture Partners, YC, M12 and Kleiner Perkins joined the round.

• Exaforce – Joined the AI security startup’s $125 million Series B round. HarbourVest, Mayfield, Khosla Ventures and Seligman Ventures were also part of the round, the San Jose, California-based startup said in a statement. It serves enterprise security teams across sectors such as healthcare, technology and financial services.

Rapido raised $240 million in a new round led by existing investor Prosus. WestBridge Capital and Accel participated. The round valued the Bangalore-based ride hailing platform at $3 billion, post-money. The primary capital infusion is “part of a $730 million primary and secondary financing,” the company said in a statement.

HrdWyr secured $13 million in a Series A round led by Ideaspring Capital, with additional backing from Singularity AMC, Avatar Growth Capital, and Persistent Systems. The Bangalore-based semiconductor startup plans to deploy the fresh capital towards advancing its AI-native System-on-Chip (AISoC) portfolio.

Wingreens raised Rs 120 crore ($12.5 million) in a Series D round led by public markets investor Ashish Kacholia. Alchemy Fund participated in the round. The Gurgaon-based healthy snacks-to-sauces company also acquired Safe Harvest, a pesticides-free agri-products retailer based in Bangalore, in a share swap transaction, according to multiple media reports. Further details were not available.

Dil Foods raised Rs 72 crore ($7.5 million) in a Series B round anchored by the Bikaji Foods Family Office. Existing investors V3 Ventures, Mount Judy Ventures and venture debt firm Alteria Capital joined the round. The Anekal, Karnataka-based company operates a cloud kitchen platform for quick service restaurants.

Mekr secured Rs 67 crore (about $7 million) in a Series A round led by Avaana Capital, with Titan Capital participating. The Delhi-based company offers end-to-end product development and manufacturing capabilities for consumer appliance brands.

Other funding deals this week:

Sub $1 million deals: App-based toy subscription startup The EleFant raised $1 million in a pre-Series A round led by Growth Sense Venture Fund. On-demand smartphone repair service provider Instafix raised $0.78 million in a pre-seed round led by Titan Capital and 8i Ventures. Packaged beverages startup Bombay Banta raised $0.83 million in a pre-Series A round led by DSG Consumer Partners.

Peak XV wasn’t the only homegrown VC that placed bets in the US. Activate, a Mumbai-based AI-focused venture capital firm, joined New York-headquartered voice AI startup ElevenLabs’ recent Series D round.

• The undisclosed investment was made through a separate vehicle backed by Activate’s limited partners, the firm said in a statement.

• “This partnership is more than just an investment. It’s about creating bridges between global frontier AI companies and India’s early-stage AI ecosystem, helping founders here access the right networks as voice becomes a core interface for them,” it said.

• ElevenLabs raised a $500 million Series D in February and was valued at $11 billion.

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Recco | Notes on Culture, Craft and the Considered Life

The Sherried Scotch That Macallan Fans Should Know About

In the world of sherried Scotch, a handful of names dominate the conversation. Macallan built an empire on it. Glenfarclas has quietly championed it for decades without the fanfare. Dalmore rides it into the luxury gifting market. GlenDronach sits comfortably in that company — rich, dark, uncompromising — and has just arrived in India.

Founded in 1826, it has built its reputation on the sherried style — one of the more underrated names in single malt globally, and until now, largely absent from Indian shelves.

Brown-Forman has launched the full range in Mumbai — the 12, 15, and 18-year-old expressions, all matured in Pedro Ximénez and Oloroso casks from Spain. The 12-year-old starts at around ₹9,000 in Maharashtra.

The consumer this is aimed at has been around the single malt world long enough to want something with more weight to it. For anyone who has explored the sherried style mostly through Macallan, this is worth a detour. Similar DNA, significantly less of a premium — and an argument, depending on who you ask, for being the more honest expression of the style.

Recco is a column by Murali Menon. Murali has spent a career paying close attention to how things are made, where they come from, and why some of them endure. Every edition, one recommendation: a maker, an object, a place, a practice.

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Edition #30. Singapore’s sovereign capital went shopping this week at opposite ends of the Indian economy. GIC backed a rocket company. Temasek invested in a dairy products maker. Both are long-term bets on the country’s structural growth.

Skyroot Aerospace raised a $60 million round led by GIC and Sherpalo Ventures, both returning investors, valuing the Hyderabad-based startup at $1.1 billion. Funds managed by BlackRock, Arkam Ventures, Playbook Partners, Sanghvi Family Office and the founders of Greenko Group joined the round.

• Up until 2020, India’s space sector was dominated by the state-owned India Space Research Organisation (ISRO). Subsequent policy reforms opened the doors for end-to-end commercial participation by the private sector. Skyroot was among the first to move in.

• Founded in 2018 by former ISRO scientists Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka, it conducted India’s first private rocket launch from India – the Vikram-S – in November 2022. The demonstration set the ground for the company’s orbital launch vehicle, Vikram-I, which the company said is “weeks from its maiden flight.”

• Skyroot is not alone in the field. Agnikul Cosmos launched its Agnibaan SOrTeD sub-orbital demonstrator a couple of years ago. Pixxel is building a constellation of hyperspectral imaging satellites. India now has an estimated 400 spacetech startups.

• Spacetech funding in 2026: In January, IISc-incubated space surveillance and intelligence startup Digantara onboarded Reliance Industries as the lead investor in a $50 million Series B round. Aule Space, which is building autonomous satellites that can dock with and service other satellites in orbit, raised $2 million from Pi Ventures. In March, Bellatrix Aerospace, which manufactures satellite propulsion systems, raised a $20 million round led by Cactus Partners.

India’s space economy is valued at approximately $8.4 billion and the government target is to grow it to $4-45 billion over the next 8-10 years. Orbital capability is central to that ambition.

Milky Mist Dairy Food raised Rs 482 crore (approximately $51 million) in a pre-IPO round from Temasek arm Jongsong Investments. The transaction, according to reports, valued the Erode, Tamil Nadu-based company at approximately Rs 9,300 crore (just shy of $1 billion). The round comprised a primary infusion of Rs 357 crore and a secondary component of Rs 125 crore, in which founders Sathishkumar T and Anitha S sold shares at Rs 139.76 per share.

The company filed draft papers with markets regulator SEBI for a Rs 2,035 crore listing in July last year.

• Milky Mist was a 30-year bootstrapped company prior to this round.

• The company doesn’t sell liquid milk. Its business is built entirely on value-added dairy products such as paneer, ghee, curd, butter, cheese and ice cream, which positions it in higher-margin territory.

• Revenue from operations (consolidated) grew 29% to Rs 2,349 crore in FY25 from Rs 1,822 crore in FY24. Profit after tax rose 2.4x to Rs 46.07 crore from Rs 19.44 crore. EBITDA margin expanded to 13.2% (Source: Milky Mist DRHP)

• The proposed Rs 2,035 crore IPO consists of a fresh issue of Rs 1,785 crore and an offer for sale of Rs 250 crore by the promoters. The Temasek pre-IPO placement, if completed, will reduce the fresh issue size accordingly.

The Milky Mist deal is the latest in a string of large consumer bets Temasek (also happens to be an investor in Skyroot Aerospace) has made in India. Recent transactions include a minority stake in packaged snacks maker Haldiram’s and an investment in cloud kitchens company Rebel Foods.

Bets on long-term structural growth: Milky Mist sits within India’s organised food and consumer products sector, which is still deeply fragmented and unorganised. The dairy segment is estimated at Rs 10.8 lakh crore and the value-added dairy products segment, in which Milky Mist operates, accounts for 51% and is projected to grow at 12% annually (Source: 1Lattice industry report referenced in the Milky Mist DRHP).

Temasek’s bet is that organised, branded players will capture a growing share of that expansion as incomes rise and cold chain infrastructure improves.

Skyroot falls within India’s emerging deep technology and space economy, nascent as a private sector play but underpinned by decades of state investment through ISRO. The addressable market is global: launch services, satellite deployment and defence applications. But it’s not a market that yields returns quickly. Developing and proving orbital launch capability requires years of engineering, repeated testing and regulatory navigation. The capital cycle is long and the technology risk is high.

As a sovereign wealth fund managing Singapore’s long-term foreign reserves, GIC represents the deep and patient long-term capital critical for the scaling of companies such as Skyroot. The bet is that India’s private space sector will produce commercially viable launch capability within a decade. Its return to Skyroot’s cap table in this round, deepening an earlier commitment, signals the conviction.

The Week in Deals

Early-Stage Consumer Bets; Fintech Delivers Exits

Apart from Skyroot and Milky Mist Dairy Food, on-demand household help services scored again along side a bunch of early stage consumer startups across skincare, apparel and women’s hygiene. A homegrown sports-focused fund went shopping overseas. And a fintech IPO delivered profitable exits for early investors.

IIFL Capital Services approved a preferential allotment of 5.71 crore shares to Fairfax India in lieu of a primary capital infusion of Rs 2,000 crore (approximately $212 million). The transaction will increase Fairfax India’s ownership of the company to 41.8%, triggering an open offer for an additional 26% mandated under SEBI regulations.

• IIFL Capital Services, according to regulatory filings, will issue shares to Fairfax India affiliate FIH Mauritius Investments at Rs 350 per share, increasing the latter’s stake from the existing 27.18% to 38.47%.

• Another Fairfax India affiliate, HWIC Asia Fund, currently holds an additional 3.33% stake.

• The Canadian investment firm intends to raise its overall stake to a minimum of 51% “through a combination of transactions including a preferential allotment of equity shares, an open offer, and arrangements with the existing promoters,” said the filing.

• IIFL Capital Services, earlier known as IIFL Securities, provides wealth management and institutional brokerage services.

Pronto expanded its Series B financing round to $45 million after securing an additional $20 million investment from Physical Intelligence founder Lachy Groom.

• The fresh capital valued the Bengaluru-based instant household services startup at $200 million, marking a twofold jump in valuation in roughly a month.

• The new infusion followed the initial close of the company’s Series B round at $25 million. Investors in the initial tranche included Epiq Capital, Glade Brook Capital Partners, General Catalyst and Bain Capital Ventures.

PlayReplay raised $12 million in a funding round led by Alfvén & Didrikson (A&D). Parth Jindal-anchored Centre Court Capital, a Mumbai-based venture capital firm, was part of the investor group that participated in the round.

• PlayReplay, based in Stockholm, is an AI-powered intelligence platform for racquet sports.

• Centre Court Capital, which focuses on sports-tech and gaming, raised Rs 410 crore (under $50 million) for its debut fund last year. Last month, the firm co-led a seed round in Bangalore-based gaming studio Spill Games.

BigEndian Semiconductors raised $6 million in a pre-Series A round led by IAN Alpha Fund, with participation from Vertex Ventures SEA & India and IvyCap Ventures. The Bangalore-based fabless semiconductor startup develops custom integrated circuits and SoC solutions tailored for surveillance and imaging applications, with its in-house chip forming a key part of its broader product roadmap.

Chosen raised $5 million in a Series A round led by Fireside Ventures. BOLD, L’Oréal’s venture capital arm and Alkemi Growth Capital participated in the round along with high networth individuals including CaratLane co-founder Avnish Anand. The Chennai-based startup develops and retails skincare and hair care products.

Other deals this week:

Sub $1 million deals: AI-first telephony infrastructure platform Vobiz, and Blunav, a startup building cloud-native software solutions for airport management, raised $1 million each from Piper Serica. Banza App raised $1 million in pre-seed round led by Campus Fund.

In exit moves, digital lender Kissht’s IPO sailed through comfortably. The Mumbai-based company listed on the bourses on Friday at Rs 190 a share (NSE data), an 11% premium on its offer price of Rs 171 a share. The Rs 926 crore offering included a Rs 76 crore offer for sale. Among Kissht’s early backers, Endiya Partners, which invested in the company’s seed round in 2017, sold part of its stake realising 4.7x on its initial investment.

“Kissht built Rs 5,956 Cr in AUM on approximately Rs 500 Cr of external equity raised over nine years of partnering. Peers in the category raised higher levels of capital (based on industry data) to reach comparable or larger scale. Kissht is Fund I’s anchor exit,” Endiya managing partner Sateesh Andra wrote in a blog post on Friday.

VenturEast Proactive Fund LLC sold 2.64 lakh shares at a multiple of 10.9x, while Ventureast Proactive Fund II came in at 3.2x. Both investors are sitting on sizable paper gains at the current stock price.

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Recco | Notes on Culture, Craft and the Considered Life

Titan Goes Diving

Swiss watches are about to get cheaper in India. The EFTA trade pact will bring down import duties incrementally, and Titan — the only serious Indian watchmaker, and the world’s fifth-largest by volume — isn’t waiting to see how that plays out. In the last six months alone, it has brought in the niche Swiss brand Auguste Reymond and is this month introducing Roamer, a mid-range Swiss label with a long history.

It has also been pushing its own name further upmarket. The latest signal is Zero Hour, a new performance-sports line built around a diver. The collection has twelve models ranging from 100 to 500 metres of water resistance.

At the top sits the 500M Professional Diver’s Automatic — a watch designed to be taken seriously. The credentials are in order. ISO 6425 certified. Grade 2 titanium case. A 120-click unidirectional bezel with an Aqua Lock mechanism. Sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating. Lume that actually works underwater. The movement is Titan’s own — Calibre 7AC0, an in-house automatic. It ships on a titanium bracelet with an FKM rubber strap as backup, both on quick-release.

Production is limited to 500 units per variant. Price is ₹76,000 to ₹78,000. That is serious money for a Titan, and very much the point.

Recco is a column by Murali Menon. Murali has spent a career paying close attention to how things are made, where they come from, and why some of them endure. Every edition, one recommendation: a maker, an object, a place, a practice.

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Edition #29. On Thursday, Palo Alto Networks announced its intent to acquire Portkey, an AI infrastructure company based in San Francisco with operations in Bengaluru. The transaction is expected to close in the Nasdaq-listed cybersecurity major’s fourth quarter of 2026.

The acquisition closes the loop on a company that until ten weeks ago was on a venture-funded path to scale. In February, Elevation Capital led a $15 million Series A in Portkey. Lightspeed, which had backed the company’s seed round in 2023, participated in the Series A.

“By the time we led their Series A a few months ago, Portkey was already governing $180M+ in annualized AI spend, processing 500B+ tokens a day… They (founders Rohit Agarwal and Ayush Garg) built cutting-edge infrastructure that the world’s biggest security company wrote a serious check to own,” Krishna Mehra, AI partner at Elevation Capital, wrote in a social media post.

The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The Economic Times, citing sources, reported that the deal carries a cash-and-stock structure at a valuation of $120-140 million.

What’s Portkey?

When an enterprise builds an AI-powered product, it rarely relies on just one model. Portkey sits between the enterprise and these models, the single dashboard, from which the enterprise manages its entire AI operation. This category, the AI gateway, has emerged fairly recently but has become essential infrastructure for any large enterprise running AI at scale.

Founded in 2023 by Agarwal and Garg, Portkey’s clients include Postman, DoorDash, Roche and others across sectors such as finance, pharmaceuticals and technology.

The competitive landscape is still small and includes companies such as LiteLLM, TrueFoundry and Kong. What distinguishes Portkey is that the security and oversight capabilities are built into the gateway itself.

Why Palo Alto Networks bought it

The Portkey acquisition comes shortly after Palo Alto Networks acquired agentic endpoint security firm Koi – a deal that brought on board tools to protect AI systems running on individual devices within enterprises. Portkey adds the next layer.

Increasingly, enterprises are deploying AI agents that act on behalf of employees, often with permission to access sensitive systems and make decisions. Each of these actions involves the agent talking to an AI model, and each conversation is a potential point of failure or attack. Securing that traffic requires an AI gateway.

In its statement announcing the deal, the company said Portkey would become the “central nervous system of Prisma AIRS”, its AI security platform launched last year.

“By integrating Portkey into our Prisma AIRS… we are delivering the industry’s first unified enforcement layer to manage and secure every AI app and agent across the enterprise,” Palo Alto Networks chairman and CEO Nikesh Arora said in a social media post.

Signals for the corridor

For India-US corridor investors, the deal carries long-term value that matters more than the specific economics of this transaction.

AI infrastructure built by Indian-founded teams holds the potential of being acquired by top-tier global buyers as strategic capability, not as an acqui-hire. Portkey is not a small product team being absorbed for its engineering talent. It’s a fairly scaled platform with Fortune 500 customers and the acquisition raises the ceiling on what kind of bets could be taken by investors going forward.

Portkey’s structure – US-incorporated parent, Bengaluru engineering subsidiary, global enterprise go-to-market play — is the same template used by Loop AI, Emergent, Rocketlane, Deccan AI and several others that have raised capital in recent months. Each of these companies operates on the assumption that Indian engineering depth combined with US enterprise distribution is a defensible competitive advantage.

The longer term implications of the deal will become clearer once the financial details of the transaction are known. But, for now, the US-India corridor thesis is certainly on point.

The Week in Deals

Growth Cheques for Home Services, QSRs and Diamonds

A handful of growth stage rounds shaped the week, with $385 million deployed across 18 tracked deals. Lab-grown diamonds, an NBFC, a QSR franchise operator and an on-demand domestic help platform together absorbed a large portion of the capital. Krafton and Naver's Unicorn Growth Fund struck its first deal within a week of its launch.

Dholakia Lab Grown Diamond raised over Rs 800 crore ($84.3 million) in a round led by Abakkus PE. ICICI Ventures, investing from IAF5, and Amal Parikh joined the round with other undisclosed investors, the Surat-based lab-grown diamond maker said in a statement.

• The space has lately seen a number of startups raise early stage capital. These include Aukera, Limelight, Onya and Lucira Jewellery.

• As many as 20 companies raised a combined $186 million as of January this year, according to Tracxn.

Axis Finance raised $79.6 million from Kedaara Capital, which picked up a 5.08% stake. The transaction values the Mumbai-based NBFC arm of Axis Bank at nearly $1.6 billion. Kedaara’s earlier financial services bets include Aavas Financiers (exited its stake to CVC Capital), AU Small Finance Bank and Avanse (co-led a $133 million follow-on round in January).

Snabbit raised $56 million in a Series D round led by Susquehanna Venture Capital, Unicorn Growth Fund and Bertelsmann India Investments. Existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Lightspeed, and new investor FJ Labs joined the round.

• With the latest round, the Mumbai-based on-demand domestic help services platform has raised a total of $112 million and is valued at $360 million-plus post-money.

• The deal is Unicorn Growth Fund’s first since its launch just a week ago. The $636 million fund, launched by Krafton and Naver, is managed by Mirae Asset Venture Investments.

Trimex Foods raised $40 million in its first institutional funding round from Siguler Guff. The Delhi-based company is the exclusive Indian franchise partner for global restaurant brands such as Chili’s Grill & Bar, Cinnabon and Paul and operates over 50 restaurants and bakery-cafés across 13 cities in India.

“The platform built over the past fifteen years is notable, representing a scalable, multi-brand platform with industry-leading execution and a strong customer following,” Siguler Guff partner and co-portfolio manager Shaun Khubchandani said in a statement.

• New York-based Siguler Guff is currently raising the $300 million Global Emerging Markets Growth Opportunities Fund II, which has a large India mandate. The firm’s prior investments here include La Renon, Rajasthan Royals, and VerSe Innovation.

Sahi raised $33 million in a Series B round led by existing investor Accel. Elevation Capital, also an existing investor, joined the round. The Bengaluru-based stock trading platform uses AI to provide real-time market intelligence for trading, apart from other tools.

Kimbal raised $22 million in a Series B round led by GEF Capital Partners. Existing investor Niveshaay, investing from the Sambhav Fund, participated in the round. The Delhi-based company develops advanced metering infrastructure, RF mesh communication networks, AI-based meter reading and other energy management tools.

Metasports Interactive, maker of multi-player cricket game Hitwicket, raised $20 million in user acquisition (UA) financing from London-based company Metica. Unlike conventional equity funding, UA financing is typically non-dilutive and earmarked specifically for marketing and player acquisition. For Hyderabad-based Metasports, the structure helps accelerate growth without founder equity dilution.

Credilio Financial Technologies raised $10.5 million in a Series A round for Novio, an app that primarily offers UPI-powered, fixed deposit-linked credit cards. The round in the Mumbai-based company was led by existing investor Cornerstone Ventures. Shepherd’s Hill Private Equity, ESV-Arthya AIF and Roots Ventures participated in the round, which included venture debt from Innoven Capital and Alteria Capital.

HyugaLife raised a $10.5 million Series A round led by IvyCap Ventures. First Bridge participated in the round. The Mumbai-based company operates an ecommerce platform for health and nutrition products. The startup had earlier raised capital from Peak XV Partners’ Surge programme.

OpenObserve raised a $10 million Series A round led by Nexus Venture Partners and Dell Technologies Capital. Both are existing investors who participated in the company’s seed round. The San Francisco-based company offers an AI-native, open-source observability platform that helps businesses monitor, troubleshoot, and analyze apps and systems in one place.

Other deals this week:

Sub $1 million deals: Climate-tech company Prithu raised $1 million in a seed round led by Transition VC. AIoT startup Ubiqedge raised $1 million in a seed round led by Piper Serica.

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Recco | Notes on Culture, Craft and the Considered Life

The Honolulu J6FC+: A Sensible All-Court Paddle

As we are all aware, pickleball has properly taken off, and along with it, the paddle market has gone a bit mad. Every week there’s a new “power” paddle, a new “control” paddle, and a new material that’s meant to change your game overnight.

If you’re playing for fun—and you don’t want to spend nights reading paddle reviews—you really just need one thing: something solid, predictable, and easy to live with. The Honolulu J6FC+ looks like it fits that brief.

It’s built around a full carbon-fibre face, with a 16mm core, and it sits in a comfortable middle zone on weight, about 230 grams. It’s also an elongated paddle, which should give you a bit more reach, and the handle is long enough for a two-handed backhand if you use one.

None of this is magic, but it’s a sensible set of choices for most casual-to-regular players: stable in the hand, not tiring, and not overly specialised. Most importantly, you’ll stop thinking about it after five minutes. If you’re travelling, it’s an easy buy — otherwise, ask someone to bring it back.

Recco is a column by Murali Menon. Murali has spent a career paying close attention to how things are made, where they come from, and why some of them endure. Every edition, one recommendation: a maker, an object, a place, a practice.

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Edition #28. India’s goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2070 is estimated to require investments worth $150-200 billion a year towards enabling its energy transition. British International Investment (BII) aims to play a meaningful role over the next five years in helping close the gap via a new £1.1 billion ($1.5 billion) climate-focused vehicle called British Climate Partners (BCP).

BCP will focus on India and six Southeast Asian economies including the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia. Asian economies, according to BII, accounted for three-quarters of global coal demand in 2024, and BCP’s stated mandate is to build and scale investible climate projects, reduce early-stage risks and attract long-term commercial investors.

“Through BCP, BII will mobilise private capital alongside its own, working in partnership with private investors to deploy capital through a combination of equity platforms and mezzanine finance,” the UK government-owned development finance institution (DFI) said on April 23 when it unveiled its global investment strategy for 2026-31.

India already accounts for 27% of BII’s roughly £7.3 billion ($9.8 billion) global portfolio – its largest country exposure by a wide margin. For India-focused private equity and venture capital firms focused on climate-specific or climate-adjacent strategies, the BCP mandate codifies a model – originate, de-risk and hand off – that the DFI has been polishing here for a while.

The wider shift

BCP sits inside a broader strategic recalibration at BII which envisages investments worth £15 billion over the next five years across climate and other projects. BII itself is committed to deploying £7–8 billion in direct investments. It aims to mobilise a further £6-7.5 billion from commercial private capital investors for the balance.

Three other shifts embedded in the strategy will shape what it backs over the next five years.

• First, the plan narrows the DFI’s sector focus to three priority areas — financial services; power, trade and digital infrastructure; and sustainable industries.

• Second, the climate finance target has been raised from 30% of commitments to 40% (including BCP), and the gender finance target has increased from 25% to 30% of core investments.

• Third, 25% of new core investments will flow to countries classified by the UN as ‘least developed’. India does not qualify.

What emerges is that BII wants to be a more catalytic DFI, one that creates the architecture for commercial private capital participation at scale in climate financing and the broader sustainable investing spectrum.

An India-specific example it cites in the 2026-31 strategy document is the 2017 investment in Ayana Renewable Power. Started as a wholly-owned subsidiary of BII (known as CDC at the time) with an initial investment of $100 million, Ayana went on to raise over $1 billion from investors including the National Infrastructure Investment Fund (NIIF), Green Growth Equity Fund and Eversource Capital. By 2023, Ayana had over 4 GW of renewable energy capacity. BII and the other investors exited the investment last year when an ONGC and NTPC joint venture acquired Ayana at an enterprise value of $2.3 billion.

BII’s more recent moves in India

The DFI’s investments since January this year have all been climate-adjacent.

In February, it committed $42 million to Ecofy, a Mumbai-based green finance NBFC that lends for EVs and rooftop solar, alongside Finnfund, Eversource Capital and FMO. The same month, Turno, a Bengaluru-based EV distribution and financing platform, received a $4.7 million follow-on cheque to launch an intercity e-bus financing unit called ElectricGo. In January, BII co-invested in Aerem Solutions’ $15 million pre-Series B, a solar-financing NBFC round led by SMBC Asia Rising Fund. This month, it led an $80 million investment in Polaris Smart Metering, a Jaipur-based smart grid and low-cost smart meter maker.

None of these four transactions reflects the equity-platform or mezzanine-finance architecture BCP is being built around. All of them are direct, balance-sheet commitments to operating companies. Directionally though they point to BII’s sharpened focus on climate financing.

In February, it also announced that climate investments in India had reached $1.1 billion, exceeding targets. Shilpa Kumar, managing direct and head of India, described the country as “central” to the firm’s climate strategy.

Who else is writing cheques for climate

BII is far from the only source of climate capital flowing into India this year. On Friday, for instance, World Bank arm International Finance Corporation outlined plans to scale annual investments in India to $10 billion by 2030, according to a Reuters report. Target sectors include renewable energy, urban ​infrastructure and financial services.

Deal activity in climate and cleantech for the first four months of 2026 reveals a market that is broadening across stages, structures and investor types.

At the growth end, PMI Electro Mobility raised a $310 million growth round led by KKR to build out EV buses for public transport; and Radiance Renewables raised $100 million from Impact Fund Denmark and FMO.

At the Series B-and-above mid-market, Varaha (carbon credits) raised $45 million led by WestBridge Capital, Euler Motors closed a $46.2 million Series E led by Lightrock (with Hero MotoCorp and Blume returning), and EV charging infrastructure player Statiq raised $18 million.

Early-stage capital continues to flow into cleantech: Newtrace (green hydrogen electrolysers) raised a pre-Series A led by HDFC Bank and Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group with Peak XV Partners participating; Meine Electric (iron-air batteries) raised seed capital from Antler; and Astranova Mobility raised a $6.4 million Series A for EV financing, with the Asian Development Bank joining IvyCap Ventures on the cap table.

The investor universe at the early and growth stages includes domestic venture capital firms, family offices and corporate venture arms, and a widening set of global DFIs and specialist climate investors. The ticket sizes at the growth end are increasingly funded by global strategic capital and infrastructure-style vehicles. The middle of the market, where BCP’s mezzanine and platform capital is being aimed, is where the structural gap remains.

Given the Indian portfolio’s weight in BII’s existing asset base, the odds favour India featuring early in BCP’s deployment. Importantly, what BII’s new strategy ultimately represents is a maturing of the development finance model in the Indian context.

The Week in Deals

Healthcare, Gaming, Vertical AI Apps Drive Dealmaking

Yet another slow week for dealmaking dominated largely by vertical AI applications across sectors. Two homegrown gaming studios found capital and healthcare was another notable underlying theme. The week closed on a slightly optimistic note with the launch of a $600 million-plus early stage technology fund backed by South Korean technology majors.

Green Gene Enviro Protection and Infrastructure raised Rs 900 crore ($95.9 million) in a secondary transaction led by JM Financial Private Equity. A group of family offices including SRF Family Office joined the round. The Surat-based company specializes in the collection, treatment, and processing of hazardous waste generated from manufacturing sectors towards the production of alternative fuel.

• “As environmental regulations tighten and demand for responsible waste management grows, we see significant long-term potential in the company,” JM Financial Private Equity managing director Vinit Rai said in a statement.

• The deal comes a week after the private equity firm led a Rs 150 crore investment in NG Electro Products, a contract manufacturing company that serves consumer brands across home care, beauty and personal care, and nutraceuticals.

Agrow Allied Ventures raised $20 million from ICICI Venture. The Gurugram-based company manufactures generic and formulated agro-chemicals across herbicides, weedicides, insecticides, and fungicides.

Oolka raised $13.8 million in a Series A round led by Accel, according to multiple media reports citing regulatory filings. Existing investors Lightspeed and Z47 joined the round. The Bengaluru-based fintech offers AI-powered credit management solutions.

Coral raised $12.5 million in a funding round co-led by Z47 and Lightspeed. The New York-based healthcare automation startup, which also has operations in Bangalore, builds tools to streamline back-office workflows that still rely heavily on manual coordination and fax-based systems.

“US healthcare admin carries over a trillion dollars in overhead each year… Our thesis is that the most compelling AI opportunities lie in workflow-heavy, tech-underserved categories that demand deep vertical expertise to crack,” Z47’s Ashwin KP said in a statement.

LightFury Games secured $11 million in a pre-Series A round from Blume Ventures, V3 Ventures, MIXI Global Investments and Times Internet. The round also saw participation from cricketers, including MS Dhoni, Jasprit Bumrah, Shreyas Iyer, and Hardik Pandya. The Bengaluru-based gaming studio is expected to launch its AAA title, eCricket mobile game, later this year.

Archil, a San Francisco-based startup building a cloud filesystem f0r AI-native applications, raised a $11 million Series A from an investor group that included Peak XV Partners. The round was led by Standard Capital and other co-investors included YCombinator, Felicis and Wayfinder Ventures.

M, Dunzo co-founder Kabeer Biswas's new concierge services startup, raised a Rs 102 crore ($10.8 million) seed round led by Peak XV Partners. Blume Ventures and CRED joined the round. M proposes to use AI to handle everyday household tasks.

STCH raised $7 million in a pre-Series A round led by Omnivore. Kae Capital joined the round. The Bengaluru-based startup enables fashion brands to design and manufacture fabrics faster and more efficiently using AI and a contract manufacturing model.

Khetika raised an undisclosed sum in a funding round led by Ayra Ventures. Existing investors Narotam Sekhsaria Family Office and Anicut Capital participated in the round. The Mumbai-based company makes and retails preservative-free staples, spices and dry fruits.

NewEra Hospitals raised an undisclosed sum in a growth round from Premji Invest. The investment will enable NewEra Hospitals to deepen and expand its quaternary care services, said a statement.

• The Mumbai-based company currently operates two hospitals in Nagpur and one in Navi Mumbai, which offer complex specialties including neurosciences, transplant, and cardiology. It plans to launch three new hospitals in Nagpur, expanding its capacity to 800 beds from 350.

• “Structural gaps in India’s healthcare delivery system persist. Nagpur, in particular, requires a higher bed density and an improvement in hospital infrastructure,” Prakash Chellam, partner and head of healthcare and life sciences at Premji Invest, said.

Other deals this week:

Sub $1 million deals: Skincare brand Clarity Global Labs raised $0.4 million led by Artha Venture. Clean food QSR chain Acai Theory raised $0.4 million led by All In Capital. Surgical care hospital network Axten Hospitals raised $0.2 million in a round led by PedalStart.

Among deals in play, a TPG-led consortium formalised an agreement to acquire Aseem Infrastructure Finance for Rs 4,000 crore, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources. The consortium includes Singapore’s GIC and ICICI Bank. The NIIF-backed NBFC, which provides financing for infrastructure projects across renewable energy, electric mobility, roads and airports, will be merged with a newly created joint venture entity, the report said. On-demand domestic help services platform Pronto is in talks for a new funding round, The Morning Context reported. Lachy Groom may invest $20 million at a $200 million valuation, the report said.

In a big boost for technology startups, South Korea’s Krafton and Naver launched Unicorn Growth Fund, a Rs 6,000 crore ($636 million) fund to invest in early and growth stage startups in India. Mirae Asset Venture Investments will manage the fund.

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Recco | Notes on Culture, Craft and the Considered Life

A Serious Win for Indian Cheese

India doesn’t usually come up in conversations around serious cheese. But at the Mundial do Queijo do Brasil earlier this week, it made a noticeable showing.

The country picked up four medals at the São Paulo competition, which drew over 2,700 entries.

The standout was a Super Gold for Gulmarg, a brie-style cheese made by Mumbai-based Eleftheria. The brand also picked up a Gold for its brunost and a Silver for Kaali Miri, while a soft yak churpi from Ladakh won Gold.

That matters because of the category. Soft-ripened cheeses are hard to get right anywhere. In India, you’re working against heat, humidity and uneven handling. Getting a clean, consistent result is the real achievement.

For years, the top end of the market has been import-led. That hasn’t flipped, but it’s no longer the only option.

Eleftheria’s cheeses are available to order online, which removes some of the usual friction around access. If you’re curious, start with Gulmarg. It’s a good reference point for how far local cheesemaking has come.

Recco is a column by Murali Menon. Murali has spent a career paying close attention to how things are made, where they come from, and why some of them endure. Every edition, one recommendation: a maker, an object, a place, a practice.

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Thank you for reading The Runway. We’d love to get your feedback. Drop us a line at hello@therunwaynews.com or just reply to this email.