☕️ A private equity firm backed an AI content company at a $2 billion valuation. Another bet on logistics consolidation. A Norwegian development finance institution wrote a $100 million cheque for renewable energy. Intel’s CEO led a large cheque in an electric motorcycle maker. And a Bangalore-based family office pushed deeper into AI-led drug discovery in the US. It’s been an interesting week for PE-VC dealmaking.
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Brahma AI’s $150 million round and Samara Capital’s logistics acquisitions were the week’s most significant domestic transactions. Ampin Energy Transition and Ultraviolette added to a growing body of energy transition capital flowing into India this year. The remaining India deals were at the seed stage — lab grown diamonds, vegetarian protein food, ergonomic products.
Venture activity concentrated in enterprise AI. Local investors backed four companies, all based in the US, building agents for hotel operations to developer tooling in deals worth a combined $160 million.
The week’s most globally-oriented story though was Premji Invest. Two AI biotech rounds and both clinical-stage companies. The family office’s overseas portfolio is now large enough that its overseas deal activity rivals its India deal flow.
Let’s unpack the deals from the week.
→ Multiples backs AI content play at $2 billion valuation
Brahma AI raised $150 million from Multiples Alternate Asset Management at a post-money valuation of $2 billion. Prime Focus, which controls the company through its subsidiary DNEG, will retain a 66% stake following the investment, it said in a regulatory disclosure.
The company also received investor commitments for a further $100 million and may expand the round.
The London and Mumbai-based company pairs a content intelligence and management layer with a creation platform for visual AI, digital humans and multilingual work. It serves enterprises in media and entertainment, sports, healthcare and advertising. Anchor clients include Warner Bros, Mayo Clinic and the NBA.
→ Samara’s logistics consolidation bet
Samara Capital agreed to buy stakes in Associated Road Carriers, a B2B road transport company, and Calyx Container Terminals, a freight station operator that serves the Chennai port. The two businesses will be merged into a single logistics company, the private equity firm said in a statement. Financial details were not disclosed.
A Mint report, citing unnamed sources, put the deal size at Rs 1,200 crore ($125 million). Samara said the transaction follows a generational change in the promoter group.
The two companies had combined revenues of Rs 2,140 crore in FY2026. ARC operates more than 20 hubs, 600 branches and deploys 3,500 trucks a day. Calyx runs a container freight station about 20 kilometers from the Chennai port with a capacity of 75,000 twenty-foot equivalent units.
→ Energy transition
Ampin Energy Transition raised $100 million from Norfund’s Norwegian Climate Investment Fund. Norfund expects the investment to catalyse a further $700 million in private capital into the company through equity and debt. The capital will finance 2 gigawatts of new solar and wind energy. The Delhi-based company has raised nearly $1 billion so far.
Ultraviolette Automotive raised $85 million from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Yali Capital and TDK Ventures. Tan joins the Bangalore-based electric motorcycles maker as an advisor, it said in a statement. The capital will be used to scale production of the F77 and X-47 Crossover and bring two new models, the Tesseract and Shockwave, to market. It also plans to enter the US market next year. The deal is one of several large electric mobility rounds this year and specifically in two-wheelers.
→ Enterprise AI
Four enterprise AI companies that investors backed this week are building agents for specific workflows. The targets range from web data infrastructure for AI systems to hotel operations, HR and IT automation, and developer tools for defence-grade software.
Ema closed a $77 million Series B led by Creaegis, with existing investors Accel, S32 and Prosus participating. The round takes the total capital raised by the company to $140 million, it said in a statement. Mountain View, California-based Ema sells software agents it calls AI Employees, which run human resources, IT and finance tasks. Indian IT services company Wipro uses its assistant to automate over a 100 workflows and handle approximately 2.9 million employee queries a year. Bangalore-based Creaegis, founded by former Premji Invest executive Prakash Parthasarathy, co-led vibe coding startup Emergent’s $130 million Series C in July.
Firecrawl, a startup that supplies web data to AI agents, raised $75 million in a Series B round led by Smash Capital. Nexus Venture Partners joined the round with Y Combinator, Altos Ventures, Freestyle and Offline Ventures. The round accompanies the launch of Alexandria, a system through which an AI agent can find and extract from a data source, including from its own indexes which include scientific paper abstracts and developer sources.
Dextr AI raised a $6.7 million seed round led by Elevation Capital, with Foundation Capital participating. The Palo Alto, California-based startup builds AI agents for hospitality businesses. Its agents handle voice reservations in more than 90 languages, guest management, back-office work, and sales and marketing. It is also launching Doss Gen 1, which lets hotel staff direct AI agents via text or voice.
ByteAsk, a startup building AI coding agents for C and C++ software, raised $1 million in a pre-seed round from Y Combinator and Entrepreneur First. The San Francisco-based startup targets engineers working on software where reliability is critical, such as defence, aerospace, robotics and semiconductors.
→ Premji Invest’s US run
Premji Invest co-led BigHat Biosciences’ $75 million Series C with DFJ Growth, with Catalio Capital Management and a group of strategic investors participating. BigHat, based in San Mateo, California, uses AI to design protein drugs and has dosed its first patient in a Phase 1 trial of BHB810, an antibody-drug conjugate for gastric cancer and advanced gastrointestinal tumours. Total capital raised by the company is $223 million.
The family office also joined Enveda’s $311 million Series E as an existing investor, with Catalio leading. Enveda, based in Boulder, Colorado, uses AI to identify and characterise molecules produced by living organisms. Three of its medicines are in human trials and it has raised $845 million in total.
The two rounds extend a pattern that has become visible across Premji Invest’s deal activity this year, spanning AI drug discovery, robotics, enterprise software and data infrastructure. It led Rhoda AI’s $450 million Series A in March and co-led Doss’s $55 million Series B the same month. In June, it led Upscale AI’s $190 million Series A-1 and participated in Pramaana Labs and Zumutor Biologics.
→ Other deals
Protein Pantry, a Delhi-based maker of ready-to-cook vegetarian protein food, raised Rs 9 crore ($0.9 million) in a seed round led by Sharrp Ventures. Peercheque, Consumer Collective by Atrium and Indian Silicon Valley Capital participated in the round.
Onya raised $1.3 million in a pre-Series A round led by Divisa Family Office. Existing investor Zeropearl VC participated. The Bangalore-based company sells lab-grown diamond jewellery and retails out of offline stores across Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad.
Betterhood raised a $1.2 million seed round led by Sauce VC. Existing investor Kairon Capital joined the round. The Bangalore-based startup sells posture and ergonomic supports, and other pain relief and recovery products.
Sol Foundry emerged from stealth mode with $4 million in funding from General Catalyst, Nexus Venture Partners, DeVC, Peercheque and Cred founder Kunal Shah. The San Francisco-based startup is developing an AI assistant that acts on promises or commitments in emails, which could range from research to scheduling to drafting responses. It targets people whose work runs through heavy email traffic such as professionals in marketing, consulting and recruiting.
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Briefly
Bessemer Venture Partners raised $5.75 billion — $1.75 billion for seed and early stage bets and $4 billion for growth deals — to invest across the full AI stack. The firm said it has backed more than 260 AI-native companies since 2022, deploying over $3 billion. The raise is in line with several mega fund raises this year. Accel closed $3.5 billion across four funds, Bain Capital Ventures closed $1.6 billion in September, and Kleiner Perkins raised $3.5 billion in March.
Carta’s Q2 2026 VC fund performance report, which analysed 2,990 venture capital funds across vintage years 2017 to Q2 2026, finds that capital is concentrating in mega funds. In 2025, 64% of all capital raised by VC funds listed on Carta went to funds with more than $100 million in AUM, up from 38% in 2017. Returns remain difficult. The median DPI for the 2017 vintage sits at 0.37x, nine years on. For 2018 funds, it’s 0.15x and for 2019 fund, 0.04x.
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