Category: Startup Funding News

Anmasa is a Delhi NCR grocery startup that makes staples like flour, oils, and spices only after a customer places an order. The latest Anmasa funding round brings in ₹30 crore in seed capital led by Fireside Ventures, with Blume Ventures also participating, as the company tries to scale a model built around fresh, minimally processed pantry basics instead of long-shelf packaged goods. Shoppers who care about freshness in staples usually end up choosing between inconsistent local mills and branded products that were processed long before they reached the kitchen. Founded in 2024 by Yatish Talvadia and Shailendra Upadhyay, Anmasa is betting that this gap is big enough to build a large repeat-purchase business.

What is Anmasa and how does it work?

Anmasa sells everyday staples through an app, website, and physical stores, but the mechanics are closer to neighbourhood micro-manufacturing than standard grocery retail. A customer places an order for atta, oil, spices, rice, pulses, ghee, dry fruits, or related pantry items. The nearest store then processes and packs the order, with delivery promised in about 90 minutes and no minimum basket value. Its own messaging is blunt: “milled after order.”

The standout product is flour. Buyers can choose from more than 30 grains, millets, and seeds. They can build multigrain mixes and pick grind texture based on what they’re cooking — including region-specific use cases like luchi, poori, and bhakri. Anmasa’s app also spells out the customization layer clearly: customers can select their preferred grain mix and texture for atta rather than just choosing a fixed SKU off a digital shelf.

The range is already pretty broad for a young fresh staples brand. The live product list includes stone-ground whole wheat variants such as MP Premium, Sharbati, multigrain, and Khapli, alongside functional blends like Fiber+, Iron & Calcium+, Low-GI Protein+, and Smart Growth+. It also sells wood-pressed mustard, groundnut, sesame, and coconut oils, plus whole and ground spices, dry fruits, millets, pulses, and rice. On its website, Anmasa says its atta is slow stone-ground at 50 RPM.

That’s the pitch. Before Anmasa, a customer who wanted fresh flour had to either trust a local chakki, buy grain and manage the milling trip, or settle for packaged flour sitting in inventory for weeks or months. After Anmasa, the process looks more like food delivery: order digitally, track it, and — if you walk into a store — watch the milling happen in front of you. It’s more tangible than the average D2C grocery promise.

Who founded Anmasa and how is it performing?

Founding story

Anmasa was started in 2024 by Yatish Talvadia and Shailendra Upadhyay. The company launched in Gurugram and Noida first, which wasn’t random — Talvadia’s view is that NCR has a large migrant population that grew up buying staples through local sourcing networks and neighbourhood mills, then lost access to that system after moving into bigger cities. So Anmasa didn’t start by trying to reinvent grocery. It started by trying to modernize a habit people already had.

Why the founders fit this category

Talvadia brings deep operating experience from Milkbasket, where he spent nearly 9 years and later served as CEO. Milkbasket’s sale to Reliance Retail Ventures in October 2021 gave him a close-up view of what urban Indian households reorder frequently and how neighbourhood delivery economics work. It also showed which cities behave differently even when they look similar on a map. That matters here because Anmasa isn’t selling discovery-led impulse products. It’s selling routine.

Upadhyay’s fit is just as relevant. He previously founded grocery delivery platform Veggie India, which Milkbasket acquired in March 2019. That history gives Anmasa two founders who’ve already worked through sourcing and hyperlocal fulfilment. They also know the unglamorous unit economics of daily-use grocery. Second-time founders don’t always win. But they usually waste less time on the wrong problems.

Traction and early signals

The company is live, not in pilot mode. Anmasa currently operates 9 stores across NCR, and those outlets do triple duty as production units, customer experience centers, and fulfilment hubs. Online orders contribute about 85% of revenue, while walk-ins make up the remaining 15%. About 40% of online customers had previously bought offline. That says something useful: the stores aren’t just for last-mile logistics, they’re a customer acquisition tool.

Early operating signals look promising. Anmasa processes roughly 700 to 800 online orders a day and has a 90-day repeat rate of nearly 50%. It gets about 70% of its D2C revenue from repeat buyers. The founders say the brand has grown 23X in the past 12 months, with 10% to 12% month-on-month sales growth, and that most stores are already positive at the store EBITDA level. Good numbers. Still, they’ve been posted in a relatively tight geographic cluster.

Fundraising details

This seed round adds ₹30 crore, or about $3.1 million, to the balance sheet. Fireside Ventures led the round, and Blume Ventures joined along with undisclosed angel investors. Anmasa says total funding now stands at ₹47.5 crore, including ₹9.75 crore in pre-seed capital last year and a ₹7.5 crore bridge round in January 2026. The new money is earmarked for city expansion and new stores. It will also fund manufacturing hubs, leadership hires, stronger tech infrastructure, and more product personalization.

Competition and positioning

Anmasa is squeezed between very different kinds of rivals. On one side are packaged staples giants such as Aashirvaad and Tata Sampann, which win on scale, distribution, and habit. On the other are local flour mills, which can deliver freshness and customization but often lose on hygiene, consistency, and convenience. Then there are newer food brands like Anveshan, Zoff, and Two Brothers Organic Farms, which also sell minimally processed pantry products to a more quality-conscious buyer.

Its answer is the “bright store” model. Instead of a dark store hidden behind a delivery promise, Anmasa uses storefronts that shoppers can visit, learn from, and order through. It’s a subtle but important distinction. The company is trying to combine the trust of a neighbourhood chakki and the selection of a premium pantry brand. It also wants the convenience of quick commerce, without carrying too much finished-goods inventory.

How does Anmasa funding change its expansion plans?

This round matters because Anmasa’s model is more operationally heavy than a typical D2C food brand. It isn’t just buying customer attention online and shipping pre-packed inventory from a warehouse. Every new cluster needs stores, milling and pressing equipment, procurement discipline, trained staff, and tight last-mile control. So capital here is less about marketing burn and more about building a repeatable city-launch machine.

The next test market is Bengaluru, where Anmasa wants to enter within 3 to 6 months. After that, Pune or Hyderabad is on the list, and the startup has mapped 25 cities for expansion over the next 5 years. It’s also building an ERP system to track the chain from sourcing and procurement to manufacturing and delivery. Talvadia summed up the priorities as “technology, team building, expansion.” That’s where the risk sits too. If the ERP and store playbook work outside NCR, this becomes a real network business. If not, it stays a smart local brand.

What is the market for fresh staples in India?

The category is bigger than it first looks. IMARC pegs India’s packaged atta market at ₹95.1 billion in 2025 and expects it to reach ₹286.4 billion by 2034. The broader wheat flour market is also large, with IMARC valuing it at $8.82 billion in 2025. That doesn’t prove Anmasa wins. But it does show that even a narrow wedge like premium, made-to-order staples sits inside a very large consumption pool.

The structural trend is also on Anmasa’s side. Redseer says about 85% to 90% of mass grocery retail in India still runs through traditional trade, while high retail density, small basket sizes, and frequent purchases keep favouring hyperlocal formats. At the same time, quick commerce now accounts for roughly 70% of online grocery, even though online grocery itself is still only about 2% of total grocery retail. It’s a weird market, but a useful one: digital ordering has been normalized, yet staples are still massively under-digitized.

Conclusion

The Anmasa funding round doesn’t prove the bright store thesis. But it does give the company enough room to test whether fresh staples can become a serious branded habit instead of a niche urban preference. Watch Bengaluru closely.

Read how Neko Health raised a $700M Series C led by Lightspeed Venture Partners to expand its AI-powered preventive health scan clinics and launch its first U.S. location in New York.

FAQ

• What is the latest Anmasa funding round? Anmasa has raised ₹30 crore in a seed round led by Fireside Ventures, with participation from Blume Ventures and other backers. The round takes total capital raised to ₹47.5 crore, and the company plans to use the money for city launches, new hubs, technology, and leadership hiring.
• How does Anmasa’s made-to-order staples model work? Anmasa processes staples after the customer places an order instead of stocking large volumes of finished goods. Through its app and stores, buyers can order fresh atta, oils, and spices, customize grain mix and texture for flour, track the order, and receive delivery in about 90 minutes in its service areas.
• Who founded Anmasa? Anmasa was founded in 2024 by Yatish Talvadia and Shailendra Upadhyay. Talvadia is a former Milkbasket executive and cofounder, while Upadhyay previously cofounded Veggie India, which Milkbasket acquired in 2019.
• What market is Anmasa trying to capture? Anmasa is going after the fresh staples and pantry products segment inside India’s massive grocery market. That includes categories like atta, spices, oils, pulses, and rice, where buyers still rely heavily on traditional retail even as digital ordering and hyperlocal delivery become normal in urban India.

Neko Health is a preventive health startup that uses a proprietary body scan, blood work, and clinician review to spot risks before symptoms push people into the healthcare system. Now it’s raised a massive $700 million Series C as the company gets ready for its first U.S. clinic in New York. The pitch is simple: healthcare is still too reactive and too fragmented. It’s also too slow for people who want a clear read on their health before something goes wrong. Founded in 2018 by Spotify founder Daniel Ek and CEO Hjalmar Nilsonne, Neko Health is trying to turn preventive screening into a repeat annual habit instead of a once-in-a-crisis event.

What does Neko Health actually do?

Neko Health offers a 60-minute preventive health visit that combines scanning, biometric testing, blood analysis, and a clinician consultation in one appointment. The workflow is tightly packaged. First the body is measured, then results are processed on-site, then a clinician reviews everything with the patient. Follow-up with specialists is included if something looks off.

That scan is more than a fancy camera booth. Its system uses more than 70 sensors and collects 50 million data points. It stores a detailed skin map using over 2,000 high-resolution images so changes can be tracked over time. It also runs cardiovascular assessments and measures oxygen saturation and arterial health. Those readings are combined with blood biomarkers covering areas like cholesterol, metabolic health, and immune function.

The product has become more consumer-friendly this year. Neko recently added body composition analysis, including visceral fat and body fat measurement without a DEXA or MRI. iPhone users can now connect Apple Health so clinicians can review everyday signals like steps, sleep, and heart rate variability alongside scan results. That matters. A static clinic visit is useful, but a scan plus everyday health data makes a stronger case.

That’s the real hook. Instead of bouncing between a dermatologist, a cardiology workup, lab testing, and a follow-up GP appointment, Neko bundles those checks into one visit with same-visit results and a shareable app record. For a lot of people, that convenience is the product.

Who founded Neko Health and why now?

The founding story

Neko Health started in Stockholm in 2018 with a pretty blunt question: if you built healthcare from scratch today, would you really center it on treating people only after they get sick? That question came from Daniel Ek, who had already spent years rebuilding music distribution through Spotify, and from Hjalmar Nilsonne, who took on the operator role and now runs Neko as CEO. The company spent 4 years developing the technology before launching publicly in February 2023.

Why these founders make sense for this bet

Ek’s role in the story is obvious. He knows how to build a consumer product that turns a messy, legacy industry into something simpler and habit-forming. That doesn’t mean healthcare behaves like streaming. It doesn’t. But it does explain why Neko feels designed like a product company first and a clinic second.

Nilsonne brings a different kind of fit. He grew up in a family of doctors, but his own career started in engineering and energy tech rather than medicine. In 2018, when Ek first messaged him about reinventing healthcare, Nilsonne was winding down an AI-powered smart home energy monitoring startup after it struggled to find product-market fit. That mix — medical exposure at home, engineering training, and a scar from a previous startup — gives Neko’s founding team more credibility than a celebrity-founder headline alone.

Traction, early signals, and the funding stack

The company now has real operating proof behind the vision. More than 100,000 people in Sweden and the U.K. have already had a Neko Health scan. More than 350,000 people have either joined the waitlist or registered for one. Neko says 75% of members book and prepay their next scan before leaving the first appointment. That’s the kind of repeat behavior investors love because it hints at an annual preventive-care subscription in everything but name.

There are some clinical signals too, though these are still early. Neko says 3 in 4 returning members who previously had severe or life-threatening conditions flagged are now in good health or have those conditions under control. It also says 5 of 7 tracked biomarkers improved significantly between first and second scans. One widely shared anecdote came from Calm founder Alex Tew, who said on X that a Neko scan found a malignant mole on his back that he then had removed: “I’m grateful to Neko for helping me discover this – I’m not sure how I would have otherwise.”

On the capital side, this is Neko’s $700 million Series C, announced on July 15, 2026. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round. O.G. Venture Partners co-led it. Atomico, General Catalyst, Lakestar, Liberty City Ventures, Positive Sum, and BDT & MSD also participated. The new financing comes after a $260 million Series B in January 2025, also led by Lightspeed, and David Ofer of O.G. Venture Partners is set to join the board subject to regulatory approval.

Where Neko Health sits against competitors

Neko isn’t alone anymore. Prenuvo is the clearest category peer: it raised $120 million in February 2025 and sells MRI-based preventive scans paired with blood biomarker analysis, including newer products around brain health. That puts both companies in the same broad consumer prevention lane, even if the hardware and care model differ.

But Neko’s real competition is still the old way of doing things. Separate lab work. A skin check at one office. A cardiovascular assessment somewhere else. Maybe an executive physical if you can afford it. Neko’s differentiation is that it built its own devices in-house and processes results on-site. It also layers in clinician review and packages everything into a retail-like visit that feels faster and less intimidating than a traditional imaging route. Midjourney is also working on a body scanner tied to a spa concept expected in San Francisco in 2027, which tells you tech founders clearly see prevention as a product category, not just a medical niche.

Why Neko Health’s $700M round matters

This round matters because Neko has moved past novelty. A flashy scan can generate a waitlist. Building a repeatable clinic network across countries is much harder.

And that’s where $700 million changes the conversation. Neko now has the balance sheet to open new centers and hire clinicians. It can also adapt its model to U.S. healthcare rules and keep investing in the hardware and software stack that makes the experience feel fast instead of bureaucratic. The New York launch isn’t a side quest anymore. It’s the next real test.

For customers, this funding could mean shorter waits and broader access. For investors, it’s a bet that preventive screening can become a recurring consumer behavior, not just a luxury health purchase people try once for curiosity and then forget. The 75% rebooking figure is probably the most important number in the whole story. It suggests Neko may be building a durable habit, not a one-off wellness stunt.

How big is the preventive health scan market?

The surrounding market is already large, even before you narrow it to direct-to-consumer preventive clinics. Grand View Research estimates the global whole-body imaging market was worth $29.6 billion in 2024 and projects it will reach $41.7 billion by 2030, growing at a 5.9% CAGR. North America accounted for 34.4% of the market in 2024. That helps explain why New York is such an important next stop for Neko Health.

What’s changing isn’t just imaging hardware. It’s consumer behavior. More people are used to tracking sleep, heart rate, recovery, glucose, and exercise. That makes a prevention-first clinic feel less alien than it would have 10 years ago. At the same time, health systems and employers have stronger financial reasons to care about earlier detection because chronic disease is expensive, long-lasting, and usually a lot cheaper to manage before it becomes acute.

That doesn’t mean the category is settled. Full-body scanning still has open questions around pricing, clinical follow-through, and how much signal consumers can actually act on. But the direction is pretty clear: prevention is becoming a product people are willing to buy directly, not just a slogan buried inside public-health policy.

What to watch after Neko Health’s Series C

The bet on Neko Health is really a bet that preventive care can be productized without becoming shallow wellness theater. So far, the company has shown demand, repeat usage, and enough capital to push beyond Europe. The next thing to watch is simple: whether the New York opening in 2026 turns Neko Health from an ambitious European clinic network into a real U.S. healthcare business.

Read how E3 Electric.Ai raised Rs 100 crore in a Series A led by BluVenture Holdings to launch its AI-powered TRION electric scooter and build a software-driven EV platform for India’s family commuters.

FAQ about Neko Health

• What funding did Neko Health raise? Neko Health raised a $700 million Series C announced on July 15, 2026. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round and O.G. Venture Partners co-led it, following Neko’s $260 million Series B in January 2025.
• How does the Neko Health scan work? It’s a 60-minute preventive health visit that combines body scanning, blood analysis, biometrics, and a clinician consultation in one appointment. Results are processed on-site. The system now also includes body composition metrics plus Apple Health data for patients who want wearables folded into the review.
• Who founded Neko Health? Neko Health was founded in 2018 by Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne. Ek brought consumer-tech building experience from Spotify, while Nilsonne came in with an engineering background, a family connection to medicine, and previous startup experience before becoming Neko’s CEO.
• Is Neko Health a body scanning startup or a healthcare clinic company? It’s both, and that’s why investors care. Neko builds proprietary scanning technology but delivers it through physical clinics, which puts it closer to a vertically integrated preventive healthcare company than a pure software startup or a standard imaging center.

E3 Electric.Ai makes AI-powered electric scooters for India’s family commuter market. The latest E3 Electric funding news is a big one: the Bengaluru startup has raised Rs 100 crore, or about $10.5 million, in a Series A round led by BluVenture Holdings ahead of the commercial launch of its first product, the E3 TRION. That matters because the mass-market scooter buyer still worries about the same ugly stuff — safety, service, charging anxiety, and resale value. Founded in 2024 by P. Sanjeev, E3 is betting that software-heavy electric two-wheelers can fix more of that ownership pain than today’s average EV scooter.

What does E3 Electric.Ai actually build?

E3 Electric.Ai is building a modular electric scooter platform with an AI layer across battery management and diagnostics. It also covers safety alerts and ride personalization. In plain English, the scooter is supposed to learn from how a rider accelerates, charges, and commutes. Then it uses that data to offer smarter range estimates, maintenance warnings, and route planning through a connected mobile app. E3 plans 10 core AI and software features for the commercial launch.

Some of the named systems are unusually specific for a pre-launch EV startup. TRIPSENSE handles AI vision alerts for hazards. AI Health Scan runs a 10-second vehicle diagnostics check before a trip. There’s also a fall-detection SOS feature in development that can alert family members and a helpline. That suggests E3 isn’t pitching this as a speed toy — it’s pitching it as a practical household vehicle.

The hardware follows the same logic. E3’s TRIAXISFRAME is a modular chassis. TRAKWHEEL uses dual 14-inch wheels. VOLTPORT is a battery-protection system with 200+ safety checks. The platform is also designed so the battery, motor, and controller can be upgraded over time without redesigning the whole scooter line from scratch. That’s a smart move in a price-sensitive market.

The customer experience is meant to feel less mechanical and more software-led. Instead of waiting for something to fail, a rider is supposed to start with a quick health scan. They’d get alerts before issues get worse and tap into roadside support if the system spots a problem. A lot of EV brands talk about “smart mobility.” E3 is trying to turn that phrase into an actual ownership workflow.

Who is behind E3 Electric funding?

Founded in 2024 to chase the 110cc scooter buyer

E3 Electric.Ai was founded in 2024 by P. Sanjeev in Bengaluru. The company isn’t chasing the premium end first. It’s positioning its scooters as an electric alternative to India’s giant 110cc scooter category, with family commuters at the center of the design brief. Affordability, reliability, and lower ownership cost sit at the center of the pitch.

Sanjeev has real category fit

That founder-market fit is one reason this round stands out. Sanjeev is a former TVS Motor EV head, which means he’s coming in with direct operating exposure to India’s two-wheeler and electric mobility market rather than learning it from scratch. For a hardware startup, that matters a lot. You can’t fake your way through supply chain choices, product-market fit, homologation, or service design in this category.

Pre-launch signals, fundraising details, and the rivals E3 has picked

E3 is still pre-launch, and that’s important context. The E3 TRION hasn’t been commercially rolled out yet, bookings haven’t opened, and the current waitlist is being used to gauge interest before launch. Still, the company has some early proof points: it has filed 18 patents and design IPs, built 10 proprietary tech features, and developed 65+ connected app features. It also picked up a NASSCOM Emerge 50 Awards 2025 win. That gives it a bit more visibility than the average stealthy EV startup.

On the financing side, the round combines equity and debt. Inc42 reported that roughly Rs 75 crore came as equity and Rs 25 crore as debt, with more than 80% already disbursed. That money is earmarked for product development, IP, and expansion rather than building giant assembly assets early. It fits the company’s asset-light approach.

Competition won’t be gentle. The source article names TVS, Ola Electric, Ather Energy, and Bajaj Auto, and that’s the right frame — these are the brands that already own mindshare in Indian electric scooters. The real incumbent, though, is still the petrol family scooter. E3’s differentiation is pretty clear: an AI-led ownership layer and a modular platform that can spawn multiple variants. It’s also pitching mass-market practicality instead of spec-sheet bragging. Investors backing this are betting that software and architecture can become a moat in a market where many scooters still look interchangeable.

Why does E3 Electric funding matter now?

This round matters because E3 is at the hardest stage for a hardware startup — the stretch between prototype ambition and commercial reality. It already has a named product, a defined market segment, and a feature story that’s more detailed than most pre-launch EV companies. What it didn’t have, until now, was enough capital to get that plan onto Indian roads.

That’s the gap.

And the money isn’t just about building more scooters. It’s about validating an idea that electric two-wheelers can improve through software after the sale, not just at the factory gate. If E3 spends this round well, it can ship a better launch product. It can also tighten the reliability of its AI stack and enter more cities without getting dragged into a capex-heavy manufacturing trap too early.

There’s also a geographic roadmap behind the round. E3 plans to start in Bengaluru and select southern markets, then move into other cities, including Delhi, during the current financial year. It has identified about 90 markets for expansion. That’s ambitious — maybe a little too ambitious for a first commercial launch — but it shows BluVenture isn’t backing a niche pilot.

How big is India’s electric scooter market?

The macro case is real. IMARC estimates India’s electric two-wheeler market reached 1,233.6 thousand units in 2025 and could climb to 12,263.2 thousand units by 2034, which implies a 28.2% CAGR. Electric scooters and mopeds already account for 88.6% of that market. So E3 is entering the biggest and most familiar corner of Indian EV adoption rather than trying to manufacture demand from nothing.

Policy and infrastructure are still doing a lot of the heavy lifting. IBEF says India is targeting EVs to make up 80% of two-wheeler and three-wheeler sales by 2030, and a recent CII estimate highlighted the need for 1.32 million charging stations by then. That tells you two things at once: adoption has real policy support, and there’s still a lot of building left to do.

There’s also a demand-side reason this timing works. Fuel costs remain a constant pressure point for commuters, and the two-wheeler buyer in India is already trained to think in lifetime running cost, not just sticker price. That’s why the “smart, affordable family scooter” pitch keeps showing up. The category is big enough now that software-led differentiation might actually matter.

Can E3 Electric funding create a real challenger?

It can — but only if E3 turns its feature stack into day-to-day reliability.

That’s the whole test.

The E3 Electric funding round gives the startup enough room to try something more interesting than another generic electric scooter launch. It has a founder who knows the sector and a product that sounds more thought-through than most early EV decks. It also has a market large enough to reward a company that gets family commuting right. But Indian two-wheeler buyers are ruthless. If the E3 TRION can’t prove itself on uptime, safety, service, and ownership economics, none of the AI branding will matter. Watch the launch, the early city rollout, and whether the waitlist turns into actual paid demand.

Read how Ather Energy secured up to ₹1,200 crore from Hero MotoCorp and other existing investors to expand EV manufacturing, accelerate R&D, and scale its connected electric scooter platform across India.

FAQ

• What is the E3 Electric.Ai funding round about? E3 Electric.Ai has raised Rs 100 crore in a Series A round led by BluVenture Holdings ahead of the commercial launch of the E3 TRION. The round combines equity and debt, and reporting around the deal says the mix is roughly Rs 75 crore equity and Rs 25 crore debt.
• How does the E3 TRION scooter work? The E3 TRION is built as a connected electric scooter with an AI layer that handles diagnostics and safety alerts. It also covers battery monitoring and ride personalization. It includes features such as a 10-second AI Health Scan, route planning based on available range, and predictive maintenance alerts delivered through a mobile app.
• Who is P. Sanjeev and why does he matter here? P. Sanjeev is the founder and CEO of E3 Electric.Ai, which he started in 2024 in Bengaluru. He previously led EV work at TVS Motor, so he comes into the startup with direct operating experience in India’s electric two-wheeler market rather than just startup credentials.
• Is India a strong market for AI-powered electric scooters? Yes — and that’s a big reason this startup exists at all. India’s electric two-wheeler market crossed 1.23 million units in 2025 by IMARC’s estimate, and scooters and mopeds made up 88.6% of that volume. That means the family scooter segment is where the action already is.

Ather Energy builds connected electric scooters and the charging and software stack around them. The latest Ather Energy funding move will bring in up to ₹1,200 crore from existing backers, at a moment when India’s EV scooter race is getting expensive fast and nobody can scale on product launches alone. Founded in 2013 by Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain, the Bengaluru company now needs fresh capital for manufacturing, R&D, new products, and the hard stuff that comes with turning an EV brand into a durable business.

The structure matters here. India-Japan Fund will put in about ₹200 crore through equity shares. Hero MotoCorp will invest ₹960 crore through convertible warrants. Mehta and Jain will each invest ₹20 crore through warrants. That sits inside a larger board-approved plan of up to ₹2,500 crore, subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals.

What does Ather Energy actually sell beyond scooters?

Ather isn’t just selling a scooter with a battery pack bolted in. It sells an electric two-wheeler platform that combines the vehicle with a software layer called AtherStack, mobile connectivity, home and public charging, and remote service features into one ownership experience. That’s why its products feel closer to connected consumer hardware than a standard commuter scooter.

For a rider, the workflow is pretty simple. You buy a 450 series scooter if you want the sharper, performance-led product, or the Rizta if you want the family scooter format. The dashboard handles navigation. The app shows charge status and location. The system can suggest charging options and trip feasibility in real time instead of leaving riders to do all that planning on their own.

The useful bits are the small ones. Over-the-air updates push fixes and new features without a workshop visit. Ather Connect adds ride stats and remote monitoring. It also includes Find My Scooter and phone-linked controls. On the charging side, Ather has its Ather Grid fast-charging network, while home charging options sit alongside that public network.

That’s the real difference versus a lot of old-school two-wheeler ownership. Riders used to think separately about range, route planning, software updates, and charging discovery. Ather folds much of that into the scooter and the app. It’s still a scooter business. But the software is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

Who founded Ather Energy and why did they start it?

How Ather Energy started

Ather was founded in Bengaluru in 2013 by Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain, both IIT Madras alumni from the Engineering Design program. The company didn’t begin with a grand EV brand thesis. It started with a narrower technical question around battery systems, then widened when the founders concluded the real problem wasn’t one component — it was the whole vehicle and the ownership experience around it.

That origin story still shows up in the business today. Ather builds scooters, yes, but it has always treated battery management and charging as core product decisions. Power electronics and software are in that same bucket. That’s a tougher route. It’s also why the company has looked more engineering-led than marketing-led from day one.

Why Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain fit this market

Mehta is Ather’s CEO and Jain is its CTO. Mehta’s public bio traces his work back to IIT Madras and the early battery-pack idea that eventually became Ather, while Jain’s background is also rooted in engineering design at IIT Madras, including advanced study in the same field. This wasn’t a pair of generalist founders chasing a trend. They came into EVs through product and systems thinking.

That matters because electric two-wheelers are unforgiving. You can hide weak execution in a consumer app for a while. You can’t do that with hardware, safety, battery reliability, service, and charging. Ather’s founders have spent more than a decade building in exactly those areas. That’s a big reason investors still back them even as the category gets more brutal.

What traction looks like now

Ather is far past the “interesting startup” stage. In FY26, it sold 263,000 units, reported total income of ₹3,823 crore, and expanded to 700 stores nationwide after doubling its network in a year. Its FY26 market share reached 17.1%, helped by stronger distribution and the broader appeal of the Rizta family scooter.

This is a real scale-up phase. Vehicle volumes jumped. The retail footprint widened sharply. The company also kept working on a new manufacturing facility in Maharashtra.

How the ₹1,200 crore round is structured

This Ather Energy funding round is a preferential allotment worth up to ₹1,200 crore. India-Japan Fund, managed by NIIF, will subscribe to 16.26 lakh equity shares for nearly ₹200 crore. Hero MotoCorp will subscribe to 76.19 lakh convertible warrants worth about ₹960 crore, while Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain will each subscribe to 1.59 lakh warrants valued at ₹20 crore apiece.

Those warrants can be converted into equity within 18 months, with 25% paid upfront and the rest due on conversion. Hero is already Ather’s largest shareholder, and after full conversion its stake would edge up to roughly 30.7% on a fully diluted basis. The India-Japan Fund’s holding would move to a little over 6%.

The broader plan is even bigger. Ather’s board has already cleared a capital-raising program of up to ₹2,500 crore. The money is meant for manufacturing expansion, R&D, new product development, and general corporate purposes.

Who Ather is up against

This category isn’t short on rivals. TVS Motor, Bajaj Auto, Ola Electric, and Hero’s own Vida lineup are all pushing hard in electric two-wheelers. The real incumbent alternative is still the petrol scooter market dominated by familiar, low-anxiety products people already trust. Ather has chosen to compete less on bare-minimum pricing and more on software, ride quality, charging access, and a more premium ownership experience.

That strategy looked narrow when Ather was mostly known for the 450. Rizta changed the equation by giving it a family-focused product with a wider addressable market. Investors are betting that Ather can keep its tech-led identity while expanding beyond the enthusiast crowd. That’s not easy. But it’s a lot more credible now than it was 2 years ago.

Why does this Ather Energy funding matter now?

Because this round tells you Ather’s existing backers still want more exposure, not less.

Hero didn’t show up with a symbolic cheque. A ₹960 crore commitment through warrants is a serious signal that the strategic relationship still has room to deepen. India-Japan Fund also fits neatly here because Ather isn’t a lightweight brand story. It’s a manufacturing and technology business that needs patient capital.

The use of funds is practical, not flashy. Ather wants more manufacturing capacity and more product development. It also wants more R&D. In a category where battery costs, service execution, and distribution can wreck margins, that’s where the money should go. If an EV company isn’t investing there, it’s probably kidding itself.

There’s another read too. Ather isn’t raising because the market is easy. It’s raising because scale in electric two-wheelers now demands capital discipline and sustained execution at the same time. Existing investors are backing Ather on the belief that its software-led brand can survive the next, uglier phase of competition.

How big is India’s electric scooter market getting?

India sold more than 12.8 lakh electric two-wheelers in 2025, up 11% year on year. That’s already big enough to stop treating EV scooters as a side category, and it helps explain why every serious manufacturer is expanding product lines and distribution at the same time.

The demand story is shifting too. Crisil has described the market’s move away from pure subsidy dependence and toward consumer demand, product quality, and broader OEM participation. It also expects electric two-wheelers to account for about 7% of total two-wheeler volume by the next fiscal, up from roughly 5.5% currently.

Longer term, forecasts are a lot more aggressive. Bain has projected electric models could make up 40% to 45% of India’s two-wheeler sales by 2030, while McKinsey has put the range even higher at 60% to 70% of new sales. The exact number will move around. The direction won’t.

Policy still matters even if subsidies matter less than they used to. India’s PM E-Drive scheme keeps demand incentives in place for eligible vehicles, but the market is increasingly being won on localisation, cost control, charging convenience, and retail reach. Even Ola Electric’s recent ₹780 crore QIP fits that reality. Everyone needs cash because this market has moved from early hype to heavy execution.

What should investors watch after this Ather Energy funding?

The next chapter for Ather Energy funding isn’t the headline amount. It’s whether the company can turn that money into better scale without losing the product edge that made people care in the first place.

Watch 3 things. How fast the Maharashtra manufacturing build-out progresses. Whether Rizta keeps widening Ather’s reach without dragging the brand into a commodity fight. Hero’s deeper ownership is the other one. The question is whether it eventually translates into a stronger strategic advantage, not just a larger cap table line item.

Ather has enough cash support, brand recall, and product credibility to stay in the front pack. But this market doesn’t hand out medals for nice dashboards. It rewards companies that can build, service, finance, and scale.

Read how Senra raised a $65M Series B co-led by Lowercarbon Capital and Interlagos to modernize wire harness manufacturing with software-guided production, AI-powered workflows, and integrated factory operations.

FAQ

• What is the latest Ather Energy funding round? Ather has approved a preferential fund raise of up to ₹1,200 crore from existing investors. Hero MotoCorp is the biggest participant, India-Japan Fund is taking equity, and founders Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain are also putting in fresh money through warrants.
• How does Ather Energy’s product work? Ather sells electric scooters wrapped in a connected software and charging stack. Riders get on-dashboard navigation and remote charge and location tracking. They also get OTA updates and access to Ather Grid fast charging, which makes ownership feel more integrated than a plain hardware sale.
• Who founded Ather Energy? Ather was founded in 2013 by Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain, both from IIT Madras’ Engineering Design program. They started by thinking about battery technology, then expanded the idea into building a full electric scooter and software platform because the real problem was bigger than one component.
• Why is Ather Energy in a market worth watching? Because India’s electric two-wheeler category is already selling at scale and still has tons of room left. The market crossed 12.8 lakh units in 2025, and major forecasts still point to electric models taking a much larger share of two-wheeler sales by 2030.

Senra builds software-guided wire harnesses for aerospace, defense, and other advanced hardware programs. Its $65 million Series B is a bet on modernizing wire harness manufacturing. Many factories still rely on PDFs, spreadsheets, and manual bench-top work. Senra believes the process can become faster, cleaner, and more traceable. The company was founded in 2023 by former SpaceX engineers Jordan Black and Benjamin Shanahan. Black got the idea after encountering wire harness bottlenecks while helping scale Starship production. As vehicles become smarter, their internal wiring becomes more critical. Even a tiny process mistake can cause major schedule delays.

What does Senra’s wire harness manufacturing platform do?

Senra isn’t just another contract manufacturer with nicer branding. It combines a browser-based harness design tool and internal factory software with actual production capacity. A customer can move from concept, quote, engineering review, procurement, build planning, assembly, and quality control inside one system instead of bouncing between disconnected teams and files. That’s the core pitch: fewer handoffs, fewer surprises, and a design that’s ready for the floor when it leaves engineering.

Its software platform is called Amp. It’s an ITAR-compliant cloud tool that gives engineers manufacturing feedback while they’re still designing the harness and captures high-fidelity data at the design stage. That data becomes a digital thread the factory can actually use. The company also offers digital twin conversion and design-for-manufacturability support. It also does 3D and 2D formboard creation, plus supply-chain guidance on piece parts.

The back half matters just as much. Amp uses GovCloud-hosted AI to read bill-of-materials data from messy, unstructured files and speed up aerospace RFQs by an order of magnitude. It then feeds that into procurement, warehousing, and kitting workflows. Senra says its software creates work instructions 5x faster with templated operations. It also generates a first-pass build plan based on the engineering drawings.

On the floor, the system tracks every crimp, connection, and shipped serial. Senra says real-time process enforcement and end-to-end traceability help it hit 99%+ first-pass yield, while FactoryOS converts design data into build instructions and machine programs. Before that kind of setup, customers were often stuck in weeks of email back-and-forth just to clarify what should be built. Senra’s pitch is that design and production finally speak the same language.

Who founded Senra and why start it?

The company started with a very specific factory headache

Black and Shanahan founded Senra in 2023 after working together at SpaceX. Black had been the manufacturing development engineer for wire harnessing, building processes for Dragon, Falcon, and spacesuit products before becoming the youngest manager in SpaceX Avionics R&D. He’s said that while scaling Starship-related production, he flew around the world auditing harness suppliers and kept finding the same thing — a business that still looked frozen in the Cold War, with wooden tables and manual workflows doing mission-critical work.

That frustration became the company. Senra began building harnesses out of Black’s apartment within weeks of incorporation. The name is a joke with a point: it’s “harness” backwards, minus the “h” and “s,” because Black says the company is trying to take the “horseshit” out of harnesses.

The founders actually fit the problem

Black’s background is unusually hands-on for a software-heavy manufacturing startup. Before SpaceX, he started as a technician fixing roller coasters at the Santa Monica Pier and had internships at Ford and Enerpac. That gives him the kind of shop-floor bias Senra needs, because the company’s thesis is that the answer isn’t just prettier design software — it’s software that respects how hard physical production really is.

Shanahan brings the other half. He studied neuroscience at Brown, worked as a software engineer at BrainGate, then joined NeuroPace, where he helped productionalize machine-learning workflows and built visualization-heavy applications. At SpaceX, he worked on the company’s internal purchasing system and Starlink’s manufacturing execution system. He also worked on telemetry infrastructure for satellites, launches, and engine tests. If Senra is trying to turn a craft-heavy process into a systematized one, that mix of software, operations, and hardware experience makes a lot of sense.

Traction, facilities, and the round itself

Senra’s product is no longer a concept. Amp is in public beta, the company has a 15,000-square-foot Redondo Beach facility, and it opened an 80,000-square-foot site in Cypress that expanded its production footprint by 5x. Black says Senra is currently producing about 1,000 harnesses a month across 2 factories and wants to reach 10,000 a month in 2027.

Customer disclosure is still selective, but the company says its work spans submarines and maritime systems, land-based defense platforms, launch vehicles, and satellites. Earlier this year, Senra also said 8 Fortune 500 manufacturers were already customers. It also said it had partnerships across top aerospace, defense, automotive, industrial, and healthcare programs, including Anduril.

Now the money. Senra announced its $65 million Series B on July 15, 2026. Lowercarbon Capital and Interlagos co-led the round, with participation from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Dylan Field, CIV, 8VC, The Friedkin Group, Jaws Estates Capital, Sozo Ventures, and Alumni Ventures. The company said total funding has now topped $112 million; before this, it had raised a $25 million Series A led by Dylan Field and CIV. Senra plans to use the new capital to expand with a third manufacturing facility and keep building out its platform.

How does Senra compare in wire harness manufacturing?

The legacy alternative is still the real competitor. A lot of harness work gets done with custom drawings, spreadsheets, email threads, tribal knowledge, and skilled technicians following instructions that may or may not be standardized. That works until volume rises, engineering changes pile up, or one bad material choice shows up late in the program.

Then there are the software incumbents. Siemens Capital, Zuken E3, and Cadonix Arcadia all sell harness design and manufacturing tools. They automate validation and formboard creation. They also handle connectivity checks, manufacturing documentation, and in some cases digital build instructions. Those products aren’t fake competition. They’re serious, established systems.

Senra is taking a different swing. Instead of stopping at software, it owns the factory too. That means it can push design rules upstream, translate them straight into procurement and work instructions, and use the same data on the production line. That full-stack model is probably what investors are buying here — not just better CAD, but tighter control over cost, speed, and traceability in sectors where a late harness can delay an entire aircraft, satellite, or weapons program.

Why does this $65M Senra round matter?

Because Senra isn’t trying to fund a cleaner dashboard. It’s trying to build actual industrial capacity around a part that almost nobody outside manufacturing talks about, even though it sits inside nearly every advanced machine. The company has already brought in former SpaceX CIO Ken Venner as chief technology and product officer. That suggests this round is as much about operational scale as software polish.

And the stakes are real. In 2023, Boeing’s Starliner program had to redo its wiring system after flammable tape was found in the harness setup, causing a costly delay. That’s why Black keeps coming back to standardization, traceability, and engineering-change control. A harness mistake isn’t glamorous. It’s just expensive.

This round also sharpens Senra’s strategy. Black has said he follows the “Elon principle” that “automation is last,” which is a useful reality check in a sector that loves promising robot-first miracles. Senra isn’t pretending robots have solved wire handling yet. It’s starting with software, process control, and technician training — including what Black describes as the only federally certified wire harness training program. Then it layers in more automation. That’s less flashy, but it’s probably the only credible path to scaling from 1,000 units a month to 10,000 without wrecking quality.

How big is the wire harness manufacturing market?

Big enough that investors don’t need Senra to own the whole thing for this to matter. A World Bank report published in 2024 put the global wire harness market at roughly $50 billion and said it is expected to grow at about 3% CAGR over the next decade. The same report noted that vehicle electrical and electronic systems were valued around $250 billion in 2023, with some estimates pointing to $460 billion by 2030.

That trend helps explain the timing. As vehicles, aircraft, satellites, and defense systems get more electrified and more sensor-heavy, harnesses stop being simple bundles of wire and start becoming dense, failure-sensitive subsystems. The World Bank also notes that while cutting and crimping can be automated, assembly is still labor-intensive. Siemens makes a similar point from the software side, warning that an aging workforce and the loss of experienced workers are already creating launch risks.

So yes, Senra is going after a niche. But it’s the kind of niche that quietly expands as everything else gets smarter.

What should you watch next from Senra?

The question isn’t whether wire harness manufacturing needs an upgrade. It obviously does. The question is whether Senra can turn a strong founder story and a lot of fresh capital into repeatable output at real industrial scale — especially once a third factory comes online and more customers start treating Amp as a design system, not just a vendor add-on. If that happens, Senra won’t just be a better harness shop. It’ll be infrastructure.

Read how Overtone raised $18M with backing from Match Group, FirstMark Capital, and Pace Capital to replace endless swiping with an AI-powered, voice-first matchmaking service focused on curated romantic introductions.

FAQ

• What funding did Senra raise? Senra raised a $65 million Series B announced on July 15, 2026. Lowercarbon Capital and Interlagos co-led the round, and the company said total funding now exceeds $112 million after adding this raise to its earlier $25 million Series A.
• How does Senra’s platform work? Senra uses Amp, an ITAR-compliant browser-based design and manufacturing platform, to move a harness from engineering through quoting, procurement, planning, build instructions, and quality tracking in one system. It also uses AI to read messy BOM files, speeds work-instruction creation 5x, and maintains a digital thread for every crimp, connection, and shipped serial.
• Who founded Senra? Senra was founded in 2023 by Jordan Black and Benjamin Shanahan, both former SpaceX engineers. Black came from manufacturing and avionics leadership on Dragon, Falcon, and spacesuit programs, while Shanahan brought software experience from BrainGate, NeuroPace, SpaceX’s ERP systems, Starlink manufacturing software, and telemetry infrastructure.
• What market is Senra in? Senra sits at the intersection of aerospace and defense manufacturing, industrial software, and the broader wire harness market. That market is worth about $50 billion globally, and it feeds into a much larger electrical-and-electronic systems stack that is growing as modern vehicles and hardware become more electrified and complex.

Overtone is a new voice-first matchmaking company that uses AI to make curated romantic introductions instead of pushing people through a swipe feed. The Overtone dating service has now raised $18 million as founder Justin McLeod starts his post-Hinge chapter with backing from Match Group, FirstMark Capital, and Pace Capital. The pitch is simple: a lot of people are tired of spending nearly an hour a day on dating apps without getting much closer to a real relationship. McLeod founded Hinge in 2011, stepped away from the CEO role on December 9, 2025, and is now trying to rebuild online dating from the ground up.

What is Overtone after the Overtone funding round and how does it work?

The clearest way to describe Overtone is this: it’s trying to act more like a modern matchmaker than a dating app. Instead of asking people to build a polished public profile and swipe through a giant pool, Overtone gets to know each person in their own voice. Then it makes only the introductions worth making.

That voice piece matters. McLeod says the company wants to hear people tell their own story, not just compress themselves into photos, prompts, and stats. The service is built around nuance — tone, energy, personality, and context — which is why the brand leans so hard into audio. The name itself comes from music: overtones are the subtle frequencies that make two identical notes sound different.

The workflow looks a lot more curated than standard app dating. A user joins and shares personal context in voice and audio-forward formats. Overtone evaluates compatibility with help from AI and relationship science, then delivers a small number of deliberate introductions with an explanation of why the match makes sense. After that, the actual chemistry test still happens offline. Overtone isn’t trying to automate intimacy. It’s trying to reduce the noise before two people meet.

That’s the real product difference. The Overtone dating service doesn’t want users writing ad copy for themselves or judging strangers in 2 seconds. It also drops the old like-to-match-to-chat funnel. McLeod’s argument is that those steps weren’t sacred parts of dating. They were technical workarounds from an earlier internet era.

Who is Justin McLeod and what does Overtone funding reveal about him?

The Overtone funding story and founding journey

McLeod didn’t come into this as a first-time founder testing a quirky idea. He spent nearly 15 years building Hinge, and Overtone grew out of that experience. Hinge developed the company during 2025 with a small dedicated team, then spun it out as an independent business at the end of that year.

His public explanation is blunt. He thinks dating apps got too good at maximizing engagement and too bad at producing real connection. Overtone is his attempt to reverse that logic. Not by tweaking swipes. By removing them.

Founder-market fit after the Overtone funding round

He’s one of the few founders in consumer internet who can credibly say he has already rebuilt a major category once. McLeod studied at Colgate University, worked in management consulting, then went to Harvard Business School. He founded Hinge in February 2011 and later led its most important pivot away from the swipe-heavy model that came to dominate app dating.

That matters because Overtone isn’t a random AI add-on. It’s coming from someone who has already seen what happens when product design optimizes for attention instead of outcomes. McLeod knows the mechanics of dating apps from the inside, including the ugly parts.

Past execution track record

Hinge is the whole résumé here, and it’s a strong one. McLeod has pointed out that the app now sets up a date every 2 seconds and is behind roughly 1 in 10 engagements. Those aren’t vanity downloads. They’re outcome-based numbers.

There’s also a pattern to his decision-making. Around a decade ago, he tore down an earlier version of Hinge and rebuilt it when he felt the market was drifting in the wrong direction. Overtone looks like the same instinct showing up again. This time, the target isn’t just swiping. It’s the whole profile-feed-messaging assembly line.

Early signals and launch status

Overtone is still early. It isn’t broadly available yet, and the company will launch later in 2026 in select locations. That makes this raise more about proving a new model than scaling a finished one.

Still, there are useful early signals. Match Group didn’t just bless the idea from a distance. It helped incubate it. And Overtone’s board already includes relationship expert Esther Perel, Match CEO Spencer Rascoff, and leadership advisor Diana Chapman. That’s an unusual mix for a dating startup.

Funding details and investor thesis

The new round totals $18 million. Match Group is participating alongside FirstMark Capital and Pace Capital, and Match had already supported Overtone during its pre-seed development in 2025.

Why would Match fund something that openly rejects parts of the dating-app playbook? Because it may need a hedge. If user behavior is shifting away from endless browsing and toward guided introductions, it’s smarter to own a piece of that shift than ignore it. For FirstMark and Pace, the bet looks more founder-led. They’re backing the guy who already built one of the most successful relationship products of the last decade.

Competition and positioning

Overtone won’t be alone in this category. Startups like Ditto, Date Drop, Sitch, and Hunch are all pushing some version of a post-swipe model. Some arrange one match per week. Some use AI to plan the date itself. Others mix algorithmic matching with human review or voice-based onboarding.

But Overtone is positioned a little differently. Ditto and Date Drop lean younger and more lightweight. Sitch blends AI with human matchmaking. Hunch is closer to a date-planning layer. Overtone is aiming higher-touch and more explicitly service-driven — less marketplace, more guided introduction engine.

The legacy alternative is still the big app stack: Tinder for volume, Bumble for controlled initiation, Hinge for intentional dating inside an app format. Overtone’s pitch is that even the “serious” apps still trap people inside the same basic mechanics. That’s the part it wants to break.

Why does the Overtone dating service raise matter now?

This round matters because it gives McLeod permission to build something that might not fit neatly inside Hinge or any legacy app business. A voice-first, limited-introduction service probably won’t optimize for the same metrics that public dating platforms love — session length, profile views, likes sent, chat volume. It may even reduce them on purpose.

That’s why Match Group’s involvement stands out. The company isn’t just financing a founder departure. It’s backing a product thesis that challenges the incentives of app dating itself. If Overtone works, it could become a template for how big dating companies experiment without blowing up their existing cash engines.

The board choices add another layer. Rascoff brings operator and platform experience. Esther Perel brings relationship credibility that most consumer apps don’t even try to claim. Diana Chapman adds organizational depth.

How big is the market for AI-assisted matchmaking?

The market is already large enough to support a serious bet. Global online dating revenue was estimated at $9.65 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach $17.28 billion by 2030. Another forecast puts the worldwide online dating user base at 475.1 million by 2030. So this isn’t a niche category in search of demand. It’s a huge market in search of a better product shape.

But growth alone doesn’t explain the timing.

User dissatisfaction does. A 2024 Forbes Health survey of 1,000 dating app users found that 78% felt burnt out, and respondents said they spent about 51 minutes per day on dating apps. That’s the kind of stat founders circle in red ink. People are still showing up, but a lot of them aren’t enjoying the product they’re showing up for.

You can see the response across the category. Big apps are adding AI-generated prompts and recommendation engines. They’re also adding conversation helpers. Newer companies are trying smaller pools, more curation, audio intros, and even matchmaker-style workflows. The trend isn’t just “AI in dating.” It’s fewer choices, more context, and less performance theater.

That’s why Overtone’s timing makes sense. Not because AI is hot. Because the old model feels stale.

What to watch next for the Overtone dating service

The next test is whether people actually want less choice if the quality goes up. That sounds obvious. In practice, it’s hard. Dating products have trained users to expect endless supply, even when that supply mostly wastes their time.

So watch the launch later in 2026. Watch the first cities. Watch whether Overtone can turn a strong founder story into a real consumer habit.

Read how Oxylabs raised $130M from Warburg Pincus to expand its AI web data platform powering live web scraping, browser automation, and enterprise AI agents.

FAQ

• What funding did Overtone raise? Overtone raised $18 million in new financing. Match Group joined the round alongside FirstMark Capital and Pace Capital, which makes this more than a standard seed-stage consumer bet — it’s also a strategic endorsement from one of the biggest companies in online dating.
• How does Overtone work compared with Hinge or Tinder? Overtone works more like a curated matchmaking service than an open dating marketplace. Instead of browsing lots of profiles and managing multiple chats, users share who they are in a voice- and audio-forward format, then receive a small number of guided introductions with an explanation of why the match fits.
• Who is Justin McLeod? Justin McLeod is the founder of Hinge and the founder and CEO of Overtone. He started Hinge in February 2011, later rebuilt it around the “designed to be deleted” idea, and stepped away from the Hinge CEO role on December 9, 2025 to launch this new company.
• Is Overtone a dating app or a matchmaking service? Overtone isn’t a dating app. It isn’t built around public profiles, swiping, or endless chat management; it sits in the emerging AI-assisted matchmaking category, where the product’s job is to narrow the field and make a few stronger introductions.

Oxylabs builds the proxy, scraping, and browser-automation infrastructure companies use to collect public web data at scale. Its Oxylabs funding moment arrived on July 9, 2026, when Warburg Pincus invested $130 million at a $3.6 billion valuation — the company’s first outside capital since founder Julius Černiauskas started it in Lithuania in 2015. The core problem is simple: AI agents can’t do serious work with yesterday’s internet. They need current pages and reliable retrieval. They also need systems that don’t fall apart every time a website changes.

That’s why this deal matters more than the usual venture headline. Oxylabs wasn’t a young startup looking for product-market fit. It had already grown into a bootstrapped business with $350 million in annual recurring revenue and more than 350,000 technology teams using the platform. Its infrastructure handles billions of requests a day across e-commerce intelligence, cybersecurity, travel, and brand protection. Now it’s taking fresh capital because the agentic AI boom could turn a niche plumbing layer into a much bigger one.

What does Oxylabs do with web scraping and AI agents?

At the product level, Oxylabs is basically a full-stack public web data platform. A customer can start with the Web Scraper API Playground, enter a target URL or search query, and tweak things like user-agent type and JavaScript rendering. They can also adjust localization, filters, limits, and session settings, then export the result as code or data in formats like HTML, JSON, or Markdown. It’s a lot closer to “test, tune, ship” than the old way of building and babysitting scrapers by hand.

It also sells tools for the messy part of the job — interacting with pages that behave like applications, not documents. Oxylabs’ Headless Browser and browser-instruction features let developers automate clicking and scrolling. They can also fill forms and wait for elements. And because nobody wants to hand-write those flows every time, the platform can prefill instructions from a natural-language prompt and turn them into structured JSON for API use.

Then there’s the data cleanup layer. OxyCopilot can generate request code and parsing instructions, while dedicated parsers return structured JSON for targets like Amazon, Google, Google Shopping, YouTube, Bing, Walmart, Etsy, and Target. For AI workflows, Oxylabs also supports Model Context Protocol and Markdown output so raw HTML can be transformed into something Claude, GPT, and other models can actually use without a bunch of extra formatting work.

That matters because the customer experience has changed. Before, teams often had to stitch together proxies and browser automation. They also had to manage parsers, retries, and formatting on their own. Oxylabs is trying to collapse that stack into one platform — plus AI Studio, a no-code prompt-based tool it released in 2025 for simpler collection jobs.

Who founded Oxylabs and how big is it now?

How Oxylabs started

Oxylabs began in 2015, inside the broader Tesonet orbit, after a friend asked whether unused IP addresses could be rented to a data-collection company. Julius Černiauskas turned that question into a business, starting with datacenter proxies before expanding into a wider web intelligence platform. That origin story sounds almost too tidy, but it explains why Oxylabs has always looked more infrastructure-first than hype-first.

Černiauskas isn’t some random founder who discovered AI late. He studied math and statistics, worked in Lithuania’s early digital advertising scene, and did SEO. He started a digital marketing business, then later worked at Vinted and data company Exacaster. That background gave him a practical read on search data, marketing demand, and what businesses would actually pay for. That’s more useful here than a flashy AI résumé.

Oxylabs changed leadership in March 2026, with Černiauskas moving from founder-CEO to chairman and Vytautas Savickas taking over as CEO. Savickas is an operator with deep execution and product-building experience, which fits where Oxylabs is now: less “invent the category” and more “scale the machine without breaking it.”

Traction, fundraising, and competition

The company is long past the beta phase. It’s live, global, and profitable from its early years. It has topped $350 million in ARR, built a patent portfolio of more than 160 inventions, and serves a customer base that includes large enterprises around the world. Oxylabs also acquired Webshare in 2022 and ScrapingBee in 2025. That gave it stronger reach across both enterprise buyers and developers.

The Warburg Pincus deal marks a real change in financing strategy. It came through the firm’s Capital Solutions Founders Fund, values Oxylabs at about $3.6 billion, and gives the company more room to expand its network. It also gives Oxylabs room to build next-generation products and keep doing M&A. CFO Jurgis Rudgalvis has already said the company wants more corporate development opportunities that add technology and products to the wider platform.

Competition is tough, and Oxylabs isn’t alone. Bright Data pitches a broad web data platform with 400 million-plus residential IPs and 660-plus prebuilt scrapers. It also has a dataset marketplace and browser infrastructure for AI agents. Zyte leans on its roots in Scrapy and sells an all-in-one scraping API with managed extraction and AI scraping features. Apify comes from a different angle — cloud-hosted “Actors” for scraping, browser automation, and AI-agent workflows. Oxylabs’ edge is its push for a more enterprise-grade bundle around compliance and proxies. It also wraps in headless browsing, parsing, and AI-friendly output in one stack, rather than just offering raw access or developer components. The legacy alternative, honestly, is still a mess of in-house scrapers, patchwork proxy vendors, and teams wasting time fixing breakage every week.

Why does Oxylabs funding matter right now?

Because this isn’t rescue money.

Oxylabs had already proved people would pay for its infrastructure without venture backing. So taking outside capital now suggests management thinks the shift from traditional scraping to agentic web access is big enough to justify changing a formula that had worked for more than a decade. Warburg isn’t betting on a concept deck. It’s betting on a business that already has customers, compliance muscle, and a global delivery network.

Savickas put it plainly: “The next generation of AI won’t be powered by static indexes that only capture yesterday’s internet.” That’s the whole thesis. If AI agents are going to monitor markets, compare products, complete tasks, and pull live information from the open web, the boring infrastructure layer becomes a lot less boring.

Warburg’s reasoning was straightforward too. Allison Ross, a principal at the firm, pointed to Oxylabs’ technology, expansive network, and enterprise relationships. Translation: the investor likes that Oxylabs already looks like a scaled supplier, not a science project.

There’s also a Lithuania angle here. Oxylabs is the second unicorn to come out of the Tesonet pipeline, and this valuation puts it among the country’s most valuable tech companies. That’s not just local bragging rights. It tells later-stage investors that serious infrastructure businesses can be built in Europe and sold globally without following the usual Silicon Valley playbook.

What market is Oxylabs funding betting on?

The direct market is getting big fast. Grand View Research valued the global web-scraped-data segment of the alternative data market at $2.54 billion in 2025 and projects it will reach $35.89 billion by 2033, a 36.9% CAGR. Those are huge numbers for what used to be treated like a back-office tooling category.

The second shift is even more telling: machines are already dominating large parts of the web. Thales said in its 2026 Bad Bot Report that bots made up more than 53% of all web traffic in 2025, up from 51% the year before. Not every bot is an AI agent, obviously. But the direction is hard to miss. The web is increasingly being read, monitored, and acted on by software, not people.

That’s why Oxylabs’ timing feels sharp rather than opportunistic. Training a model on archived pages is one market. Building systems that can reliably access live, changing websites in production is another one entirely. That second market is where a lot of enterprise AI spending is likely to pile up next.

Should you watch Oxylabs funding from here?

Yes.

Oxylabs funding isn’t about proving the business works. That part already happened. The question now is whether Oxylabs can turn a decade of web-data infrastructure into the default layer enterprises trust when AI agents need the live web — fast, structured, and without constant breakage. If that happens, this won’t look like a late growth round. It’ll look like a pretty early claim on a much bigger market.

Read how Elevation Capital raised a $500M Fund IX and launched a $400M Holdings vehicle to back India’s next generation of AI startups from seed to pre-IPO.

FAQ about Oxylabs funding

• What is the Oxylabs funding deal? Oxylabs raised $130 million from Warburg Pincus on July 9, 2026, at a valuation of about $3.6 billion. It was the company’s first outside investment since its 2015 founding, and the money came through Warburg Pincus Capital Solutions Founders Fund.
• How does Oxylabs actually collect web data? Oxylabs combines proxies and a Web Scraper API. It also uses headless browser automation, parsers, and AI tools like OxyCopilot in one workflow. A developer can test requests in the Playground, automate actions like clicks or form fills, and return data in JSON, Markdown, or MCP-friendly formats for AI systems.
• Who founded Oxylabs? Julius Černiauskas founded Oxylabs in 2015 and moved to chairman in March 2026. Before building the company, he studied statistics, worked in digital advertising and SEO, launched a marketing business, and held roles at Vinted and Exacaster. Vytautas Savickas now runs the company as CEO.
• Is Oxylabs an AI company or a web scraping company? It’s more accurate to call Oxylabs a web data infrastructure company that’s being pulled deeper into AI. Its products still sit in the web scraping and proxy category, but features like headless browser support, AI-generated parsers, and MCP output make it increasingly useful for AI agents and enterprise retrieval systems.

Elevation Capital is an India-focused venture capital firm that backs startups from seed to growth stage. Its new Elevation Capital Fund IX brings in $500 million for early-stage investing, while a separate $400 million Holdings vehicle gives the firm a combined $900 million to deploy across the startup lifecycle. Indian founders are dealing with a weird split market right now—seed money is still flowing, but late-stage capital and IPO timing have gotten harder. Founded as SAIF Partners in the early 2000s by Ravi Adusumalli and rebranded as Elevation Capital in 2020, the firm is now pushing a sharper thesis under Ravi Adusumalli, Mukul Arora, Mridul Arora, Chirag Chadha, and Vaas Bhaskar.

What is Elevation Capital Fund IX and how will it work?

At a basic level, Elevation Capital Fund IX is the firm’s new seed-and-Series A pool. Founders who get backed here are the ones Elevation wants to meet early, often before the company is fully formed as a category leader. Unlike a classic early-stage VC that eventually hands the company off to late-stage funds, Elevation is trying to keep that relationship alive much longer through Elevation Holdings, its late-stage vehicle for companies heading toward IPO and beyond.

That’s the “barbell approach” Mukul Arora described: one vehicle stays tightly focused on new startups. The other concentrates on established winners. For founders, the pitch is simple. You can raise your first institutional round from Elevation, grow with it, and potentially keep the same capital partner as your company matures into a public-market story.

The firm’s early-stage check-writing has also expanded. Elevation has usually written $2 million to $5 million cheques, but it has started going up to $10 million as stronger companies pull in more competition and need bigger rounds earlier. The firm still expects to do roughly 15 to 18 investments a year, which tells you this isn’t a defensive fund. It’s still in attack mode.

There’s another layer here. Elevation has built a fairly broad operating platform around investing, with dedicated talent, finance, legal, community, AI operations, and even a CTO-in-residence alongside its investment team. That doesn’t replace founder execution. But it does explain why the firm keeps selling itself as more than a cheque.

Who built Elevation Capital and why does that matter?

From SAIF Partners to Elevation Capital

Elevation didn’t appear overnight. The firm traces its India investing roots to SAIF Partners, with Ravi Adusumalli leading the franchise and later overseeing the rebrand to Elevation Capital. Officially, the firm has been investing in India since 2001, and older filings show its first investments landing in 2002, so the early-2000s timeline is the right way to think about its start. Ravi came into venture after stints at Credit Suisse and Mobius Venture Capital. He helped build one of the earlier institutional brands in Indian venture.

The people shaping Fund IX

Mukul Arora, now co-managing partner, focuses on consumer and SaaS/AI investing. Vaas Bhaskar works across fintech and financial services. Before joining Elevation, he spent time at Bain & Co. and Barclays, including work on internal products for emerging markets. Chirag Chadha came up through the firm itself—he joined as an analyst in 2017 after IIT Bombay, a brief stint at ITC, and an attempt at building a company while still in college. That mix is useful. Operator empathy on one side, classic analytical training on the other.

Mridul Arora has long been one of the firm’s fintech-heavy investors and has been associated with Elevation since 2011. His investing footprint has included names like Acko, Aye Finance, Capital Float, ClearTax, and Urban Company. Even if Elevation is now talking up AI, its partnership still has deep muscle memory in sectors like financial services, consumer internet, and healthcare. Those are the places where India has historically produced repeatable venture outcomes.

Track record, fundraising details, and who Elevation is up against

The firm’s credibility comes from repetition. Elevation has backed companies like Paytm, MakeMyTrip, Swiggy, Meesho, Urban Company, NoBroker, and Unacademy, and it has backed more than 200 startups over time. That’s why this fundraise lands differently from a first-time manager pitching an AI story. Elevation has earned the right to say it has pattern recognition.

Fund IX arrives more than 4 years after the firm’s $670 million Fund VIII. The fresh early-stage pool is smaller on its own, but Elevation wants it judged together with the new $400 million Holdings vehicle, which takes total deployable capital to $900 million. Most of the new money came from existing limited partners, even as dollar returns for India funds have been under pressure from rupee depreciation.

Competition is intense. Peak XV closed $1.3 billion in new capital commitments across India and APAC funds. Nexus closed a $700 million fund for early-stage startups across India and the US. Accel raised a $650 million eighth India fund while also beginning work on a ninth. So Elevation’s edge isn’t that it has the biggest fund. It’s pairing early-stage aggression with a late-stage vehicle built to hold on to winners for longer. Frankly, that’s smart—if it works. Early conviction and late-stage underwriting are different skills.

Why does Elevation Capital Fund IX matter right now?

The biggest signal in this raise isn’t just the money. It’s the thesis. Elevation says nearly two-thirds of the investments it has made over the last 12 to 18 months have been AI-native, and it doesn’t plan to carve out a separate AI bucket inside Fund IX. It wants AI to become the default layer across the companies it backs.

That’s a bigger bet than it sounds. A lot of firms say they like AI. Elevation is saying AI will shape its main fund and its sector priorities. It’ll probably shape the type of founder it wants to spend time with too. The sectors it’s prioritising span enterprise AI and consumer technology. They also include fintech, healthcare, education, and newer frontier areas like robotics, defence, advanced manufacturing, and space tech.

There’s also a global ambition baked in. Elevation has been building presence in the Bay Area, but not because it wants to become a US venture tourist. The goal is to help Indian founders build AI companies that can sell to the world. That’s a harder plan than backing domestic clones. But it’s also where the upside is if the firm is right.

One more thing stood out. Elevation openly admits it needs stronger deep-tech capabilities. That kind of honesty is rare in venture, where everyone pretends to be good at everything. If the firm uses Fund IX to recruit that muscle and turn early AI enthusiasm into actual company-building help, this raise could reshape more than its portfolio.

How big is the market behind Elevation Capital Fund IX?

The timing isn’t random. Bain and IVCA said VC and growth funding in software and SaaS, including generative AI, rose about 1.2x to $1.7 billion from 2023 to 2024 in India. The same Bain-IVCA data set also showed India-focused VC fundraising rebounding to about $5.4 billion in 2025 from $2.7 billion the year before. That’s not a euphoric market. But capital is still clustering around firms with track records and around sectors investors think can produce outsized outcomes.

The AI side is even more compelling. BCG and Nasscom project India’s AI market could reach about $17 billion by 2027, growing at a 25% to 35% CAGR. The same research says India already has more than 600,000 AI professionals, with that talent base expected to reach 1.25 million by 2027. So when Elevation says it’s “all in on India,” that isn’t just patriotic branding. It’s a capital allocation view tied to talent supply and software exports. It also rests on the idea that India can build AI companies with global reach—not just local demand.

And yet the market isn’t easy. Public investors are still selective. Currency moves still chip away at venture returns. Late-stage timelines still stretch. That’s why Elevation’s barbell structure matters more than the headline number. It’s trying to solve for two different markets at once.

What to watch after Elevation Capital Fund IX

Elevation Capital Fund IX looks less like a routine vintage and more like a statement of intent. Elevation is telling founders that it wants to invest earlier, write bigger early cheques, and stay in the story longer. It also wants to make AI central to how it picks companies. That’s ambitious. Maybe a little audacious. But this is one of the few Indian firms with the portfolio history to make that pitch without sounding ridiculous.

Watch what Fund IX actually produces. Watch whether it backs more India-born enterprise AI and applied AI companies with global customers, and whether Elevation Holdings actually stays with category leaders through the IPO window instead of just talking about “permanent capital.”

Read how IM8 secured up to $1B from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund to scale its subscription wellness brand without giving up equity or diluting existing shareholders.

FAQ

• What is Elevation Capital Fund IX? Elevation Capital Fund IX is the firm’s new $500 million India-focused venture fund for seed and Series A startups. It sits alongside Elevation Holdings, a separate $400 million late-stage vehicle, so the firm can back founders from the earliest rounds to the pre-IPO phase.
• How much capital has Elevation raised across its new vehicles? In total, Elevation now has $900 million across the two vehicles announced in this cycle. The split matters because the early-stage fund and the Holdings vehicle are built for different jobs, rather than forcing one pool of money to do everything.
• Who leads Elevation Capital today? Ravi Adusumalli is the founder and a co-managing partner, and Mukul Arora is the other co-managing partner. The broader investing partnership includes Mridul Arora, Vaas Bhaskar, and Chirag Chadha, who bring coverage across fintech, consumer, enterprise AI, and growth investing.
• Why is Elevation Capital betting on AI in India? Because the firm thinks AI will create the next batch of large technology companies from India, not just add features to old software. That view lines up with a domestic AI market projected at about $17 billion by 2027 and with a fast-growing talent base that could hit 1.25 million professionals in the same period.

IM8 sells a subscription wellness drink designed to replace a messy stack of daily supplements with one routine. The IM8 funding news is huge: General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund has committed up to $1 billion to the David Beckham-backed startup without taking an equity stake, which is rare even by startup-finance standards. That matters because consumer health brands usually burn a lot of cash chasing customers, and dilution is often the price of that growth. IM8 launched in 2024 with entrepreneur Danny Yeung and Beckham, and the company now has a financing tool built for aggressive acquisition rather than traditional venture optics.

This isn’t a normal VC round. It’s basically a bet on repeat purchases.

What is IM8 and how does it work?

IM8 is a consumer wellness brand that sells a daily drink mix on subscription. The idea is simple: instead of buying separate vitamins, probiotics, and other add-ons one by one, customers sign up online and get recurring shipments. They use one product as a daily routine.

That’s the real product hook. Convenience first. Science-flavored branding second.

The drink itself is pitched around longevity and broad nutritional coverage. It bundles ingredients such as açai fruit extract and Coenzyme Q10 into a single formula. It aims at buyers who want an “all-in-one” health habit rather than a cupboard full of pill bottles. In practice, IM8 is selling simplification as much as supplementation.

Before products like this, the usual customer experience was fragmented. One bottle for multivitamins. Another for gut health. Something else for energy or recovery. IM8 turns that into one recurring purchase and one daily ritual, which is why subscription economics matter so much here — the company isn’t trying to win a one-off sale at retail.

That’s also why General Catalyst’s structure fits. If a brand can reliably turn marketing spend into long-term subscription revenue, financing customer acquisition starts to look less like pure risk and more like math.

What does IM8 funding tell us about the founders?

From Prenetics to a Beckham partnership

IM8’s operating brain is CEO Danny Yeung, a founder who has been around consumer health long enough to understand both hype and execution. He has described himself as a high-school dropout, which startup profiles love, but the more relevant point is his track record: he previously built Prenetics, a health company that went public in 2022.

IM8 sits inside that wider corporate orbit. It’s a subsidiary of Prenetics, not an isolated celebrity side project.

The founding story is unusually blunt. Yeung moved in the sort of circles that led to dinner with David Beckham, and that meeting helped turn a relationship into a business. Plenty of celebrity wellness brands are basically marketing shells. IM8 at least has a real operator behind it. It also has a public-company parent with experience in health products.

Why Yeung had a shot at building this

Yeung’s edge isn’t that he invented supplements. He didn’t. His edge is that he understands how to package health into something consumers will actually buy.

That matters more than people admit. Wellness is crowded and expensive. It’s also brutally dependent on trust. A founder who has already taken a health company public brings a different level of credibility than a random first-time consumer founder with a famous face on the box.

Beckham’s role matters too, but differently. He brings reach and instant recognition in a category where customer acquisition is half the battle. Yeung brings operating history. That combo is the real pitch.

Past execution is the story here

Prenetics going public in 2022 is the most important signal in Yeung’s résumé because it shows he’s already built something large enough to matter in public markets. That doesn’t guarantee IM8 works. Not even close. But it does mean investors aren’t backing a blank résumé.

General Catalyst didn’t structure this as a vanity endorsement deal. It backed a model tied to customer revenue.

Fundraising details that actually matter

The headline number is up to $1 billion from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund, or CVF. That pool doesn’t buy equity the way a standard venture round does. Instead, it provides capital that works more like a loan tied to future performance.

In IM8’s case, the facility is set up to cover as much as 70% of customer acquisition costs. In return, General Catalyst gets a capped share of what it calls reference income — revenue from those customers adjusted by a fixed gross-margin assumption. Once the firm gets its money back and reaches that cap, the remaining revenue from those customers flows back to Prenetics.

So, no new stock issued. No ownership stake for General Catalyst. No dilution for existing shareholders.

That’s the clever part. It lets IM8 spend big on growth without giving away more of the company.

Where IM8 sits against competitors

IM8 isn’t entering an empty category. It’s stepping into a premium supplements market already crowded with greens powders, daily drink mixes, vitamin packs, and subscription-led wellness brands. The obvious direct competition comes from all-in-one daily nutrition products like AG1, plus a long tail of functional wellness blends that sell convenience, energy, gut support, or healthy-aging benefits.

The legacy alternative is even bigger than those brands. It’s the old-school supplement cabinet.

That’s where IM8 tries to separate itself. It has celebrity distribution power through Beckham and a cleaner single-product pitch than many broad supplement catalogs. It also has a parent company with real health-business experience. General Catalyst is backing the part investors care about most: a predictable subscription engine that can justify heavy customer acquisition spend.

Why does the IM8 funding structure matter?

Here’s the blunt version: this deal is really about buying growth without selling ownership.

Consumer brands love recurring revenue, but they hate the cost of getting new customers. Ads are expensive. Influencer marketing is expensive. Retail expansion is expensive. Even strong brands can end up raising equity just to keep feeding that machine. IM8 now has a financing structure built specifically for that problem.

For customers, that could mean faster brand expansion and more aggressive marketing rather than immediate product reinvention. For the company, it means more room to scale before facing the usual “grow slower or dilute more” tradeoff.

General Catalyst’s thesis is pretty clear. CVF works best when a startup has predictable revenue streams and knows how extra capital converts into growth. IM8 fits that logic because subscriptions create a cleaner payback model than one-time consumer purchases.

And there’s precedent. Grammarly took the same kind of $1 billion financing from General Catalyst’s CVF in May 2025, shortly before buying Superhuman. That deal helped normalize the idea that not every large startup check has to come through equity.

How big is the market behind IM8 funding?

The market IM8 is chasing is already massive. The global dietary supplements sector was valued at roughly $177 billion in 2023, and forecasts for the end of the decade commonly push it past $300 billion. That’s the sort of number that keeps both celebrity founders and growth investors interested.

The consumer behavior behind it is just as important. In the U.S., supplement use is mainstream, not niche, with a large majority of adults reporting that they take some form of supplement. So IM8 doesn’t need to create a market from scratch. It needs to win attention inside a market that already spends heavily.

What’s changed is format and branding. Buyers increasingly want fewer products and easier routines. They also want more personalized-sounding health promises, especially around energy, recovery, gut health, and longevity. A drink-based subscription brand fits that shift better than a wall of disconnected bottles.

There’s also a timing angle here. Longevity has become one of the most commercially useful words in wellness. It’s broad enough to sell aspiration, but specific enough to support premium pricing. That doesn’t mean every longevity-branded product deserves trust. It does mean the category has real consumer pull right now.

The real test for IM8 funding won’t be the size of the headline. It’ll be whether the company can turn Beckham-powered awareness and Yeung’s operating experience into durable subscription retention. If not, it’ll be remembered as a flashy way to prepay for expensive ads.

Read how BiofuelCircle raised a ₹35 crore bridge round led by Spectrum Impact to expand its biomass supply chain platform connecting farmers, aggregators, and industrial buyers across India.

FAQ

• What is the IM8 funding deal?
  IM8 secured up to $1 billion from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund in a non-equity arrangement. The money is tied to customer acquisition and repayment comes through a capped share of revenue from those customers, not through stock ownership.
• How does IM8 work as a product?
  IM8 sells a daily wellness drink through a subscription model. Customers sign up for recurring deliveries and use one formula that combines a range of nutrition and longevity-focused ingredients instead of managing separate supplements.
• Who founded IM8?
  IM8 launched in 2024 with Danny Yeung and David Beckham as a founding partner on the brand side. Yeung had already built Prenetics, the health company that went public in 2022, which gives IM8 a more experienced operating base than a typical celebrity wellness launch.
• Is IM8 a supplements brand or a health-tech company?
  It’s primarily a consumer supplements brand, but it comes with health-tech DNA because it sits under Prenetics. That mix matters because IM8 isn’t just selling wellness branding. It’s also borrowing credibility from a founder who has already built and listed a health business.

BiofuelCircle runs a biomass supply chain platform that connects farmers, aggregators, biofuel makers, and industrial buyers. Its latest BiofuelCircle funding update is a ₹35 crore bridge round led by Spectrum Impact. It matters because biomass demand in India is rising fast while feedstock procurement is still messy, seasonal, and offline. Founded in 2020 by Suhas Baxi and Ashwin Savé, the Pune startup is using the new funding for working capital. It plans to raise a larger Series B round in early 2027.

What does BiofuelCircle actually do?

At the simplest level, BiofuelCircle is a hybrid digital-and-physical marketplace for biomass and biofuels. On one side, farmers and rural enterprises list or aggregate crop residue. On the other, industrial buyers and biofuel producers procure feedstock through formats such as RFP-based sourcing, auctions, spot deals, and term contracts. The platform supports more than 50 varieties of solid biofuels. Buyers can either transact on the marketplace or use BiofuelCircle’s managed supply-chain services.

The workflow is more specific than “we connect supply and demand.” Farmers can use a multilingual mobile app to either bring residue to a local warehouse or pre-book evacuation services. Those include balers, shredders, tractors, and transport. That material moves into village-level biomass banks — each serving roughly a 10-village cluster — where it’s aggregated and stored before being routed to end customers.

For industrial buyers, the pitch is fewer headaches. Instead of juggling scattered suppliers, transport, storage, quality checks, invoicing, and payment tracking, they can manage the deal-to-delivery cycle digitally through one platform. BiofuelCircle also layers in testing and transaction management. It offers supply-chain-as-a-service for customers that need year-round feedstock rather than one-off trades.

That operating model is why the company doesn’t look like a plain marketplace. It owns specialized post-harvest machinery and runs physical collection and storage points. It also handles digital settlements.

Who founded BiofuelCircle and how has it grown?

The founding story

BiofuelCircle was founded in Pune in June 2020 by Suhas Baxi and Ashwin Savé to build a reliable, lower-cost bioenergy supply chain in India. The bet was straightforward: agricultural residue was abundant, buyer demand for biomass was growing, but the chain between farm waste and industrial use was too fragmented to scale cleanly. BiofuelCircle’s answer was to combine digital coordination with local collection, storage, and transport infrastructure instead of treating those as separate problems.

Why these founders fit the job

Baxi brought old-school operating depth. Before starting BiofuelCircle, he held leadership roles across energy, manufacturing, and software, with stints at Thermax, Triple Point Technology, Konecranes and Demag, and Pennar Industries. He has also served on the board of Praj Industries and worked with CII’s national bioenergy committee.

Savé’s background complements that. He started at Hindustan Petroleum, later worked at Triple Point Technology, and went on to senior customer success and enterprise software roles at Icertis. His resume is heavy on oil trading, enterprise software operations, and scaling customer-facing systems.

Traction, fundraising, and competition

The company is already live at meaningful scale. BiofuelCircle operates 80 biomass banks across 800 villages in 10 states, including Haryana, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh, and aggregates crop residue through around 2,000 farmers. On the demand side, it serves about 2,000 biofuel companies and more than 600 industrial buyers. It also directly supplies feedstock to CBG projects linked to IOCL, Reliance, and Adani Total Gas; industrial names on the customer list include Unilever, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola.

Financially, the jump has been sharp. BiofuelCircle posted FY26 operating revenue of ₹160 crore, up from ₹52 crore a year earlier, and it’s targeting roughly ₹500 crore in FY27. The company’s valuation in this bridge round is about 10% higher than the ₹560 crore level set after its Series A, which implies a current valuation of roughly ₹615 crore.

That brings us to the round itself. The startup has raised ₹35 crore in bridge capital from Spectrum Impact, Better Capital, Karma Capital Advisors, promoters, and angel investors. It plans to use the money mainly for working capital. It’s aiming to raise about ₹70 crore more in working capital financing and wants to open a larger Series B round in early 2027 after spending the year sweating the assets it already built with its earlier ₹100 crore Series A.

Competition is real. GPS Renewables is the obvious heavyweight because it spans biogas engineering and CBG infrastructure. It also runs feedstock systems and raised ₹635 crore in a Series C round in June 2026. BiofuelCircle also faces Biomass Aggregators India and a long tail of regional feedstock suppliers. Its edge is that it doesn’t just source residue; it combines a live marketplace, rural biomass banks, owned machinery, and digital payments into one operating layer. That’s harder to build than a buyer directory. It’s also more capital-intensive.

Why does the BiofuelCircle funding round matter?

This round matters because the bottleneck here isn’t flashy tech. It’s cash conversion. BiofuelCircle buys biomass from farmers, stores it, and then sells it onward, which means working capital gets tied up in inventory, logistics, and payment cycles. A ₹35 crore bridge round aimed at working capital shows the company is now past the “can we build the network?” stage and deep into the harder question: can the network run at high enough utilization to become a strong business?

That’s a more interesting signal than a generic growth raise. Baxi has said the big infrastructure push was already funded through the earlier Series A, so the current year is about extracting more throughput from existing assets. If that works, the FY27 revenue target starts to look less like startup optimism and more like operating leverage. If it doesn’t, the next round gets a lot tougher.

The unit economics are at least directionally encouraging. BiofuelCircle says a typical biomass bank needs about ₹4 crore of investment and can generate gross margins around 20%. It can recover capital in under 4 years once mature. Its oldest biomass banks are already operating-profit positive.

How big is the market BiofuelCircle is chasing?

The raw-material base is huge. BiofuelCircle puts India’s annual agricultural residue waste at around 235 million tonnes, and says that resource could meet about 17% of the country’s energy needs if it were properly collected and used instead of burned or wasted. That’s why feedstock logistics matter so much here — not because biomass is a niche, but because the supply is massive and badly fragmented.

Policy support has also become a lot more serious. India’s National Bioenergy Programme was notified in November 2022 with a total budget outlay of ₹1,715 crore, and SATAT set an ambitious long-term direction for compressed biogas by envisioning 5,000 CBG plants and 15 million metric tonnes of annual output. More recently, India has also added support for biomass aggregation machinery. That’s a direct tailwind for companies sitting upstream in feedstock collection.

The best recent demand signal comes from the IEA. In its January 2026 India bioenergy market report, the agency said the country had around 170 functional CBG plants by 2025 and almost 300 more under construction. Under current policies, the IEA expects India’s liquid and gaseous biofuel use to grow by more than 50% by 2030. Without aggregation, storage, and transport, a lot of planned CBG and biofuel capacity simply won’t have reliable feedstock.

What to watch after BiofuelCircle funding

The next 12 months will tell the story. BiofuelCircle wants to turn an 80-bank network into a much more heavily utilized one, close additional working capital financing, and tee up a Series B in early 2027 that could roughly double its biomass bank footprint across India. That’s ambitious. But if the company can convert this BiofuelCircle funding round into stronger asset utilization and something close to its ₹500 crore FY27 revenue target, it’ll look less like a startup experiment and more like real climate infrastructure.

Read how PixVerse raised a $439M Series C extension to build an AI video platform that turns text prompts, images, and reference assets into production-ready videos for creators, studios, and enterprises.

FAQ

• What is the latest BiofuelCircle funding round? BiofuelCircle raised ₹35 crore in a bridge round in July 2026. Spectrum Impact led the round, with Better Capital, Karma Capital Advisors, the company’s promoters, and angel investors also participating; the money is mainly meant to support working capital ahead of a planned Series B in early 2027.
• How does BiofuelCircle work for farmers and buyers? BiofuelCircle uses a digital platform plus physical biomass banks. Farmers can book residue pickup or deliver crop waste through the app and local network, while industrial buyers can source biomass through auctions, RFPs, spot deals, or managed supply-chain services with digital tracking for contracts, deliveries, and payments.
• Who founded BiofuelCircle? BiofuelCircle was founded in June 2020 by Suhas Baxi and Ashwin Savé. Baxi came from senior leadership roles in energy, manufacturing, and software, while Savé brought experience from Hindustan Petroleum, Triple Point Technology, and Icertis.
• Is BiofuelCircle a biofuel producer or a biomass supply chain startup? It’s a biomass supply chain and marketplace startup, not a biofuel manufacturer. The company aggregates, stores, and routes agricultural residue to biofuel plants and industrial customers, which puts it in the infrastructure layer of India’s broader bioenergy and compressed biogas market.