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ELMED Life Sciences Raises $2.7M to Scale Probiotics

ELMED Life Sciences makes probiotic products for healthcare and agri-biotech companies, and it has now raised $2.7 million in Series A funding from NABVENTURES-managed AgriSURE Fund. It’s chasing a simple but messy problem: reliable microbiome products are still hard to manufacture across human health, animal health, aquaculture, and agriculture. Founded in 2018 by VIT alumni Pruthivin Reddy Madduri and Nikhil Konkathi, the Hyderabad company plans to use the fresh capital to expand production capacity in the city. It also wants to deepen microbiome-focused R&D and push harder into Tier II and Tier III India as well as overseas markets.

That’s a meaningful step for a company in a less flashy part of the business. ELMED isn’t selling a wellness story first. It’s building the formulations and manufacturing backbone that let other brands and healthcare businesses sell probiotic products at all.

What does ELMED Life Sciences actually make?

ELMED Life Sciences is a probiotic manufacturer and formulation partner. It works across human health, animal health, aquaculture, and agriculture. Its business spans contract manufacturing and research and development services for outside companies. Its catalog covers multiple dosage forms and use cases rather than one narrow gut-health SKU.

The human-health side is especially broad. ELMED sells probiotics in vials, capsules, sachets, syrups, and drops, with product examples built around strains such as Bacillus clausii, Bacillus coagulans, Bacillus subtilis, and Saccharomyces boulardii. Some listings are very specific. Triogermila is a 6 billion CFU oral suspension. Endogermila is a Bacillus clausii vial product, and Bacimed is a syrup based on Bacillus subtilis CU1.

That format flexibility matters for customers. A pharma or healthcare brand that wants a room-temperature probiotic in orange-flavored vials has a different manufacturing need from an aquaculture buyer that wants a bacillus-and-pediococcus blend for Vibrio control. An agriculture buyer may be looking for microbial products aimed at soil and water hygiene. ELMED already shows all of those in-market formats, including aquaculture products like VIBRICON and agriculture products like ELTOX.

Taken together, the product catalog points to a practical workflow: strain-led formulation work, dosage-form selection, then scaled manufacturing under one roof. That’s the pitch. Instead of a brand stitching together R&D and production from different vendors, ELMED is trying to collapse that into a single specialist partner. It serves 150+ clients, supports 250+ brands, exports to 18+ countries, and holds 15+ global certifications.

Who founded ELMED Life Sciences and what’s its edge?

The founding story

ELMED was founded in 2018 in Hyderabad by Pruthivin Reddy Madduri and Nikhil Konkathi. The company formally dates to December 13, 2018, and both founders have been on the board since launch. The startup began with a focused bet on probiotics rather than a broad nutraceutical sprawl. That matters because probiotic manufacturing is unforgiving on strain stability, quality control, and dosage-form execution.

Both founders are VIT alumni, and the company has kept its manufacturing base in Hyderabad — a city that already has the supplier base, pharma talent, and export muscle needed for a business like this.

Founder market fit

Pruthivin Reddy Madduri brings a slightly unusual profile for this category. His background is in computer science at VIT, followed by graduate study at California State University, Fullerton, and he has described prior exposure to the U.S. healthcare sector before starting ELMED. He isn’t a bench scientist. But it helps explain why ELMED leans into formulation, process, and product architecture instead of just branding.

Public founder detail on Konkathi is thinner, but he has been there since incorporation and is listed as director across company profiles and industry listings. One older profile on the founding team says both founders worked in healthcare companies after their master’s studies before starting up together in Hyderabad.

Traction and early signals

This is not a pre-product story. ELMED is already operating with a commercial catalog, a manufacturing plant in Cherlapalli, and a customer base large enough to matter. It has 150+ clients and 250+ brands across markets, while the source article names Xanum, Hetero Healthcare, Wallace Pharmaceuticals, and Donovan among its top customers. ELMED also exports to more than 18 countries and wants to go deeper into Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Its facility is built to produce oral suspensions, emulsions, drops, capsules, sachets, and syrups across therapeutic areas for humans, aquatic life, animals, and plants. That breadth is a real signal. Lots of startups talk about microbiome science. Fewer have translated that into multiple commercial form factors.

Fundraising details and competition

The company’s Series A totals $2.7 million, or ₹25.4 crore, from NABVENTURES-managed AgriSURE Fund. ELMED will use the money for more production capacity in Hyderabad. It also plans stronger R&D in microbiome-based solutions and wider distribution across smaller Indian cities while expanding internationally.

Competition is crowded but fragmented. In India, probiotic manufacturing and contract work already includes established names such as Unique Biotech, Sanzyme Biologics, and other specialist manufacturers that compete on fermentation know-how, certifications, and export readiness. The legacy alternative is even tougher: big pharma brands that outsource probiotic production to experienced contract manufacturers with long regulatory track records. ELMED’s differentiator is its cross-sector footprint — one company serving human health, aquaculture, animal health, and agriculture — plus a dosage-form mix that goes beyond capsules into suspensions, emulsions, drops, and farm-use microbial products.

Why does ELMED Life Sciences funding matter?

This round matters because it shifts ELMED from “credible specialist” toward “scaled platform” , if execution holds up. Production capacity in probiotics isn’t a cosmetic upgrade. It decides how many brands a manufacturer can serve, how consistently it can deliver sensitive strains, and whether it can win larger accounts that don’t tolerate supply shocks.

The R&D piece is just as important. Microbiome products get more valuable when a company can tailor strains, delivery formats, and applications to different end markets. Human gut-health products need one kind of evidence and formulation discipline. Aquaculture and agriculture need another. ELMED is trying to own that complexity instead of staying a plain-vanilla bulk producer.

There’s also the investor angle. NABVENTURES backing this round through AgriSURE suggests the thesis isn’t only about consumer wellness. It’s also about applied microbiome science in rural and agricultural settings, where probiotics can move from supplements into productivity and preventive-health tools.

How big is the probiotics and microbiome market?

The market tailwind is real, even if the exact number depends on what you count. IBEF, citing PharmaTrac, said India’s probiotics market reached ₹2,070 crore in 2025 after roughly doubling in five years and growing 22% on a moving annual total basis in May 2025. IMARC’s broader estimate put India’s probiotics market at $2.2 billion in 2024, with projected CAGR of 17.8% from 2025 to 2033.

That gap in estimates isn’t unusual. Some reports focus tightly on probiotic products sold in certain channels. Others include wider food, supplement, and wellness categories. Either way, this isn’t a fringe category anymore.

The global picture is larger still. IMARC estimated the worldwide probiotics market at $71.9 billion in 2025, with a path to $124 billion by 2034. That scale helps explain why ELMED wants deeper exposure to Europe, Asia, and Latin America rather than staying domestic.

Investor behavior backs that up. On May 6, 2025, Mumbai-based gut-health startup The Good Bug raised ₹100 crore to scale microbiome R&D and expand distribution, showing that capital is still flowing into this segment when companies can tie science to commercial demand. Closer to ELMED’s own category, the broader Indian probiotics industry is also benefiting from demand for natural, preventive, and non-antibiotic solutions across both healthcare and agriculture.

Final take on ELMED Life Sciences

ELMED Life Sciences isn’t the loudest startup in microbiome health. That may actually help. It’s a building where a lot of the hard value sits — formulation, manufacturing, and cross-category probiotic infrastructure.

Watch whether ELMED can convert this round into faster capacity build-out, deeper R&D, and real distribution wins outside metros without losing quality discipline.

Read how Deccan AI Raises $25M for Post-Training Stack and why enterprises are investing in tools that make AI systems reliable in production.

FAQ

What funding did ELMED Life Sciences raise?

ELMED Life Sciences raised $2.7 million in a Series A round. The investor was NABVENTURES-managed AgriSURE Fund, and the company is putting that money into manufacturing expansion in Hyderabad, microbiome R&D, and market expansion in India and overseas.

What does ELMED Life Sciences sell?

ELMED sells and manufactures probiotic products across human health, animal health, aquaculture, and agriculture. Its catalog includes vials, capsules, sachets, syrups, drops, and farm-use microbial products, with examples built around strains like Bacillus clausii and Saccharomyces boulardii.

Who founded ELMED Life Sciences?

ELMED was founded in 2018 by Pruthivin Reddy Madduri and Nikhil Konkathi, both VIT alumni. Madduri’s profile includes computer science training, graduate study in California, and prior exposure to the U.S. healthcare sector before launching the business in Hyderabad.

Is ELMED Life Sciences a gut-health brand or a biotech manufacturer?

It’s much closer to a biotech manufacturer and contract development partner than a consumer-first gut-health brand. Unlike companies that mainly sell probiotics directly to shoppers, ELMED works behind the scenes on formulation, R&D, and production for healthcare and agri-biotech customers.

March 31, 2026
Deccan AI Raises $25M for Post-Training Stack

Deccan AI builds post-training, evaluation, and deployment tools for enterprise AI models. The AI infrastructure startup has now raised $25 million in a round led by A91 Partners, with Susquehanna and existing backer Prosus Ventures also participating. Lots of companies can access strong models now, but far fewer can safely train, test, and run them inside real business workflows without things breaking. Founded in 2023 by Rukesh Reddy, the company is betting that this messy middle layer — between a foundation model and a usable enterprise system — is where a lot of the value will sit.

What is Deccan AI and how does it work?

Deccan AI is trying to sell enterprises a full post-training stack, not a single AI feature. Its portfolio now includes STARK RL envs, Helix evals, and EnterpriseOS agents. In plain English, that means one layer for training agents in realistic conditions, one for generating and managing evaluation data, and one for deploying those systems into operating workflows.

The most concrete piece is STARK RL envs — the STARK RL gym. It simulates enterprise servers, tools, permissions, latency, rate limits, and irreversible actions so an AI agent can learn inside a controlled environment before touching live systems. The setup includes tasks, verifiers, golden trajectories, a sandbox container, plug-and-play LLM endpoints, and a Python SDK for training and evaluation. That’s a lot more useful than a toy benchmark. Enterprise failures usually come from workflow edge cases, not just bad prompt wording.

Helix evals sits closer to the data problem. It’s a data-generation tool for building, managing, and scaling high-quality training data, and that lines up with Deccan’s broader platform emphasis on expert-built datasets, model evaluation, domain-specific tuning for RAG, Text2SQL, coding, STEM, multimodal work, and agentic systems. The pitch isn’t “we’ll give you generic labels.” It’s “we’ll help you create the sort of evaluation and post-training data that enterprise models usually don’t have enough of.”

Then there’s EnterpriseOS agents. Deccan’s workflow for customers starts with understanding the business process and data sources. Then it customizes and trains a model on company data, and deploys and monitors it with a UI builder, sandbox testing, and real-time orchestration. Before that, a lot of this work lives in internal prompt hacks, manual QA, and scattered scripts. Afterward, the company is promising something closer to a managed production layer for enterprise AI. Ambitious? Yes. But the product logic is coherent.

Who founded Deccan AI and why now?

The founding story

Deccan AI was founded in 2023 by Rukesh Reddy. The company helps enterprises train, evaluate, and deploy AI across agentic workflows, coding, functional streams, and robotics — which explains why the new round is earmarked not just for post-training data and R&D, but also for enterprise-grade infrastructure and robotics-relevant data. It operates from the Bay Area, Hyderabad, and Bangalore. That fits the model: close to enterprise buyers in the US, deep talent delivery from India.

Why Rukesh Reddy fits this market

Reddy doesn’t come out of an academic AI lab. He comes from operating roles in finance and consulting — 15+ years across Citi, Monitor, and JPMorgan, with IIT Bombay and IIM Ahmedabad on the résumé. He also spent time at 360 ONE Wealth, where he led growth for the digital wealth business. That background matters because Deccan isn’t selling research demos. It’s selling reliability and process design. Enterprise trust, too.

Earlier operating experience

Before launching this company, Reddy held roles including SVP for strategy and business development in Citi’s global retail bank, US head of CX and digital transformation at Citi, and general manager for Citigold. He also founded Soul AI in 2023, another venture centered on RLHF and enterprise generative AI services. So while he isn’t a household-name model researcher, he does have a track record in complex operating environments where workflows, compliance, and customer experience are the whole game.

Early traction and signals

This isn’t pre-product vapor. Deccan AI already counts Google and Snowflake among its customers. The company has also built a talent pool of more than 500,000 specialists across 25+ domains for high-quality AI data and evaluation work — an important asset if your business depends on difficult post-training workflows rather than commodity annotation. It has also put enterprise certifications like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA front and center, which tells you exactly who it wants to sell to.

Funding details

The new round brings in $25 million, led by A91 Partners, with Susquehanna and Prosus Ventures participating. Deccan will use the money to scale post-training data, expand R&D, build enterprise-grade infrastructure, and deepen its datasets for enterprise use cases and robotics. That comes after Prosus had already backed the company in an earlier financing announced in May 2025.

Competition and positioning

This category is getting crowded fast. On the data and post-training side, enterprises can look at firms like Scale AI and Snorkel AI. On the evaluation side, buyers increasingly compare tools from Patronus AI, Arize, and Statsig, all of which focus on measuring model quality, production behavior, or guardrails in one form or another.

Deccan is trying to bundle the ugly parts together. Instead of only selling eval dashboards or only selling data services, it offers a chain from domain data creation to simulated RL training to live workflow deployment. Legacy alternatives are still messy — internal AI teams, outsourced contractor networks, systems integrators, and spreadsheet-heavy QA loops. Deccan’s bet is that enterprises would rather buy one stack that mirrors real operational failure modes than stitch together 4 vendors and hope the seams hold.

Why does Deccan AI’s $25M round matter?

This isn’t growth capital for a simple SaaS seat-expansion story. The money is going into post-training data, R&D, and hardened infrastructure — the expensive stuff that determines whether an AI product survives contact with a real company. If Deccan executes well, it could move from being a useful vendor in model training and evals to something closer to a core enterprise AI plumbing layer.

For customers, that matters more than another flashy model demo. A lot of enterprise AI projects still fail in the handoff from benchmark to production. Deccan’s product set is built around that exact failure point. It trains agents on realistic workflows. It generates the right eval data, then deploys into live processes with monitoring and iteration. That’s a much less glamorous pitch than “we built a new model,” but it’s where many buyers are finally willing to spend.

For investors, the logic is pretty clear. Deccan already has known enterprise names on its customer list, a cross-border operating setup, and a product roadmap that maps neatly to where enterprise AI pain is heading. The hard part now isn’t whether there’s demand. It’s whether the company can scale quality without turning into just another labor-heavy services business wearing an infrastructure label.

Why are investors betting on AI post-training now?

The market tailwind is real. Gartner forecast worldwide generative AI spending at $644 billion in 2025, up 76.4% from 2024, and put software GenAI spending at $299 billion in 2025 with a path to $895 billion by 2028. That doesn’t mean every startup wins. It does mean the budget line is no longer theoretical.

Adoption is also getting broad enough that quality problems can’t be brushed aside as “pilot noise”. McKinsey’s 2025 global survey found 88% of respondents said their organizations were using AI in at least one business function, up from 78% a year earlier. But only about one-third said their companies had begun scaling AI programs, and just 23% reported scaling an agentic AI system somewhere in the business. That gap — lots of usage, much less dependable scale — is exactly where post-training, evals, and production workflow tooling become valuable.

There’s another shift underneath all this. Enterprises are getting less excited by raw model access and more obsessed with accuracy, governance, and workflow fit. Gartner even noted that many CIOs are growing dissatisfied with early proof-of-concept results and are leaning toward more predictable commercial solutions. So startups that can improve reliability after the model is chosen have a much clearer story than they did 18 months ago.

What should customers watch from Deccan AI next?

The thing to watch isn’t whether Deccan AI can add more product names to the site. It’s whether it can turn this three-part stack into a repeatable enterprise system with visible depth in a few verticals — especially robotics and other high-risk workflows where failure costs are real.

If that happens, this round will look smart.

If it doesn’t, Deccan AI risks getting squeezed between pure-play eval startups on one side and giant data infrastructure vendors on the other. That’s why the next 12 months matter so much. The company has money, customers, and a believable thesis. Now it has to prove the stack holds together at scale.

Read how Ultrahuman Secures ₹400 Crore in Series C Funding and why its smart ring-led health platform is taking on global wearable leaders.

FAQ

What is the latest Deccan AI funding round?

Deccan AI has raised $25 million in a round led by A91 Partners. Susquehanna and existing investor Prosus Ventures also joined, and the capital will be used for post-training data, R&D, enterprise infrastructure, and robotics-focused datasets.

How does Deccan AI work for enterprise customers?

Deccan AI combines training environments, evaluation tooling, and deployment software into one stack. A customer can simulate workflows in STARK RL envs, build higher-quality data and tests through Helix evals, and then push AI agents into operational systems through EnterpriseOS-style deployment tools.

Who founded Deccan AI?

Rukesh Reddy founded the company in 2023. His background spans Citi, Monitor, JPMorgan, and 360 ONE Wealth, and he studied at IIT Bombay and IIM Ahmedabad — which helps explain why Deccan’s pitch feels more enterprise-operations-heavy than research-lab-heavy.

Is Deccan AI an AI infrastructure startup or an AI services company?

It sits in an awkward but interesting middle ground. Deccan AI looks like an AI infrastructure startup because it sells productized tooling for post-training, evaluation, and deployment, but its human-expert data engine is also a big part of the value. That hybrid model could be a strength if customers want outcomes, not just software.

March 31, 2026
Ultrahuman Secures ₹400 Crore in Series C Funding

Ultrahuman makes health-tracking wearables and metabolic health tools built around a smart ring, blood testing, glucose monitoring, and connected home sensors.

Now the Ultrahuman smart ring story has a lot more money behind it. The Bengaluru company has closed a Series C round of around ₹400 crore, or about $48 million. The problem it’s trying to solve is simple enough: health data is scattered, hard to interpret, and too clunky for most people to use every day. Founded in 2019 by Mohit Kumar and Vatsal Singhal, Ultrahuman is trying to turn that mess into a single always-on health stack — and this round comes just as it tries to get back into the US after a bruising patent fight with Oura.

One wrinkle still hangs over the deal. One person said Premji Invest led the round, but Kumar pushed back and said Ultrahuman has “not raised from Premji,” then declined to say more. It tells you this financing is real, but some cap-table details still aren’t fully settled in public.

What is the Ultrahuman smart ring and how does it work?

The short version: Ring PRO is Ultrahuman’s third-generation health-tracking ring. It collects passive biometric data through the ring, syncs that data through the app, and translates it into scores, prompts, and longer-term guidance. It tracks sleep, recovery, movement, stress, heart rhythm and other markers. Then it layers those signals into features like Sleep Index, Dynamic Recovery, Stress Rhythm, Movement Index, and Ultra Age.

What makes the product more interesting now is that it’s no longer just a ring. If a user is inside the wider Ultrahuman system, Jade — the company’s new biointelligence layer — can combine ring data with 120+ Blood Vision biomarkers, M1 CGM glucose trends, and data from Ultrahuman Home. That means the user isn’t stuck hopping between dashboards and guessing what matters. They can ask natural-language questions and get recommendations back.

The hardware changes are pretty concrete too. Ring PRO has up to 15 days of battery life and stores up to 250 days of data on the ring itself. It uses a redesigned heart-rate sensing architecture and runs on an upgraded dual-core processor with on-chip machine learning. The new PRO Charger adds up to 45 days of extra battery life and stores up to a year of ring data. It also supports Qi charging and includes a “Find My Case” feature.

And that’s really the before-and-after pitch. Before, serious health nerds had to piece together sleep data, heart metrics, blood markers, and glucose trends from separate products. After, Ultrahuman wants one ring-led system to do the stitching. Ambitious? Yes. But it’s a real product thesis, not vague wellness branding.

Who founded Ultrahuman and how did the company get here?

The founding story

Ultrahuman was started in 2019 by Mohit Kumar and Vatsal Singhal in Bengaluru. The company first built around metabolic health and performance tracking, then expanded into hardware and a broader consumer health platform. That arc matters because Ultrahuman didn’t begin as a fashion-first wearable brand. It began with biomarker-heavy health optimization, and the ring became the most scalable way to package that idea.

Why Mohit Kumar had market fit

Kumar wasn’t new to building fast-moving consumer tech companies. Before Ultrahuman, he was chief operations officer of Zomato’s food delivery business until 2019, and before that he co-founded Runnr with Singhal — a last-mile and food delivery startup that later folded into Zomato in 2017. He’s also a graduate of PES Institute of Technology in Bengaluru. That doesn’t automatically make someone a wearable-tech founder. But it does mean Kumar had already lived through scale, operations, logistics, and a startup exit before trying to build hardware.

What Ultrahuman has shipped so far

Ultrahuman has been steadily widening the product set. Ring Air launched in 2022. Ring PRO is positioned as the performance-oriented upgrade, while Ring Air stays in the lineup for people who care more about comfort and lighter wear. Kumar’s own summary was blunt: Pro is for performance with 15-day battery life, Air is for comfort with 5-6 day battery life. Ring PRO is already on sale in India, Europe, the UAE, and Australia. The company has also expanded into blood testing and home health devices. That helps explain why its product roadmap now stretches beyond rings.

The Series C and the US reset

This new round lands at a very specific moment. Ultrahuman has already raised more than $60 million in equity from Rainmatter Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures, Alpha Wave Incubation, Steadview Capital, and angel investor Deepinder Goyal. In November 2025, it also took ₹100 crore in venture debt from Alteria Capital. The fresh Series C money is expected to fund 3 things: a US return with the redesigned Ring PRO, expansion into new geographies, and new wearables — including a wristband-style product and new home lines.

That US return isn’t just a sales push. It’s a legal comeback. In August 2025, the US International Trade Commission ruled in favor of Oura in a patent case involving Ultrahuman and RingConn, then exclusion and cease-and-desist orders took effect on October 21, 2025, blocking imports and sales tied to the older Ring Air design. The new Ring PRO has been redesigned specifically to avoid the battery-integration and form-factor issues at the heart of that dispute, and The CapTable reported that Ultrahuman has now received approval to bring the redesigned ring back to the US.

Where it sits against Oura, RingConn, and the old alternatives

Oura is still the company to beat. It raised a $200 million Series D in November 2024 at a $5.2 billion valuation, and by May 2024 it had sold more than 2.5 million rings. That’s the scale benchmark Ultrahuman is chasing. RingConn is another direct smart-ring competitor, and it was dragged into the same patent fight. Then there are the older alternatives — smartwatches and fitness bands. They offer broader notifications and screens but still lose on comfort, sleep wearability, and passive data capture for a lot of users.

Ultrahuman’s differentiation is pretty clear. It’s pushing battery life and a performance-first ring. It also wants deeper data integration across glucose, blood and home signals, plus a more complete health-data layer rather than just a hardware accessory. Investors aren’t just betting on a ring. They’re betting that a ring can become the entry point into a broader personal-health subscription and device stack.

Why does Ultrahuman smart ring funding matter right now?

Because this round isn’t about survival. It’s about whether Ultrahuman can turn a legal setback into a product reset.

If Ring Air had stayed blocked in the US with no clear redesign path, the company’s global ambitions would’ve looked a lot thinner. The US is still the most important premium wearables market for category-defining brands, especially in health tracking. Getting Ring PRO through that bottleneck gives Ultrahuman a second shot at the one market where Oura already has brand gravity, distribution muscle, and consumer familiarity.

There’s also a roadmap signal buried in the use-of-funds plan. A wristband form factor and new home lines suggest Ultrahuman doesn’t want to be trapped inside a single-device story. That’s smart. Hardware categories can go cold fast. A multi-device health stack is harder to build, but it also gives the company more shots.

And honestly, that’s probably what investors are buying here. Not just a prettier ring. A wider platform.

How big is the market for an Ultrahuman smart ring?

The category is no longer niche. MarketsandMarkets estimates the North America wearable technology market will grow from $34.1 billion in 2025 to $69.1 billion by 2030, a 15.2% CAGR. Smart rings are still a small slice of that total, but they sit inside one of the fastest-moving parts of consumer health tech: passive, always-on, lower-friction monitoring.

That timing helps Ultrahuman. Consumers have gotten a lot more comfortable with continuous health data. They also want devices that don’t feel like tiny smartphones strapped to their bodies. That’s why screenless wearables are getting real attention now — less distraction, more wear time, better sleep tracking, and fewer charging headaches when the hardware is done right.

AI is part of the timing too. People don’t just want more data anymore. They want interpretation. Jade is Ultrahuman’s answer to that shift, and Oura has already shown there’s real appetite for smart rings. So the market tailwind is real. But tailwinds don’t guarantee a win. Execution does.

Ultrahuman’s next chapter comes down to one thing: can it turn the Ultrahuman smart ring from a strong alternative into a category leader with real US momentum? The funding gives it the chance. The redesigned Ring PRO gives it the opening. What to watch next is simple — whether the US relaunch sticks, and whether the company can make that wider health stack feel indispensable instead of overbuilt.

Read how Velmenni Li-Fi Raises ₹30 Cr for Defense Push and why optical wireless is emerging as a serious alternative to traditional telecom infrastructure.

FAQ

What is Ultrahuman raising in its latest funding round?

Ultrahuman has closed a Series C round of around ₹400 crore, or roughly $48 million. One source said Premji Invest led the round, but Mohit Kumar publicly denied that specific detail and said the company had “not raised from Premji.”

How does Ultrahuman Ring PRO differ from Ring Air?

Ring PRO is the higher-performance model, with up to 15 days of battery life, more computing power, and a redesigned architecture aimed at more durable health tracking. Ring Air, which launched in 2022, stays positioned as the lighter and more comfort-first option with about 5-6 days of battery life.

Who founded Ultrahuman?

Ultrahuman was founded in 2019 by Mohit Kumar and Vatsal Singhal. Before that, the pair had already built Runnr, and Kumar later ran delivery operations at Zomato until 2019 — which gave him a pretty unusual mix of startup and scale-execution experience for a hardware founder.

Is the smart ring market big enough for Ultrahuman to matter?

Yes — if the company executes well. North America’s wearable-tech market alone is projected to grow from $34.1 billion in 2025 to $69.1 billion by 2030, and Oura has already sold more than 2.5 million rings, which shows consumer demand for the form factor is real rather than experimental.

March 31, 2026
Velmenni Li-Fi Raises ₹30 Cr for Defense Push

Velmenni builds light-based wireless communication systems for telecom, enterprise, and defense networks. The New Delhi startup has raised ₹30 Cr in a pre-Series A round led by pi Ventures, with MountTech Growth Fund – Kavachh and Apekso joining in, as it tries to turn Velmenni Li-Fi from a deeptech promise into a bigger commercial business. It’s chasing a clear problem: a lot of last-mile and backhaul links are still too slow, too expensive, or too awkward to build with fiber or radio. Founded in 2014 by Deepak Solanki, Velmenni is betting that optical wireless links can fix that in places where conventional telecom infrastructure struggles.

What does Velmenni Li-Fi actually do?

At the product level, Velmenni sells optical wireless connectivity. Indoors, its Li-Fi setup takes data from a router over PoE or Ethernet and pushes that data to a Li-Fi access point attached to LED lighting. It then encodes and modulates the signal through light. A dongle connected to the user device decodes that signal and handles the uplink using near-infrared LEDs, which makes the connection bidirectional rather than just a one-way demo.

That matters. This isn’t just “internet through a bulb” marketing. Velmenni’s indoor system is built around specific enterprise features: up to 1 Gbps speeds and latency in the 1–3 ms range. It also offers plug-and-play hardware and line-of-sight security that keeps light-based traffic from leaking through walls the way radio can. The company frames Li-Fi as interference-free for places where electromagnetic noise is a real operational headache.

Outdoors, the company goes after a different job. Its light communication backhaul product is designed for point-to-point or point-to-multipoint links, with 1 Gbps throughput at 1 km and latency around 1–2 ms. It uses pole-mounted equipment meant to be deployed faster than trenching cable. That makes it more like telecom infrastructure than a niche lighting add-on.

The customer workflow is pretty straightforward. Instead of digging for fiber or fighting for more spectrum, a telecom operator, factory, campus, harbor, or defense site can mount optical gear where it needs the link and align it. Then it can bring bandwidth online with less civil work. That’s why Velmenni talks about both Li-Fi and FSO rather than treating them as the same thing—they solve different connection problems inside the same optical wireless stack.

Who built Velmenni Li-Fi and what has it shipped?

The founding story and founder fit

Velmenni was founded in 2014, and Solanki still leads it as founder and CEO. His background is in electronics and communication engineering, and he’d been focused on Li-Fi research before the company’s commercial push took shape. He became interested in Li-Fi in 2011, then pushed the idea from an R&D effort into a product company. He also worked with the Airbus accelerator, which gave the startup early validation outside India.

There’s also a business-side counterpart here. Velmenni lists Ujjwal Minocha as cofounder and COO, running business, strategy, sales, and marketing. His background is less lab-heavy and more commercial. That matters because this kind of company doesn’t win on patents alone—it wins when someone can actually sell hard tech into long procurement cycles.

The early traction is unusually concrete

Here’s where Velmenni gets more interesting than a lot of optical wireless startups. It has already done more than 50 deployments across India, Southeast Asia, and with tier I mobile network operators in the US. One of the biggest proof points is a multi-million-dollar Indian defense contract to deploy FSO systems across Indian submarines for harbor connectivity. Another is a private 5G network installed at GMR’s thermal power plant in Odisha, where the company maintained 99.999% availability for more than 18 months in tropical conditions.

Those aren’t soft signals. Neither is the compliance story. Velmenni has secured CE certification in Europe and is waiting for FCC clearance in the US. It has also built an international patent portfolio backed by grants from the Department of Telecommunications and India’s defense ministry.

The round, the rivals, and where Velmenni sits

The new round brings in ₹30 Cr, or about $3.3 Mn, at the pre-Series A stage. pi Ventures led it. MountTech Growth Fund – Kavachh and Apekso also participated. Velmenni plans to use the money to commercialize its FSO and Li-Fi telecom products. It also plans to build more solutions for defense and enterprise buyers and push into more international markets. For pi Ventures, which has explicitly positioned Fund II around seed-to-Series A deeptech bets, the fit is obvious.

Competition is real, even if this market is still early. Trackers place Velmenni in a global field that includes pureLiFi, Oledcomm, VLNComm, Signify, Lucibel, and LiFiComm. But most of the incumbent alternatives Velmenni is really selling against aren’t other Li-Fi startups. They’re fiber trenching, licensed spectrum, and millimeter-wave links. Velmenni’s pitch is that light-based backhaul can be cheaper and faster to deploy in places where those options are messy, slow, or overkill.

Solanki put the differentiation plainly: Velmenni offers an “all-weather tested, 100% Made in India design” with “10Gbps+ seamless connectivity” across 1–25 km. That’s ambitious. But it also explains why investors are backing it—the company isn’t just selling a lab demo. It’s selling a hardware stack with telecom and defense use cases attached.

Why does this Velmenni funding round matter?

This round matters because it isn’t being framed as pure R&D money. Velmenni is using it to commercialize products that already exist, not to begin from scratch. That usually means manufacturing, deployment support, sales capacity, and product hardening are now just as important as the underlying optics.

For customers, that’s a big shift. A telecom buyer or defense user doesn’t care that a system worked once in a pilot. They care whether it can be installed repeatedly and serviced quickly. They also care whether it can be procured without drama. Velmenni now has the kind of capital that can help bridge that ugly middle stage between “ impressive technology”‘ and “‘reliable vendor”.

For the category, this is a useful signal. Optical wireless has been talked about for years as a secure, high-capacity alternative to RF-heavy networks. The hard part was always commercial adoption. A funded company with real deployments, defense validation, and an enterprise roadmap has a better shot at pushing the category out of the prototype bucket.

How big is the Li-Fi and optical wireless market?

The market tailwind is substantial. Grand View Research projects the global light fidelity market will reach $7.76 Bn by 2030, growing at a 51.0% CAGR from 2023 to 2030. The same forecast flags aerospace and defense as a meaningful end-use segment. It also expects Asia Pacific to be one of the fastest-growing regions.

India gives that story a local backbone. Since 5G launched in 2022, the country has built the world’s second-largest 5G user base, with 40 Cr subscribers by early 2026 and 4.69 lakh base stations. That doesn’t automatically make Li-Fi mainstream. But it does create more pressure for dense, fast, secure backhaul and last-mile links in places where radio isn’t ideal.

The competitive set also shows this is now a real market, not a science fair project. Grand View’s market data lists pureLiFi, Oledcomm, VLNComm, Signify, and Velmenni among notable players, while its regional outlook expects Asia Pacific light fidelity revenue to reach about $1.38 Bn by 2030. Behind this round is a broader shift: more security-sensitive environments and more connected industrial sites. There’s also more willingness to use optical wireless where line-of-sight constraints are acceptable.

Will Velmenni Li-Fi break out from here?

Velmenni has something a lot of deeptech startups never get—deployment history in actual operating environments, not just decks and pilots. That gives it credibility. But credibility isn’t scale.

What matters next for Velmenni Li-Fi is whether those early submarine, industrial, and telecom wins turn into repeatable multi-site rollouts.

Read how Fuse Raises $25M for AI Loan Origination System and why lenders are looking to replace legacy LOS platforms with AI-driven infrastructure.

FAQ

What funding did Velmenni raise?

Velmenni raised ₹30 Cr, or about $3.3 Mn, in a pre-Series A round. pi Ventures led the investment, and MountTech Growth Fund – Kavachh plus Apekso also participated. The company plans to use the capital to commercialize its FSO and Li-Fi telecom products and expand with defense and enterprise customers.

How does Velmenni’s Li-Fi technology work?

It works by moving data through light instead of radio. Velmenni’s indoor setup sends router data over Ethernet to a Li-Fi access point attached to LEDs. A dongle on the device decodes the light signal and handles the uplink through near-infrared LEDs, while its outdoor systems use optical links for backhaul.

Who founded Velmenni?

Deepak Solanki founded Velmenni in 2014 and serves as CEO. He comes from an electronics and communication engineering background and had been working on Li-Fi for years before the company scaled. Velmenni also lists Ujjwal Minocha as cofounder and COO, leading the commercial side.

Is Velmenni a Li-Fi company or a telecom infrastructure startup?

It’s both. Velmenni sits in the Li-Fi and optical wireless category, but the business it’s building looks a lot like telecom infrastructure for high-speed backhaul, last-mile connectivity, private 5G environments, and secure defense networks.

March 31, 2026
Fuse funding: AI loan origination startup raises $25M

Fuse builds an AI loan origination system for credit unions, banks, and other lenders. The New York startup has closed a $25 million Series A led by Footwork, with Primary Venture Partners, NextView Ventures, and Commerce Ventures also backing the round, as it tries to replace the slow, contract-heavy loan software that still runs a lot of consumer lending. Founded in 2020 by Andres Klaric and Marc Escapa, the company spent its first years on an automotive lending startup before pivoting in 2023 toward loan origination infrastructure. That shift matters because the LOS isn’t some side tool. It’s the core operating system behind application intake, underwriting, approval, and disbursement.

What is Fuse’s AI loan origination system?

Fuse’s AI loan origination system is a modern LOS and account-opening stack for lenders that want to replace patchwork workflows with one configurable system. A borrower starts in Fuse’s application portal and submits information through a mobile-friendly flow. They can move between online and branch channels without starting over. On the lender side, staff work from a tailored internal agent portal. Business teams get a no-code decision engine and reporting tools. There’s also an integrations marketplace tied to more than 200 external systems.

The more interesting part is the AI layer. Fuse has named agents for different jobs: an AI Loan Officer to guide applicants and an AI Underwriter to recommend and evaluate rules. It also has an AI Funder that auto-processes more than 90% of documentation for fraud and accuracy checks. The AI Configurator explains automation results and suggests new rules based on override behavior. That’s more concrete than the usual “we use AI across the workflow” line startups hide behind.

For credit unions, Fuse bakes account opening and membership into the loan flow itself. That means one application instead of separate portals. Less re-keying. It also means cleaner handoffs when a member starts online and finishes in-branch, or the other way around. Fuse supports direct and indirect lending across consumer and SMB products. Smaller institutions usually don’t want a different tool for every loan type.

What manual work disappears? A lot of the ugly stuff. Fuse pushes automation into document reading and fraud verification. It also handles underwriting logic, contract generation, document validation, and system integrations. The company promises fast deployment terms, including custom integrations built in under 1 month and biweekly automation coaching. That kind of contract-level implementation promise is an aggressive sales move. LOS migrations are usually painful.

Who founded Fuse and why did it pivot in 2023?

The founding story

Fuse was founded in 2020 by Klaric and Escapa, who met 5 years earlier as classmates at Harvard Business School. Klaric, a Bolivian native, and Escapa, a Spanish immigrant, originally spent 3 years building an automotive lending startup. In 2023, they decided the bigger opportunity wasn’t another lending product at the edge of the stack. It was the stack itself. So they pivoted into the LOS, the system lenders rely on as their source of record.

Why these founders make sense here

Klaric’s background is unusually finance-heavy for a founder selling infrastructure into lenders. Before Fuse, he worked on Wall Street and in investing roles tied to tech and business services, with stops at Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Crescent Capital Group, and H.I.G. Capital. That matters because selling core lending software isn’t just a product problem. It’s also a credibility problem. Buyers want founders who understand credit, operations, and risk.

Escapa brings the operator side. He leads technology and innovation at Fuse and came in as a second-time founder. Before this, he co-founded travel startup Noken, which raised $7 million from Bessemer and Primary, and earlier worked at Turo on growth marketing with a $1.7 million annual budget. He also spent time at McKinsey. Put those résumés together and you get a specific founder-market fit: one co-founder with deep finance exposure, the other with startup product and scaling experience.

Traction, funding, and the rescue fund

The early signals are real. Fuse has more than 100 customers. Now it has $25 million in fresh Series A capital, with Footwork leading and Primary Venture Partners, NextView Ventures, and Commerce Ventures participating.

Fuse is also doing something pretty blunt to win over credit unions: it has set aside a $5 million “rescue fund” to give the first 50 qualifying institutions free access to Fuse until their current legacy contracts expire. Klaric says, “it’s not just a marketing gimmick,” arguing that a lot of credit unions simply can’t afford to break old LOS contracts early.

How Fuse is positioning against incumbents and newer rivals

The incumbent targets are clear: nCino and MeridianLink. Both already sell cloud-based consumer lending and origination software to banks and credit unions, and both pitch streamlined workflows, automation, and digital borrower experiences. Fuse isn’t inventing the category. It’s trying to win by saying legacy platforms are too slow to implement and too rigid to configure. They’re also too expensive to switch into or out of.

Then there are newer challengers. Casca is building an AI-native loan origination platform for SBA lenders and FDIC-insured banks, with deep SBA workflow features like E-Tran integration, and it raised $29 million in 2025. Glide, meanwhile, leans hard into mobile-first account opening and loan origination for credit unions and banks, including a 2-minute application flow. Fuse’s answer is breadth: one platform across consumer, SMB, indirect lending, and account opening. It also offers automation, 200+ integrations, membership built into lending flows, and implementation guarantees written into the contract.

Why does this AI loan origination system funding round matter?

This round matters because Fuse isn’t selling a nice-to-have workflow layer. It’s going after the software category lenders are least eager to replace. Nikhil Basu Trivedi, co-founder and general partner at Footwork, told TechCrunch he backed Fuse because there are more than 4,000 credit unions in the U.S. and their technology is badly overdue for an overhaul. He also compared the LOS to an ERP or CRM: mission-critical, deeply embedded, and historically painful to swap.

That’s why the rescue fund is clever. The biggest blocker to adoption often isn’t product quality. It’s timing. Credit unions get trapped in long contracts, and even when leadership wants newer AI tools, ripping out the core system midstream can be financially dumb. Fuse is trying to buy its way through that bottleneck. Not with discounts alone, but by carrying some of the switching pain itself.

There’s a second signal here. Investors aren’t just betting that lenders want AI. They’re betting lenders want AI wrapped inside a system they can deploy. That’s a more mature thesis. Fancy copilots are easy to demo. Replacing operational plumbing is hard. If Fuse can do that faster than legacy vendors, this round will look smart. If it can’t, $25 million disappears fast.

How big is the digital lending and loan origination market?

The broader market is big enough to make the bet make sense. Grand View Research pegs the U.S. digital lending platform market at $2.42 billion in 2024 and projects it will reach $9.58 billion by 2030, which implies a 26.3% CAGR from 2025 through 2030. That’s fast growth by normal B2B software standards.

Global figures tell a similar story, even if the growth assumptions are a bit less aggressive. IMARC values the worldwide digital lending platform market at $13.0 billion in 2024 and forecasts $39.8 billion by 2033. It says loan origination is the largest product segment inside that market, which lines up with where startups like Fuse, Casca, and Glide are aiming.

Why now? Because lenders finally have enough pressure from both sides. Consumers expect fast, app-like borrowing. Regulators and risk teams still expect tight controls and auditability. Financial institutions want automation that cuts operating costs without forcing them into a multi-year IT project. That combination is why LOS software is getting another look after years of being treated like untouchable back-office infrastructure.

Can Fuse become the AI loan origination system credit unions want?

Fuse is going after one of the hardest software categories in fintech, which is why this story is interesting. An AI loan origination system sounds flashy, but the real test is less glamorous: implementation speed, contract conversions, and whether credit unions trust the company enough to move core workflows onto it. Watch the rescue fund. Watch customer wins against MeridianLink and nCino. Watch whether Fuse can turn “AI-native” from a pitch into a real migration wave.

Read how Neo Group became a unicorn with a ₹500 crore raise and why its advisory-plus-tech model is gaining traction among India’s wealthy investors.

FAQ

What funding did Fuse raise?

Fuse raised a $25 million Series A. Footwork led the round, and Primary Venture Partners, NextView Ventures, and Commerce Ventures also participated. The financing comes as Fuse tries to sell its platform to credit unions and other lenders that are still running older loan origination systems.

How does Fuse’s AI loan origination system work?

It combines borrower intake, internal lender workflows, decisioning, integrations, and account opening into one platform. Borrowers use a mobile-friendly application flow. Staff work inside a configurable agent portal. AI agents help with application guidance, underwriting recommendations, document checks, and automation setup. Fuse also supports more than 200 integrations and lets customers move between online and branch channels without restarting the process.

Who are the founders of Fuse?

Fuse was founded in 2020 by Andres Klaric and Marc Escapa, who met at Harvard Business School. Klaric came out of Wall Street and investing roles, while Escapa had already built and sold in startup and product-heavy environments, including Noken, Turo, and McKinsey. That mix helps because selling core lending infrastructure takes both financial credibility and product discipline.

Why is loan origination software attracting so much attention now?

Because the category sits right at the intersection of cost pressure and AI adoption. In the U.S., the digital lending platform market is projected to grow from $2.42 billion in 2024 to $9.58 billion by 2030, and globally the market is forecast to reach $39.8 billion by 2033. Loan origination is the biggest segment inside that shift, which is why investors are backing startups that promise to modernize the lending system of record instead of just layering on a chatbot.

March 31, 2026
Neo Group Funding: TVS Backs ₹500 Cr Unicorn Bet

Neo Group is a Mumbai-based wealth and asset management firm built for India’s HNIs, UHNIs and family offices. The latest Neo Group funding round brings in ₹500 crore from TVS Capital and its affiliates at a ₹10,000 crore pre-money valuation, formally pushing the company into unicorn territory. That matters because wealthy Indian clients now expect sharper advice and better reporting. They also want smoother access to private-market products than a lot of legacy wealth setups still offer. Founded in 2021 by Nitin Jain with Varun Bajpai, Hemant Daga and Puneet Jain, Neo has spent the past few years trying to build that kind of platform.

What is Neo Group and how does its wealth platform work?

Neo isn’t just an advisory boutique with a nice brand deck. It runs a two-layer model: human-led wealth advice on one side and a digital client interface on the other. For a client, the workflow is straightforward. Assets get mapped into one place. Portfolios can be viewed by product or asset class, and performance can be tracked either through XIRR or absolute returns. You can drill down from a broad portfolio view to instrument-level transactions.

The app is designed for people who hate fragmented reporting. Neo gives users a unified cashflow view across accounts. It flags upcoming cash flows over the next 30 days and shows quarterly and annual mark-to-market performance. For a wealthy family or promoter juggling multiple products and advisors, that’s useful.

Then there’s the analytics layer. Neo’s platform includes AI-led portfolio insights and benchmark comparisons. It also offers filtered performance views by category, asset class or sector, along with consolidated investment reports. One detail that stands out is its drawdown summary for AIF investments, which matters because private-market allocations often come with messy reporting and long blind spots between updates.

For fixed-income portfolios, Neo has a dedicated tracker called NeoDive. It surfaces issuer name, maturity date, coupon details, face value and expected payout schedules in one place. Clients can also schedule meetings through the app and access KYC, bank-account and nominee information without the usual back-and-forth. Less manual coordination. Fewer spreadsheets.

Who founded Neo Group and how did it get here?

The founding story

Neo was started in 2021, right when India’s wealth industry was beginning to split into two camps. On one side were giant incumbent banks and listed wealth firms. On the other were clients who wanted more customized advice, better access to alternatives, and less product-pushing. Neo was built to go after that second group.

The founding team wasn’t random. Nitin Jain came in as chairman and managing director. Varun Bajpai joined as co-founder on the wealth side. Hemant Daga and Puneet Jain built out the asset-management engine. Later, Shajikumar Devakar joined as co-founder and CEO of Neo Wealth Management, adding another senior private-banking operator to the table.

Why this team had market fit from day 1

Nitin Jain had already spent years building scale in wealth and asset management before starting Neo. He previously led the wealth and asset-management business at Edelweiss and was part of the build-out of a platform that managed more than $40 billion in client assets. He studied at IIT Kharagpur and IIM Calcutta, which matters less than his operating record. He’d already seen what institutional wealth businesses look like from the inside.

Varun Bajpai brought a different angle. His background runs through Macquarie, where he was country head in India, and before that through Deutsche Bank across India, Hong Kong and Singapore. He also served on Edelweiss Wealth & Asset Management’s executive committee. Neo didn’t start with junior founders learning the category on the fly. It started with people who already knew the client base, the product stack and the talent map.

Hemant Daga gave the company serious depth in alternatives and fund management. Before Neo, he held leadership roles at ICICI Bank and Edelweiss, and as CEO of Edelweiss Asset Management he helped build one of the country’s larger alternatives platforms. He also oversaw a sharp jump in mutual fund AUM — from ₹10,000 crore in 2017 to ₹75,000 crore in 2021.

Puneet Jain’s background is more deal-driven. He came from Goldman Sachs and Kotak Institutional Equities, with experience in distressed assets, turnarounds and equity research. He has worked across more than $1 billion in debt acquisitions and financing opportunities. That’s useful if your ambition is to sell more than public-market vanilla to wealthy clients.

Traction, signals and the broader build-out

Neo is live, not experimental. It now manages nearly ₹1 lakh crore in total client assets. On the financial side, revenue jumped 2.7x year-on-year to ₹177 crore in FY24. Losses widened faster — up 3.8x year-on-year to ₹13.7 crore. FY25 numbers still haven’t been released.

The asset-management arm has also been moving. In August 2025, Neo Asset Management announced the first close of its ₹2,000 crore secondaries private-equity fund at ₹750 crore. The plan is to back 12 to 15 startups across BFSI, healthcare, consumer, IT and ITeS, industrials and services, with cheque sizes ranging from ₹50 crore to ₹250 crore. That’s a serious signal. Neo isn’t only curating products for clients. It wants to manufacture some of the exposure too.

The fundraising streak and where Neo sits against rivals

This new round is Neo’s fourth fundraise in the past year. In February 2025, it raised $20 million from MUFG, Peak XV Partners and other investors at a pre-money valuation of about $640 million. It followed that with a $19 million round in August 2025, then another $25 million follow-on round led by Crystal Investment Advisors in November 2025. The latest ₹500 crore raise from TVS Capital and affiliates values the company at ₹10,000 crore pre-money, or about $1.08 billion.

That’s a sharp climb.

Neo’s direct competition comes from scaled wealth managers such as 360 ONE WAM and Nuvama, plus established private banks and independent multi-family offices. The incumbents usually have deeper distribution and longer client histories. Neo’s pitch is different: more specialist-led advice and heavier private-markets orientation. It also offers tighter tech reporting and a cleaner, more premium operating model for the top end of the market. The risk, frankly, is that white-glove wealth businesses are hard to scale without becoming slower and more bureaucratic. The upside is obvious too. If Neo can keep talent quality high, that mix of trust, product access and tech can be sticky.

Why does Neo Group funding matter now?

This round matters because it does more than add cash. It resets how Neo is viewed.

A jump from roughly $640 million pre-money in February 2025 to $1.08 billion pre-money now tells the market that investors think Neo has moved past the “promising challenger” stage. It’s now being valued like a platform that could become a lasting category player in Indian wealth management, not just a fast-growing boutique.

Neo says the fresh capital will be used to accelerate growth and deliver knowledge-driven solutions to clients. That likely means more senior hiring and deeper product capability. It also points to continued investment in the tech layer that sits under the advisory business. Suraj Majee of TVS Capital summed up the thesis neatly when he said Neo combines “trust and talent” into an institutional franchise. That’s basically the bet. Wealthy clients don’t switch for marginally better dashboards. They switch when credible advisors and better infrastructure show up together.

How big is India’s wealth management market?

The timing here isn’t accidental. India’s wealthy population is growing fast enough to support new-age wealth platforms, not just old-line incumbents.

Knight Frank’s Wealth Report 2025 put India’s high-net-worth population at 85,698 people with more than $10 million in wealth, making the country the world’s fourth-largest HNWI market. The same report projects that number will rise to 93,753 by 2028. That’s not a niche client pool anymore. It’s a real market with enough depth for multiple specialized firms.

Capgemini’s World Wealth Report 2025 showed India’s HNWI population grew 5.6% in 2024, adding about 20,000 millionaires. Another useful data point from the same report: globally, $83.5 trillion is expected to change hands over the next two decades through inheritance. That transfer matters because the next generation tends to expect digital reporting and customized portfolios. They also want advisor relationships that don’t feel like a bank queue in a nicer room.

There’s also a structural business tailwind. Jefferies said India’s core wealth managers could see more than 20% annual growth over the next three years as HNI demand expands. That doesn’t guarantee winners. But it does explain why capital is flowing into firms that can pair advisory trust with better product access and cleaner tech.

What should Neo Group do with this funding next?

The unicorn tag is nice. It’s not the hard part.

The real test after this Neo Group funding round is whether Neo can turn a high-growth story into a durable operating business. That means keeping advisor quality high and showing that the tech layer truly improves client retention. It also means proving that asset management can add depth without adding confusion. Watch three things next: how quickly it scales the wealth team, whether FY25 numbers show improving operating leverage, and how effectively it deploys that secondary fund.

Read how DrinkPrime raised ₹20 crore in fresh funding and why investors are backing its subscription-based smart water purifier model for Indian households.

FAQ

What is the latest Neo Group funding round?

Neo Group has raised ₹500 crore, or about $53 million, from TVS Capital and its affiliates at a ₹10,000 crore pre-money valuation. The round formally makes Neo a unicorn and marks its fourth fundraising event in roughly a year.

How does Neo Group’s wealth platform work for clients?

Neo combines advisor-led wealth management with a client app that brings portfolio holdings and cashflows into one interface. It also includes investment reports and fixed-income tracking. Clients can monitor returns through XIRR, review transaction-level details, track AIF drawdowns and schedule advisory meetings without bouncing between separate systems.

Who founded Neo Group?

Neo was founded in 2021 by Nitin Jain with Varun Bajpai, Hemant Daga and Puneet Jain. The founding bench came from firms such as Edelweiss, Macquarie, Goldman Sachs and Kotak. That helps explain why Neo was able to build credibility quickly in a trust-heavy category.

Why is India wealth management attracting so much investor interest?

Because the addressable client base is getting bigger and more demanding at the same time. India had 85,698 HNWIs in 2024 and is expected to have 93,753 by 2028, while a broader generational wealth transfer is pushing firms to offer better digital tools and more alternatives exposure. It’s also raising demand for more personalized advice.

March 28, 2026
DrinkPrime funding: Bengaluru water purifier startup raises ₹20 Cr at $36.8 Mn valuation

Clean drinking water is a basic need, but buying and maintaining a purifier in India is still weirdly expensive and messy. That’s the gap DrinkPrime is chasing, and its latest DrinkPrime funding update shows investors still like the bet: the Bengaluru startup has raised ₹20 crore, plus an undisclosed debt component, to expand its smart subscription-based water purifier business.

DrinkPrime rents out IoT-enabled RO+UV purifiers on monthly plans starting at ₹349, with installation and maintenance bundled in. The new money comes as the company pushes into more cities, more products, and a bigger field service network.

What is DrinkPrime funding and why are investors backing it now?

DrinkPrime has closed an extended Series A round of ₹20 crore, roughly $2.2 million, with participation from new investors Mirabilis Investment Trust and Artha Continuum Fund. Regulatory filings show the board approved the issue of 21,718 Series A3 compulsorily convertible preference shares at a face value of ₹10 and a premium of ₹9,195 per share through a preferential allotment.

The round also included undisclosed debt. That matters because this isn’t a pure software startup. It runs a hardware-plus-service model, so debt can be useful for financing inventory, installations, and field operations without piling all of that onto equity.

The fresh round has pushed DrinkPrime’s valuation to ₹340 crore, or about $36.8 million. That’s up roughly 31% from ₹260 crore in its previous round. In 2024, the startup had already raised $3 million in a round led by SIDBI Venture Capital alongside existing investors.

Here’s the short version for anyone Googling the company: DrinkPrime is a Bengaluru-based water purifier subscription startup founded in 2016. It offers IoT-enabled RO+UV purifiers on monthly rental plans, including installation and maintenance. The company has now raised ₹20 crore in an extended Series A round, taking its valuation to about $36.8 million.

Investors are backing a pretty simple thesis. Safe water is non-negotiable. Upfront purifier costs are annoying. After-sales service from legacy brands is often inconsistent. A recurring revenue model with predictive maintenance, data analytics, and lower customer friction is easier to scale than old-school appliance selling, at least in theory.

That theory is starting to show up in the numbers. DrinkPrime says it has served more than 2 lakh households. Revenue in FY25 rose 54% to ₹72.1 crore from ₹46.8 crore a year earlier, while net loss narrowed 18.4% to ₹11.5 crore from ₹14.1 crore.

What is DrinkPrime and how did the founders build it?

DrinkPrime was founded in 2016 by Manas Ranjan Hota and Vijender Reddy Muthyala. The company started with a clear consumer pain point: in many Indian cities, water quality varies sharply by neighborhood, but purifier buying is still treated like a one-time appliance purchase. That’s clunky. Families pay a big upfront amount, then deal with service calls, filter changes, and maintenance headaches later.

The founding story

The founders built DrinkPrime around a different idea. Don’t sell a purifier like a refrigerator. Offer purified water as a managed household service.

That shift sounds small, but it changes the whole customer relationship. Instead of asking a family to spend thousands upfront, DrinkPrime installs a connected purifier and charges a monthly subscription. The company then owns the service burden. If something breaks, it’s on DrinkPrime. If filters need replacing, same story.

That’s why the startup’s IoT stack matters. The purifier isn’t just a box under the sink or on the kitchen wall. It’s part of a connected appliance network that can feed usage data, service alerts, and maintenance signals back to the company. In plain English, that means fewer surprise breakdowns and a better shot at predictive maintenance.

Founder market fit

Detailed public biographies for Hota and Muthyala are limited in the funding announcement itself, and the company hasn’t widely disclosed long CV-style founder histories in the way bigger late-stage startups often do. So it’s worth being careful here.

What is clear is their market fit through execution. They’ve spent nearly a decade building in a category that mixes consumer hardware, subscription commerce, field operations, and data-led servicing. That’s not easy. Lots of startups can build a direct-to-consumer brand. Far fewer can manage purifier installations, recurring billing, customer support, and on-ground maintenance across multiple cities.

Frankly, that operating complexity is part of the moat. A lot of founders can pitch a recurring revenue business. Fewer can actually run one in Indian home services.

Past ventures and track record

No major previous exits or well-documented earlier startups by the founders were publicly disclosed in the material around this round. That doesn’t mean there weren’t earlier roles or ventures. It just means they weren’t clearly stated, and guessing would be sloppy.

Their visible track record is DrinkPrime itself. Since launch, the company has built a live product, expanded across major urban areas, and reached over 2 lakh households. It also developed a product lineup that now includes DrinkPrime Copper, DrinkPrime Alkaline, DrinkPrime UTS, DrinkPrime RO+, and DrinkPrime Under the Sink.

Traction, team, and fundraising details

DrinkPrime is very much live and commercial, not a pilot-stage business. It says it has already served more than 200,000 households and now wants to reach 1 million households over the next three years while scaling to 20 cities.

The company hasn’t publicly pinned down current headcount in this announcement, though its operating model clearly requires teams across product, customer support, field service, supply chain, and city operations. That matters because this is closer to an operationally heavy consumer tech company than a lightweight enterprise software business.

As for the money, the plan is specific. DrinkPrime says the fresh capital will go toward strengthening its IoT and data capabilities, expanding field service infrastructure, supporting R&D, and preparing new product launches. It also wants to enter high-growth tier II cities, build offline retail distribution, and add AI-driven processes to improve customer experience.

There’s a useful adjacent read here on how recurring-revenue consumer startups are being valued in India.

How does DrinkPrime funding shape its product and business model?

DrinkPrime’s product is easy to understand. Customers subscribe to a water purifier instead of buying one outright. Plans start at ₹349 per month. Installation and maintenance are included. The purifiers are tailored to local water conditions, which matters because water quality in India isn’t one-size-fits-all.

The company’s devices are built around RO+UV purification, with connected hardware that feeds into a data layer. That data layer helps with service scheduling, purifier health monitoring, and customer support workflows. In startup language, this is a consumer appliance business with workflow automation and analytics automation built into the backend.

That doesn’t make it an enterprise software company, obviously. But some of the same logic applies. Better data means better board reporting, tighter financial reporting, and smarter operational decisions. If DrinkPrime can predict service needs before customers complain, that improves retention and unit economics.

The company also says it plans to integrate AI-driven processes. For now, that likely means internal optimization rather than flashy AI agents talking to consumers. Think service routing, maintenance prioritization, support triage, and maybe demand forecasting. Not agentic AI in the buzzy sense. More practical automation. Honestly, that’s probably the right call.

DrinkPrime’s latest DrinkPrime funding round is really a bet that connected appliances plus subscription billing plus strong service can beat the old hardware-sales model in a necessity category.

How does DrinkPrime compare with Kent, Aquaguard, Livpure, and other rivals?

This is the mandatory question, because funding news without market positioning is just noise.

DrinkPrime sits in a crowded water purifier market with several layers of competition. The direct competitors are brands offering home water purification, especially those with subscription or service-heavy models. Livpure is the closest comparison in spirit because it has also pushed smart and subscription-led offerings. Then there are giant incumbents like Kent RO, Eureka Forbes’ Aquaguard, Pureit, and AO Smith, all of which still have much stronger brand recognition in purifier ownership.

Indirect competition is broader. It includes local purifier rental shops, neighborhood service providers, and even households that simply keep using bottled water, can deliveries, or basic non-electric filters. The legacy alternative, though, is still the classic buy-and-maintain model: pay upfront, then hope after-sales service is decent.

DrinkPrime’s differentiation is pretty clear. It lowers upfront cost, wraps maintenance into one monthly fee, and uses IoT-enabled monitoring to improve service reliability. That’s a cleaner pitch for renters, younger families, and urban consumers who don’t want another appliance headache.

But there’s a catch. The company is taking on operational risk that incumbents can partly offload to dealer networks and annual maintenance contracts. Field service quality will make or break this model. If service slips, the subscription pitch falls apart fast.

Still, the numbers suggest momentum. A 54% revenue jump in FY25 is real. So is the 31% valuation increase. That’s why investors are still interested, even in a market where consumer brands don’t get easy money anymore.

For readers tracking the broader home-tech and D2C startup funding cycle, this is another useful comparison point.

Why does DrinkPrime funding matter for the Indian water purifier market?

Because it says something bigger about where the category is headed.

India’s water purifier market is already worth several thousand crore rupees by most industry estimates, and many forecasts expect double-digit growth over the next few years as urbanization, health awareness, and water contamination concerns keep rising. The subscription slice is still smaller than outright ownership, but it’s growing because consumers increasingly prefer access over ownership in categories with ongoing maintenance.

That trend isn’t unique to water. You see versions of it in appliances, mobility, software, and even finance tools. People don’t always want to own the thing. They want the outcome. In this case, the outcome is safe drinking water without surprise repair bills.

DrinkPrime’s COO Sanjay Sunku put the ambition plainly: “This capital will help us accelerate our growth as we scale DrinkPrime to 20 cities and work towards serving 1 Mn households over the next three years.”

The company also says it’s on track to cross the ₹100 crore revenue mark in FY26 and turn EBITDA positive. If it gets there, that would be a meaningful proof point that a managed water-tech subscription model can grow without burning forever.

That’s the real story. Not just another round. A test of whether a recurring revenue, IoT-enabled, service-first consumer business can win in a category dominated by legacy appliance brands. The next 12 to 18 months will tell us if this DrinkPrime funding bump turns into durable scale or just a nicer valuation on paper.

Read how OfficeBanao raised $7.7 million in funding from Lightspeed and why investors are backing its tech-led push to bring more structure to India’s fragmented office interiors market.

FAQ

How much has DrinkPrime raised in its latest round?

DrinkPrime raised ₹20 crore in an extended Series A round, along with an undisclosed debt component. New investors Mirabilis Investment Trust and Artha Continuum Fund joined the round. The funding pushed the Bengaluru startup’s valuation to ₹340 crore, or about $36.8 million.

What does DrinkPrime actually sell to customers?

DrinkPrime offers subscription-based RO+UV water purifiers rather than one-time hardware sales. Plans start at ₹349 per month and include installation and maintenance. Its lineup includes DrinkPrime Copper, DrinkPrime Alkaline, DrinkPrime UTS, DrinkPrime RO+, and DrinkPrime Under the Sink for different household needs.

Who founded DrinkPrime and what is known about them?

DrinkPrime was founded in 2016 by Manas Ranjan Hota and Vijender Reddy Muthyala. Publicly available details on earlier ventures or exits are limited, but their execution record is visible in DrinkPrime’s scale: more than 2 lakh households served and expansion across major urban markets.

Why is DrinkPrime funding significant for the market?

The latest DrinkPrime funding round matters because it backs a subscription-first alternative to traditional purifier ownership. The company grew FY25 revenue 54% to ₹72.1 crore, cut net loss to ₹11.5 crore, and says it aims to reach 1 million households and 20 cities in three years.

March 28, 2026
OfficeBanao Funding Lands $7.7M for AI Fit-Outs

OfficeBanao builds tech-led commercial interiors and office fit-out solutions for businesses in India. In its latest funding round, OfficeBanao raised $7.7 million from existing backer Lightspeed, as it tackles an office design market in India still defined by scattered vendors, poor visibility, and costly delays. Founded in 2022 by Tushar Mittal, the company is trying to turn a messy services business into something that feels more like a structured operating platform. That’s the real story here.

What does OfficeBanao actually do?

OfficeBanao sells a full-stack commercial interiors service for offices. A customer doesn’t just hire a designer or a contractor. They enter a single workflow that covers space planning, design options, furniture and material procurement, execution, project tracking, and final handover.

The process starts with discovery. Businesses can explore layout styles, space configurations, and budget ranges before they get deep into execution. From there, OfficeBanao’s team works on instant layouts, real-time design options, and pricing estimates meant to come back far faster than a traditional design-and-build cycle. The pitch is simple: fewer handoffs, less chaos, fewer spreadsheets.

That tech layer matters more than it sounds. OfficeBanao uses interactive design tools so clients can see layouts before anything is built, edit finishes, and compare options quickly. The company’s stack includes an ERP system for project management, a layer that works with AutoCAD, and a proprietary 3D preview engine that can show thousands of design combinations in seconds. For a category that has long run on calls, PDFs, and delayed bills of quantities, that’s a meaningful shift.

The promise also goes beyond design. The company runs procurement and execution under one roof. That means milestone visibility, structured payments, vendor coordination, and quality monitoring sit inside the same system. For customers, the before-and-after is pretty obvious: instead of juggling an architect, a contractor, a material supplier, and a furniture vendor separately, they get one accountable team.

Who is behind OfficeBanao and how did it get here?

The founding story

Tushar Mittal didn’t arrive in this category from the outside. He’s spent most of his working life in office construction and interiors, and that history shows in how OfficeBanao is set up. Before launching the startup, he had already seen the same problem for years — demand was real, but the market was fragmented, opaque, and largely unorganized.

That’s why OfficeBanao wasn’t built as a pure software business. It was built as a tech-enabled operating model for workspace design and build. Mittal started the company in 2022, alongside Akshya Kumar and Divyanshu Sharma, with the idea that office owners shouldn’t have to stitch together design, procurement, and site execution on their own.

Why Mittal looks like a believable founder here

Founder-market fit isn’t a buzzword in this case. Mittal studied civil engineering, went on to NICMAR, and worked at DLF early in his career. That gave him direct exposure to construction projects, vendor networks, and the ugly realities of execution on the ground.

He later founded Studiokon Ventures in 2009, a bootstrapped office design-and-build business. It grew fast, crossed ₹100 crore in revenue by 2015, and hit ₹121 crore in FY19 after a rough reset period. He also briefly launched Happy Monday, a managed office venture, in late 2019. That business died quickly when the pandemic shut offices in March 2020.

So no, OfficeBanao isn’t a founder guessing at a market from a slide deck. It’s a second major act in a category Mittal has already operated in for well over a decade. He’s also a Harvard alumnus, which matters less than the fact that he knows how this industry breaks.

Early execution and traction

OfficeBanao is live and operating at scale, not testing ideas in beta. It handles workspace projects starting at around ₹10 lakh for small offices and going up to ₹5 crore for large office and enterprise work. That range matters because it shows the company isn’t serving only giant corporates.

The business has completed more than 200 projects across 40-plus cities in India. Its delivery footprint has also crossed 2 million square feet, with 95% of projects delivered on time and within scope. The company runs offices in Gurugram and Bengaluru, plus an experience centre in Gurugram.

On the numbers side, revenue has moved quickly. OfficeBanao went from ₹22 crore in FY23 to ₹138 crore in FY25 and is on track to hit about ₹225 crore in FY26. It has also said it expects to reach EBITDA breakeven in calendar 2026. That’s ambitious. But at least it’s attached to a visible revenue base, not just a story.

OfficeBanao funding details

The headline number is $7.7 million, or roughly ₹64 crore, in a round led by Lightspeed with participation from Medra Family. The money came in across two tranches — one in June 2025 and another in January 2026.

Board approvals covered the issuance of 45,472 pre-Series A2 non-cumulative CCPS at ₹7,654 per share, translating to ₹34.8 crore in that tranche. Lightspeed India Partners III and LS Opportunities Access Fund were each allotted shares worth ₹10.62 crore on December 31, 2025. Mangum II LLC received shares worth ₹9.04 crore on the same date. Medra Family subscribed to shares worth ₹4.52 crore on January 23, 2026.

The valuation report for that raise pegged the pre-money valuation at ₹522.7 crore, or about $56.5 million. Before this round, OfficeBanao had raised $6 million in seed funding in 2023.

Where OfficeBanao sits against rivals

This isn’t an empty category. Flipspaces is the most obvious comparison in tech-enabled commercial interiors, and it has already raised roughly $50 million across three tranches. 91Squarefeet is another player pushing structured commercial fit-outs. All Home — launched by PharmEasy cofounders Dharmil Sheth, Dhaval Shah, and Hardik Dedhia in June 2025 — has added more investor attention to the wider design and interiors market after raising capital from Bessemer at a $120 million valuation.

But OfficeBanao’s edge is a little different. It’s deeply focused on workspace interiors, not broad home design. It combines design and procurement with execution in one workflow. It also comes with a founder who already built a large offline business in the same category before trying to layer software and AI onto it. Investors aren’t just backing a prettier interface. They’re backing operational memory.

Why the OfficeBanao funding round matters

The obvious use of proceeds is AI. OfficeBanao says it wants to deploy AI and machine learning across the project lifecycle — automated design generation, smarter procurement matching, project scheduling, and quality monitoring. If that works, customers should see faster design turnarounds, tighter material selection, and fewer surprises once execution starts.

There’s also a margin story here. Commercial interiors is full of leakage — delays, rework, last-minute sourcing, poor handoffs. A platform that can shorten design time from weeks to days and compress manual BoQ work into a few hours has a shot at building a much cleaner business than a traditional contractor-led model.

Repeat backing from Lightspeed matters too. Venture firms don’t usually double down in a services-heavy category unless they believe the company is building process, trust, and real defensibility. OfficeBanao is also hiring into leadership and pushing deeper into South and West India, which tells you this round isn’t just about survival. It’s about expansion with a heavier tech layer.

How fast is India’s office interiors market growing?

The timing isn’t random. India’s interior design market reached about $36.9 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit $74.73 billion by 2034, implying an 8.16% CAGR. That’s a big enough market on its own, and the commercial segment is a major part of it.

Office demand is also stronger than a lot of people expected after the remote-work panic years. India recorded 83.3 million square feet of gross office leasing in 2025, the highest annual level on record. That matters because more office leasing usually means more fit-outs, more refurbishment, and more demand for vendors that can deliver quickly without turning projects into a mess.

There’s a second shift, too. Companies still want offices, but not the same kind. Workspaces are being designed more for collaboration, client-facing meetings, and experience than for rows of fixed desks. That creates demand for smarter layouts, quicker visualization, and more flexible procurement. That’s exactly where a company like OfficeBanao wants to play.

What to watch after OfficeBanao funding

OfficeBanao funding is interesting because it sits between two worlds — old-school contracting and software-led workflow control. The next thing to watch isn’t just revenue growth. It’s whether the company can prove that AI in office fit-outs actually cuts time, improves procurement decisions, and keeps delivery predictable as the business scales across more cities.

Read how WeRize raised ₹64 crore in fresh funding and why investors are backing its advisor-led fintech model for credit, insurance, and savings in small-town India.

FAQ

What happened in the OfficeBanao funding round?

OfficeBanao closed a $7.7 million round in March 2026, led by Lightspeed with participation from Medra Family. The raise was completed in two tranches during June 2025 and January 2026, and earlier board documents had shown a ₹34.8 crore tranche priced at ₹7,654 per share.

How does OfficeBanao work for office design and fit-outs?

OfficeBanao gives businesses one system for office design, procurement, and execution instead of making them manage separate vendors. Clients can review layouts, compare design options, get faster costing, and track project milestones through a tech-first workflow that also covers material sourcing and site delivery.

Who founded OfficeBanao?

Tushar Mittal started OfficeBanao in 2022, with Akshya Kumar and Divyanshu Sharma as cofounders in the early team. Mittal had already spent years in office interiors, including building Studiokon Ventures after earlier experience at DLF, so he came into this startup with unusually strong category knowledge.

What market is OfficeBanao competing in?

It operates in India’s commercial interiors and office fit-out market, which has a lot of fragmented local contractors and manual workflows. That broader interior design market is projected to reach $74.73 billion by 2034, which helps explain why investors keep showing up for structured, tech-enabled players in this category.

March 28, 2026
WeRize Funding: Sony Backs ₹64 Cr Small-Town Push

WeRize is a Bengaluru-based full-stack fintech that sells credit, insurance, and savings products through local financial advisors in small-town India. It’s raising ₹64 crore, or about $6.9 million, in fresh WeRize funding led by Sony Innovation Fund, with existing backer 3one4 Capital joining the round. Outside big cities, a lot of households still want formal financial products, but they often don’t want to buy them through a cold, app-only flow. Founded in 2019 by former Lendingkart executives Vishal Chopra and Himanshu Gupta, the company plans to use the new money for operations, working capital, capital expenditure, and expansion.

What is WeRize and how does it work?

WeRize runs a tech-enabled advisor network for financial products. Instead of asking customers in tier II to tier IV towns to discover, compare, and complete everything on their own, it equips local partners to sell salaried personal loans and business loans. It also offers loan-against-property products, insurance, fixed deposits, and digital gold through one platform. The company calls this a socially distributed finance model — basically a local relationship layer sitting on top of digital rails.

The workflow is simple. A partner downloads the WeRize app and signs up with a mobile number. Then comes OTP verification. They fill in PAN and address details, verify Aadhaar, upload a selfie, add bank details, and can start operating right away. That matters because it cuts out a lot of the paperwork and branch dependence that usually slow down financial distribution outside metros.

And the platform isn’t just a form-filling tool. WeRize gives partners a personalized web presence and marketing support. It also offers payout tracking and relationship-manager support. So the product isn’t only for the end borrower or policy buyer. It turns freelancers and local advisors into mini storefronts for formal finance.

For customers, the before-and-after is pretty obvious. Before, they might have needed separate conversations with a bank branch, an insurer, and an agent they barely knew. After, one trusted local intermediary can offer multiple products through a single interface, with digital processing in the background. That hybrid model is the whole bet.

Who founded WeRize and how is it positioned?

The founding story

WeRize was started by Vishal Chopra and Himanshu Gupta after their stint at Lendingkart. Chopra is the CEO. Gupta is the COO. The company traces its roots to 2019, when the founders began building a consumer-finance venture aimed at customers usually ignored by mainstream banks and many app-first fintechs.

That starting point still shapes the business. WeRize isn’t trying to win affluent urban users with slick design alone. It’s built around assisted distribution — the boring, messy part of finance that decides whether formal credit and protection products reach smaller towns.

Why the founders fit this market

Chopra’s background is unusually strong for this kind of model. Before WeRize, he was chief business officer at Lendingkart. Earlier, he was part of Amazon India’s launch team and also worked at Souq.com, the Middle East ecommerce company later acquired by Amazon. He holds an MBA from ISB Hyderabad.

Gupta brings the underwriting and analytics side. He previously led data science and analytics at Lendingkart and worked as a data scientist at IHS Markit. He studied at IIT Delhi and has more than 15 years of experience in AI, machine learning, and data science. For a fintech trying to tailor products for thin-file customers, that’s not a side skill. It’s the core engine.

Traction and execution

This isn’t a pre-launch story. WeRize is already operating at scale. It has built a network of 20,000+ financial advisors, crossed 10 lakh app downloads, served 5,000+ towns, and helped disburse more than ₹3,000 crore in loans.

The financial picture in the source filing-backed report is even more telling. Operating revenue rose 64% to ₹236 crore in FY25 from ₹144 crore a year earlier. Profit also doubled to ₹10 crore. That’s a better signal than vanity installs. It suggests the model is producing real economics, not just activity.

The WeRize funding round

Now to the actual deal. WeRize’s board has approved the issue of 10,150 convertible equity securities with a face value of ₹63,272.50 each, taking the total to ₹64 crore. Sony Innovation Fund is set to put in nearly ₹46 crore, while 3one4 Capital will invest the remaining ₹18 crore.

The structure matters. The company is doing this raise through convertible equity, not debt. The planned uses are plain vanilla but important: general operations, working capital, capex, and business expansion.

This comes after the company’s last funding round in June 2022, when it raised $15.5 million at a $115 million valuation from British International Investment, Sony Innovation Fund, and existing investors.

How does WeRize compare with rivals?

WeRize sits in an interesting slot. It overlaps with lenders such as Aye Finance, Arthan Finance, and Finova Capital, all of which focus on underbanked borrowers in semi-urban or smaller-city markets. But those companies are largely lender-led businesses. WeRize is broader. It mixes product manufacturing with multi-product distribution across credit, insurance, and savings.

Its other comparison set is assisted-fintech distribution players like PayNearby, which works through neighborhood retail stores to offer digital financial services. WeRize, by contrast, leans harder on independent advisors and freelancers rather than retail outlets as the customer-facing layer.

There’s one more distinction. WeRize says older distribution-heavy firms, including models used by LIC and Fino Bank, still depend on local field teams or branches to manage freelancers city by city. Its own platform acquires, trains, and manages thousands of freelancers digitally, without a feet-on-street team. If that holds up over time, lower customer acquisition cost is the edge investors are backing.

Why does this WeRize funding round matter?

Because this isn’t rescue capital.

WeRize is raising after posting revenue growth and profit, which changes how the round should be read. It looks less like “prove the model” money and more like “scale the machine” money. That’s a very different place to be in Indian fintech right now, especially when a lot of startups are still cleaning up credit quality, compliance, or burn.

Sony returning also says something. Strategic investors don’t usually write a second meaningful cheque into an assisted-distribution fintech unless they see a category that’s still underbuilt. 3one4 staying in the round reinforces that this isn’t a one-off regulatory filing story. Existing backers are still in.

For customers, the practical implication is simple. More capital should mean more advisors and more product depth. It should also mean better service in towns where trust still beats pure self-serve finance. That may not sound flashy.

How big is the market WeRize is chasing?

The broad fintech opportunity is huge. One market estimate pegs India’s fintech market at $142.5 billion in 2025, with room to reach $642.9 billion by 2034 at a 16.7% CAGR. That’s big enough to make even niche distribution models interesting.

But the sharper number is what’s happening in lending outside the top cities. FinTech NBFCs sanctioned 10.9 crore personal loans worth ₹1,06,548 crore in FY25, and 39% of those loans went to borrowers in tier III towns and beyond. Fintech lenders accounted for 74% of loan volumes, even though they held only 12% of the market by value.

That tells you two things fast. First, digital credit demand in smaller towns is already real. Second, volume is moving toward smaller-ticket, higher-frequency products where distribution and underwriting both matter. That’s the lane WeRize is trying to own.

Conclusion: what to watch at WeRize next

The real test after this WeRize funding round isn’t whether the company can raise again. It’s whether it can keep revenue compounding while staying profitable and making its advisor network more productive.

Read how Ecofy raised ₹380.5 crore in fresh equity funding and why investors are backing its push to expand green lending for EVs, rooftop solar, and sustainable SME finance in India.

FAQ

What is the latest WeRize funding round?

WeRize is raising ₹64 crore in a round led by Sony Innovation Fund, with 3one4 Capital also participating. The money is coming in through convertible equity, and the company plans to use it for operations, working capital, capex, and expansion.

How does WeRize work for customers and advisors?

WeRize works through a network of local financial advisors who use its app to onboard and sell products such as loans, insurance, fixed deposits, and digital gold. Partners can sign up digitally in roughly 10 to 15 minutes. The platform gives them tools like payout tracking, marketing support, and a personalized online presence.

Who founded WeRize?

WeRize was founded by Vishal Chopra and Himanshu Gupta, both former Lendingkart executives. Chopra previously worked at Amazon India and Souq.com, while Gupta comes from a data science background that includes Lendingkart and IHS Markit.

Is WeRize a lender or a broader fintech platform?

It’s better described as a broader full-stack fintech platform than as a single-product lender. Unlike firms that mainly lend from their own balance sheet or assisted-commerce players that work through retail stores, WeRize combines multi-product financial distribution with a tech-managed advisor network aimed at smaller-town households.

March 28, 2026
Ecofy Funding: BII Backs ₹380.5 Cr Green Lending Bet

Ecofy is a Mumbai-based green financing NBFC that lends for rooftop solar, electric vehicles, and sustainability-linked SME use cases. Its latest Ecofy funding round brings in ₹380.5 crore in fresh equity from British International Investment, Finnfund, FMO, and Eversource Capital. The gap it’s chasing is obvious: clean assets are spreading fast, but affordable last-mile credit still doesn’t reach enough buyers. Founded in 2023 by Rajashree Nambiar and Govind Sankaranarayanan, the company now wants to use the new capital to scale lending around sustainable assets.

What is Ecofy and how do its green loans work?

Ecofy is a retail-focused NBFC built only for green assets. In practice, that means it finances electric 2-wheelers and 3-wheelers, residential and commercial rooftop solar systems, and energy-efficient equipment. It also covers some SME and supply-chain needs tied to cleaner operations. Loan sizes run from ₹1 lakh to ₹1.5 crore, with tenures ranging from 6 months to 5 years.

The customer journey is more embedded than a typical old-school loan file. A borrower can come in through an EV dealer, an OEM partner, or a solar installer. They submit documents digitally, go through underwriting, and get to disbursal without the usual back-and-forth that slows down specialty financing. Ecofy has also rolled out a customer portal so borrowers can see loan documents and make EMI or overdue payments in real time.

And the product set is a bit broader than the headline categories suggest. Ecofy has pushed beyond straight vehicle loans into leasing structures and assured buyback options. It also offers niche green-credit products such as Battery-as-a-Service financing. That matters because clean-asset buyers often don’t want one generic EMI product. They want financing that matches resale value, battery risk, or subsidy timing.

Before players like this, a lot of buyers were stuck piecing together loans from generalist banks or local financiers who didn’t really understand EV depreciation curves, rooftop solar cash flows, or small-ticket climate assets. Ecofy’s whole pitch is that the underwriting model starts with those assets instead of treating them like awkward exceptions. That’s a smarter approach. But it also means the company has to get risk right every single time.

Who founded Ecofy and what is the company building?

How Ecofy started

Ecofy was founded in 2023 by Rajashree Nambiar and Govind Sankaranarayanan. Their basic thesis was that climate capital existed at the institutional level, but it wasn’t reaching the end borrower who actually wanted to buy an EV, install rooftop solar, or finance a greener small business. So they built a tech-led NBFC around that missing last mile.

Why the founders fit this market

Nambiar came into Ecofy with deep retail-lending chops. Before this, she was MD and CEO at Fullerton India Credit, and earlier CEO and executive director at IIFL Finance. There, she worked on retail diversification across housing, commercial vehicles, gold loans, and SME credit. Before that, she spent 22 years at Standard Chartered and ended up as head of retail products for India and South Asia. She has an MBA from JBIMS.

Govind’s résumé is just as relevant, but in a different way. He spent 27 years in the Tata group and, for 11 of those, served as group COO and CFO at Tata Capital. He helped scale the business to about ₹7,000 crore in revenue and ₹65,000 crore in AUM. Earlier, he was global CFO at Tata Communications and has also sat on finance and policy committees linked to the RBI, Ministry of Finance, CII, and other industry bodies. He studied chemical engineering at BITS Pilani, holds an MBA from IIM Bangalore, and a master’s in finance from London Business School.

That mix matters. Nambiar understands granular retail credit and digital lending execution. Govind understands balance sheets and fundraising. He also knows policy and how to build an institution in a regulated sector. For a green finance NBFC, that’s a strong pairing.

Traction and early signals

Ecofy is already live and operating at scale, not sitting in pilot mode. It has served 1.25 lakh customers so far and built assets under management of ₹1,400 crore. The company has also tied up with more than 23 banks and financial institutions for co-lending. It also works with over 100 OEMs. Earlier partnerships with Ather Energy and Motovolt Mobility show how its distribution model leans on point-of-sale access rather than waiting for borrowers to discover the brand on their own.

Its financials tell a more mixed story. Operating revenue in FY25 rose nearly 3x to ₹102.9 crore from ₹34.9 crore a year earlier. But net loss also widened 16% to ₹42.3 crore from ₹36.6 crore.

Who backed the round and where the money goes

The new round brings in ₹380.5 crore, or about $42 million, in equity. British International Investment and Finnfund led the investment. Existing backers FMO and Eversource Capital also joined. Ecofy plans to use the money to scale credit products around sustainable assets, especially rooftop solar, EVs, and SMEs.

That comes after a separate $12.5 million debt raise from Denmark’s IFU. Before the current round, Ecofy had raised close to $11 million in equity. Nambiar summed up the company’s case like this: “Over the last three years, we have created a technology-led, retail-focused green finance platform with strong unit economics, disciplined risk management, and scalable impact. This capital allows us to deepen our offerings, expand distribution, and continue building a high-quality green lending franchise, while delivering attractive, risk-adjusted returns.”

How Ecofy funding stacks up against rivals

This isn’t a winner-take-all category. Ecofy sits in a crowded but still underbuilt market with adjacent specialists all around it. Aerem is more solar-first and combines financing with installer workflows; it raised $15 million in 2025. Revfin has gone hard at EV financing, especially commercial and underserved borrower segments. It raised $14 million in a Series B round in late 2023. Mufin Green Finance is a listed NBFC with a stronger legacy footprint in EV and solar financing and recently lined up about $12 million from Finnfund.

So where does Ecofy stand out? It isn’t just an EV lender. And it isn’t just solar fintech. It’s trying to be a pure-play green retail lender across multiple asset classes. Its co-lending relationships let it originate more while sharing risk and funding costs with larger institutions. Against legacy alternatives — banks, generalist NBFCs, and captive OEM finance desks — that specialization is the differentiator.

Why does this Ecofy funding round matter?

For Ecofy itself, the timing is pretty straightforward. Lending businesses need equity support before they can safely grow the book. If you’re financing new asset classes that still make a lot of conventional lenders nervous, that capital cushion matters even more.

The round also gives Ecofy breathing room to expand without pretending profitability is already solved. Revenue is growing fast, yes. Losses are too. Fresh equity lets management keep building distribution and product depth while the portfolio matures.

There’s another signal here. BII and Finnfund aren’t casual tourists in climate finance. When development finance institutions back a young NBFC, they’re usually betting on two things at once: commercial scalability and measurable transition impact. For Ecofy’s customers, that should mean more credit availability for rooftop solar installations, EV purchases, and SME upgrades that might otherwise get delayed or rejected.

What is driving green financing demand in India?

The macro case is getting harder to ignore. In the source market data tied to this story, India’s solar financing opportunity alone is projected to grow from $12.4 billion in 2025 to $34.7 billion by 2033. That creates room for specialist lenders instead of forcing them to fight over scraps.

EV adoption is adding another tailwind. India remained the world’s largest electric 3-wheeler market in 2024, with sales of roughly 7 lakh units, while electric car sales came close to 1 lakh. At the same time, policy support has been shifting from pure subsidy-led acceleration toward a more normalised financing and infrastructure build-out after the FAME II scheme ended on March 31, 2024. In plain English: financing is becoming a bigger part of the EV story, not a side note.

Capital markets are moving too. India’s sustainable debt market had reached $55.9 billion cumulatively by December 2024, and loans made up 39% of the green segment. That doesn’t guarantee success for any single lender. But it does show that green credit is turning into a real asset class rather than a niche ESG talking point.

Ecofy funding matters because it lands right where those shifts meet: retail demand for cleaner assets, institutional appetite for climate-linked credit, and a financing gap that generalist lenders still haven’t fully closed.

Read how Atlys raised $36 million in Series C funding and why investors are backing its push to simplify visa processing with a more digital, AI-driven travel experience.

FAQ

What is the latest Ecofy funding round?

Ecofy has raised ₹380.5 crore in fresh equity, or about $42 million. British International Investment and Finnfund led the round, and existing investors FMO and Eversource Capital also participated. The company plans to use the money to expand lending for rooftop solar, EVs, and green SME use cases.

How does Ecofy’s green loan platform work?

Ecofy works as a specialist NBFC for sustainable assets, so borrowers usually enter through dealers, OEMs, or solar partners rather than a generic loan branch. It underwrites digitally and offers structured products for EV and rooftop solar purchases. It also runs a customer portal for loan documents and EMI payments.

Who founded Ecofy and what did they do before this?

Ecofy was founded in 2023 by Rajashree Nambiar and Govind Sankaranarayanan. Nambiar previously led Fullerton India Credit and IIFL Finance after a long run at Standard Chartered, while Govind spent 27 years in the Tata group and helped build Tata Capital as group COO and CFO.

Why is green financing becoming a bigger NBFC category in India?

Because the assets are scaling faster than traditional credit processes can adapt. India’s electric 3-wheeler market stayed the world’s biggest in 2024, and the country’s sustainable debt market had already crossed $55.9 billion by the end of that year. That means there’s both borrower demand and capital looking for credible green-lending channels.

March 28, 2026