Fourteen years on Ketto — India's largest crowdfunding platform — gave Kunal Kapoor, Varun Sheth, and Zaheer Adenwala a specific and uncomfortable education: most of the medical emergencies families were raising money for had roots in metabolic disease that had been silently progressing for years before anyone intervened.
In deep-tech sectors where women's representation has traditionally been lower, IIT Madras is quietly rewriting the numbers. Of 567 startups incubated under its ambitious "100 Startups a Year" mission, one in four has a woman co-founder. And the percentage has stayed above 25% for two straight years.
She is the third Indian woman to win the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award, joining Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and Falguni Nayar. Her company, Assiduus Global, has generated over $1 billion in revenue for partner brands and expanded more than 150 companies across 20+ countries. This is not just a personal milestone.
She was given carte blanche. No clients, no team, no brand presence in India. Just the brief: build it. What she built from 2008 to 2025 — a $6 million turnover studio, 250-plus employees, 22% margin growth, 89% staff retention, and India's top-ranked design consultancy — is among the most impressive organisation-building stories in Indian brand and design.
BCT Ventures is not building a nutrition brand. It is building the operating system for building nutrition brands — and then running multiple brands through it simultaneously. Three proprietary AI engines replace the guesswork in consumer insights, product development, and marketing spend.
Corporate bonds have historically required minimum investments of ₹10 lakh or more and were accessible only to institutional investors. Wint Wealth started from a belief that this was wrong — and built the SEBI-regulated platform that lets retail investors start with ₹1,000. In January 2026, it raised ₹250 crore to go further.
Most climate finance in India flows to large projects and large borrowers. The electric rickshaw driver who needs ₹1.5 lakh to buy an EV, the homeowner who needs ₹3 lakh for a rooftop solar installation, the small business that needs green equipment financing — these are the borrowers India's green finance ecosystem was not built for.
Phitku was founded in early 2025, bootstrapped to profitability, built a 6 lakh customer base, appeared on Shark Tank India, and by July 2026 had completed a ₹100 crore majority stake deal with Ananta Capital — the PE firm backed by the Taparia family of Famy Care Group, which also owns Bella Vita, HipHop, and India's GNC franchise
There are 10 million traditional ironing carts in India. They burn roughly 50 million kilos of charcoal every day. That is the problem Vinisha Umashankar noticed as a school student walking through her neighbourhood in Tamil Nadu — and the problem she decided to solve with solar panels, a patent, and a speech alongside the Duke of Wales.
Amazon launched a $1 billion AI deployment venture on June 30. Microsoft launched a $2.5 billion one on July 2. OpenAI and Anthropic launched similar ventures in May. Four of the biggest names in AI have made the same bet in the same two months: the bottleneck in enterprise AI is not the model.