Results (439 found)

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The ₹8 Crore Bet That Kala Khatta Can Beat Coke: How a Husband-Wife Duo Is Turning India's Street-Side Nostalgia Into a Premium Beverage Empire

Akkshita Malhotra was not supposed to be a beverage entrepreneur. She was a marketing professional with a stable career, a comfortable salary, and a perfectly respectable trajectory. Her husband, Meet Singh Malhotra, was an operations specialist with experience in scaling consumer businesses. They were the kind of couple who could have spent their thirties climbing corporate ladders, accumulating promotions, and settling into the comfortable rhythms of urban professional life.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The Comeback That Shocked Dalal Street: How Mamaearth's Parent Was Written Off by Critics—Then Delivered a ₹69 Crore Quarterly Profit and a 52-Week High

In the winter of 2024, Honasa Consumer was the most hated stock on Dalal Street. The parent company of Mamaearth, India's largest digital-first beauty and personal care brand, had listed at a valuation that critics called absurd—a multiple of revenue that seemed to price in a decade of flawless execution. When the stock fell, the critics were vindicated. When it fell further, they were merciless. "IPO Frenzy Fades," read one headline. "Valuation Without Substance," read another. The company was a poster child for everything that had gone wrong with Indian startup IPOs: too much hype, too little profit, too much optimism baked into a share price that had nowhere to go but down.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The ₹7,500 Phone That Built a Spice Empire: How a Rajasthan Homemaker Turned Her Village Kitchen Into a Crore-Turnover Brand—and a MasterChef Finalist Spot

Kaushalya Chaudhary did not set out to become an entrepreneur. She did not set out to become a YouTube star, a MasterChef India finalist, or the founder of a spice and cold-pressed oil brand with outlets across India and customers overseas. She set out to do what millions of Indian women in her position have done for generations: cook for her family, run her household, and live within the quiet, invisible boundaries that rural Rajasthan drew around a woman's ambition.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The Four Friends Who Thought Indian Men Deserved a Better Shave—and Built a ₹700 Crore Empire Before Gillette Saw It Coming

Shantanu Deshpande was 28 years old, sitting in a comfortable McKinsey office, earning a salary that most Indian twenty-somethings could only dream of. He was on the consulting track—the one that leads to business school, then back to consulting, then to a corner office somewhere with a view and a pension and the quiet satisfaction of a life well-executed. He was good at it. He was also, by his own later admission, bored out of his mind.

FundingMay 23, 2026

How Non-AI Startups Can Still Raise Venture Capital in 2026 (Without an LLM in Their Pitch Deck)

Even as AI absorbs extraordinary venture attention in 2026, investors increasingly continue backing non-AI startups solving large operational and infrastructure problems.

StartupsMay 23, 2026

The Meat Brand That Vegetarian VCs Refused to Fund: How Two Outsiders Built India's Most Unlikely Unicorn—and Are About to Take It Public at $2 Billion

When Vivek Gupta walked into his first investor meeting for Licious a decade ago, he thought he was ready. He had a pitch deck. He had a co-founder. He had a thesis—that India's ₹4 lakh crore meat and seafood market was a branding desert waiting for someone to build a premium, trust-driven consumer label. What he did not have was an answer for the question that would define the next two years of his life. The investors in the room were mostly vegetarian. Some were religiously observant. Several told him, in the polite, elliptical language of Indian venture capital, that they could not bring themselves to fund a meat company. Others made a more pragmatic suggestion: pivot to plant-based protein, and the money would flow. Gupta and his co-founder, Abhay Hanjura, refused. "I thought I knew how to raise money," Gupta recalled later. "Then I walked into a room full of VCs."

StartupsMay 22, 2026

The Accidental Empire: How a 21-Year-Old Who Wanted to Be an Investment Banker Built India's Zara for Indian Wear—And Is About to Take It Public

There is a photograph Sidhant Keshwani does not need to show you. You can picture it from the way he talks: a young man, fresh off a flight from Manchester, sitting in his family's Delhi office, surrounded by fabric swatches, export orders, and the quiet hum of a manufacturing business that had seen better days. He was 21. He had plans. "I initially wanted to be an investment banker," he admits, laughing. "I accidentally got into entrepreneurship."

ImpactMay 22, 2026

Made From Thin Air: Inside the Material Science Startups Bagging Millions to Turn Industrial Smoke Into Premium Streetwear

Material science startups are increasingly turning captured emissions into fashion and design products, opening broader conversations around sustainability and circular innovation.

StartupsMay 22, 2026

The Pivot That Saved India's First AI Unicorn: How Bhavish Aggarwal Stopped Chasing ChatGPT, Killed His Chip Dream, and Built a Profitable Cloud Fortress Instead

Sometime in late 2025, Bhavish Aggarwal sat in a conference room and made a decision that most founders of his stature never make. He decided to stop. Not the company. The plan. The grand, intoxicating, venture-funded plan to build India's own ChatGPT—a foundational language model trained on Indian languages, running on Indian-made chips, competing with the most advanced AI systems on Earth. The plan that had made Krutrim India's first AI unicorn. The plan that had attracted $50 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation. The plan that was, by late 2025, burning capital and talent on two separate moonshots—chip design and frontier model development—neither of which was anywhere near generating revenue.

StartupsMay 22, 2026

The Indian Watch Brand That Sells Out Every Launch—And Just Took Aim at the Swiss

Somewhere in the backstreets of Mumbai's watch district, a brand that did not exist three years ago has been doing something that Swiss executives with six-figure marketing budgets and centuries of heritage cannot explain. Every time Argos Watches launches a new collection, the watches disappear. Olympus I sold out. Apollo III sold out. This week, the company launched Olympus II, its latest automatic watch line priced from ₹13,990—roughly $170—and more than 34,000 people had already signed up before the launch to be first in line. The collection features Japanese Miyota automatic movement, open-heart dials, sapphire crystal glass, and fluted detailing. The watches went live on Monday. By Wednesday, the website was displaying the three words that have become the brand's signature: "Sold Out Again."