HrdWyr’s $13 million raise increasingly signals broader investor confidence around fabless semiconductor startups and India’s evolving deep-tech ambitions.
On Wednesday morning, a 12-year-old fintech company announced a funding round and triggered an identity crisis across the entire American banking industry. Mercury, the technology company that provides financial-operating systems to startups, disclosed a $200 million Series D funding round that valued the firm at $5.2 billion, led by investment firm TCV with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, CRV, Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital. The valuation represented a 48.6 percent increase from the $3.5 billion figure attached to its Series C in March 2025. Total primary and secondary funding has now reached approximately $700 million.
Bidso’s ₹63 crore raise increasingly reflects a broader shift as manufacturing startups attract stronger investor attention amid changing supply-chain realities.
In 2012, Falguni Nayar did something that made no sense to anyone who knew her. She was 50 years old, the managing director of Kotak Mahindra Capital, one of India's most respected investment banks. She had spent nearly two decades advising companies on mergers, acquisitions, and public offerings. She had a corner office, a steady salary, and the kind of professional reputation that takes a career to build. She was, by any conventional measure, at the peak.
Niharika Bhargava was 24 years old, living in London, earning a comfortable salary at a marketing agency, and doing exactly what ambitious young Indians with good degrees and global opportunities are supposed to do. She had a career. She had a future. She had a life that her parents could describe to their friends without pausing for breath.
Kanika Tekriwal was 21 years old when the doctors told her she had Stage 2 cancer. She was a Marwari girl from Bhopal, the daughter of a family that had never produced an entrepreneur, in a community where daughters were expected to marry well and settle down, not chase dreams of aviation. She had no money, no connections, no degree from an elite institution, and no reason to believe that the universe would reward her ambition. She was, by every conventional measure, exactly the wrong person to build India's first transparent marketplace for private aviation.
Abhay Rajaram was not supposed to be a founder. He grew up in a family of academics and professionals—the kind of household where education was the only currency that mattered and entrepreneurship was something other people's children did. He studied hard, earned his degrees, and embarked on a perfectly respectable corporate career. He worked in consulting. He worked in strategy. He did everything right.
Gokul Rajaram does not have a Wikipedia page. He has never been on the cover of Fortune or Forbes. He does not keynote major technology conferences, does not maintain a public relations presence, and does not, by all available evidence, seek the kind of recognition that usually attaches to someone who has helped build seven billion‑dollar companies and invested in more than 300 startups. He is, by the standards of the technology industry, almost invisible—a ghost in the machine whose fingerprints are everywhere but whose face is known only to the insiders who have worked alongside him.
Dhiraj Rajaram was 28 years old, living in a Chicago suburb with a management consulting job and a comfortable marriage, when he approached his wife Ambiga with a proposal that sounded like insanity. He wanted to sell their house. He wanted to empty their savings. He wanted to move back to India — where they had both grown up, where he had been raised by a grandfather who worked as a typist at the Times of India after his own father had been consumed by alcoholism — and start a company based on an idea that almost no one believed in. Big data. The year was 2004. The term "big data" would not enter the popular lexicon for nearly a decade. Venture capital in India was nearly nonexistent. And Rajaram was proposing to bet almost everything he had on the conviction that businesses would pay for the mathematical ability to extract meaning from the vast and growing oceans of information they were accumulating.
In 1998, Rajesh Rajaram arrived in the United States from India with the same dream carried by millions of international students before and since: a master's degree, a steady corporate job, a comfortable life. He enrolled at San Diego State University, earned a Master of Computer Science, and began a perfectly respectable career as a software developer, working his way through startups and Fortune 500 companies including Genband, Oracle, and AT&T. The immigrant dream was working. The ladder was solid. The path was clear.