Results (439 found)

StartupsMay 21, 2026

The Helicopter Farmer: How a Banker Quit His Job, Bet Everything on Medicinal Herbs, and Built a Rs 70 Crore Empire in India's Most Dangerous Region

In 1998, Rajaram Tripathi did something that made no sense to anyone who knew him. He was a probationary officer at the State Bank of India, a government job that came with a pension, respectability, and the quiet assurance of a middle-class life. He had degrees. He had security. He had a father who was a teacher and a grandfather who had spent seven decades coaxing crops from the soil of Bastar. Everyone in his orbit expected him to stay in banking, rise through the ranks, and retire with a gold watch. Instead, he walked into his branch manager's office and resigned.

StartupsMay 20, 2026

The Scrap Dealer's Billion-Rupee Bet: How a Mumbai Recycler Is Mining Dead Batteries for EV Gold—and Planning an IPO

On the outskirts of Mumbai, inside a facility that smells faintly of metal and burnt wires, Rajesh Gupta sees treasure where most of India sees garbage. Every morning, trucks unload mountains of discarded laptop batteries, spent electric-vehicle cells, dead mobile phones, and industrial scrap—the detritus of a nation racing to digitize and decarbonize simultaneously. What arrives as waste leaves as cobalt sulfate, lithium carbonate, and nickel powder, metals so valuable that they have become the subject of geopolitical competition between the world's most powerful nations.

StartupsMay 20, 2026

The $1 Billion Sovereignty Play: How Tata and JSW Are Trying to Break India's Dependence on Chinese EV Batteries

The most expensive, most technically demanding component of an electric vehicle is not the motor, the software, or the chassis. It is the battery—and for nearly every electric vehicle sold in India today, the cells inside that battery were designed and manufactured in China. India's EV penetration has surged past 8.5 percent, driven by electric two- and three-wheelers that have become a common sight on city streets. But the lithium-ion cells that power those vehicles, and the lithium-iron-phosphate chemistry that is increasingly used in stationary energy storage, remain almost entirely imported from a single country.

StartupsMay 20, 2026

The Sachet-Model Battery Revolution: How a Former NASA Engineer Is Making EV Batteries Pay-As-You-Go

Ashwin Shankar has worked at Schlumberger, the oilfield services giant. He has worked at NASA. He holds a degree in electrical engineering from Stanford. He could have spent his career in any number of comfortable, well-compensated roles designing complex systems for organizations with deep pockets and long time horizons. Instead, he is running a startup in Pune that manages a fleet of 2,000 electric vehicle batteries across six Indian cities—and he just raised ₹8 crore to expand that fleet tenfold over the next eighteen months.

StartupsMay 20, 2026

The ₹10,000 Crore Clean-Energy Bet by Three Founders Who Already Built One Solar Giant

Kushagra Nandan has already built one successful solar company. In 2011, he co-founded SunSource Energy, a distributed solar developer that grew into one of India's largest commercial and industrial solar platforms before it was acquired. He could have retired to a comfortable life of angel investing and advisory board seats. Instead, in January 2026, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he launched something far more ambitious.

StartupsMay 20, 2026

The ₹30 Crore Miracle Chip: How Two IIT Madras Engineers Are Building India's First Secure IoT Brain—and Taking On the Global Semiconductor Giants

Shashwath T.R. and Sharan Srinivas J. were graduate students at IIT Madras when they decided to do something that most graduate students do not do. They decided to build a semiconductor company. Not a software platform. Not an app. Not a marketplace. A chip company—in a country that had never produced a commercial-grade, high-performance microcontroller system-on-chip designed entirely within its borders.

StartupsMay 20, 2026

The AI Coworker Arrives: How Two Former Meta Engineers Built a $15 Million Business in 10 Weeks by Putting an Assistant Inside Slack

When Fryderyk Wiatrowski and Peter Albert met inside Meta's AI division, they had no intention of starting a company. They were engineers, not entrepreneurs. Their evenings were spent tinkering — building small AI agents that could handle the repetitive parts of knowledge work that nobody enjoys. Writing reports. Pulling data from scattered systems. Setting up dashboards. The kind of tasks that fill calendars and drain energy without producing anything anyone would call meaningful.

StartupsMay 20, 2026

The 21-Year-Old, the $3,367 Crore Loss, and the IPO That Could Rewire How India Shops: Inside Zepto's Make-or-Break Summer

On May 8, 2026, the Securities and Exchange Board of India issued a single-page observation letter that changed the trajectory of one of the most aggressive startups in the country's history. The recipient was Zepto, the quick-commerce company founded in 2021 by two Stanford dropouts who were nineteen years old at the time. The letter meant that Zepto's initial public offering — a monster raise of approximately Rs 8,000 to Rs 9,000 crore, or roughly $1 billion — had cleared its largest regulatory hurdle. The company was now on a countdown: file the updated prospectus, test the waters with institutional investors, and hit the public markets in the July-September quarter of 2026.

StartupsMay 20, 2026

The $3.44 Billion Wake-Up Call: How Ronnie Screwvala Is Consolidating the Rubble of India's Edtech Crash — and Building Something That Might Actually Last

In the autumn of 2021, Unacademy was worth $3.44 billion. Its founder, Gaurav Munjal, was 27 years old. The company had raised nearly $900 million from SoftBank, Tiger Global, and Sequoia Capital. It had acquired a dozen startups, launched a graph-novel platform, opened a chain of physical coaching centers, and sponsored every major cricket tournament in India. The narrative was intoxicating: a young, aggressive founder building the Amazon of education, a generational company that would teach India everything it needed to know, from cracking the civil service exam to mastering code. The pandemic had accelerated online learning, and Unacademy was surfing the wave with the bravado of a company that believed the wave would never break.

StartupsMay 20, 2026

The Elephant in the Cloud: How India's First AI Unicorn Just Pivoted, Turned Profitable, and Quietly Built a Fortress That Silicon Valley Can't Touch

There is a particular kind of silence that follows a pivot. Not the silence of failure — failure is loud, messy, public. This is the silence of a company that has stopped trying to be everything and decided, with the clarity that only a near-death experience can provide, to be one thing exceptionally well. It is the silence of a founder who has looked at the money, looked at the market, looked at the geopolitics of the moment, and made a bet so contrarian that it borders on heresy.