Results (588 found)

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The ₹70,000 Crore Question: How a Delhi Dropout Built India's Biggest Eyewear Empire, Survived a Shark Tank Valuation Meme-Storm—and Just Posted a ₹530 Crore Profit That Silenced Everyone

In October 2025, the internet made fun of Peyush Bansal. Lenskart, the company he had spent fifteen years building from a small Delhi shop into India's largest eyewear retailer, was about to go public. The valuation was approximately ₹70,000 crore—roughly $8 billion at the upper end of the price band. The price-to-earnings ratio, calculated on trailing earnings, was approximately 230. The memes arrived within hours. "Glasses Or Diamonds?" read one viral post, comparing the per-share price of Lenskart to a pair of gold earrings. Shark Tank India viewers—who knew Bansal as the measured, thoughtful investor on the show's judging panel—pointed out the apparent hypocrisy: the same person who grilled founders about their valuations was now asking public-market investors to pay one of the highest multiples in Indian consumer internet history.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The $15 Million Bet That Indian Mythology Can Be Bigger Than Marvel: How the Turnaround CEO Who Sold a Superhero Company for $100 Million Is Building the "Disney from the East"

Jason Kothari was 12 years old when he first imagined Bloodshot as a movie. The character—a nanite-infused super-soldier from the Valiant Comics universe—was not yet famous. Valiant itself was not yet famous. It was, in fact, bankrupt. Two decades later, Kothari had acquired Valiant Entertainment while still an undergraduate at Wharton, recruited the management team behind the historic Marvel turnaround, led the company out of bankruptcy, sold it to China's DMG Entertainment for $100 million, and served as executive producer on the Vin Diesel-led Bloodshot film for Sony Pictures. He was, by any measure, one of the most unusual entrepreneurs in the Indian diaspora—a turnaround specialist who had operated at the intersection of entertainment, finance, and technology his entire career.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The Flipkart Brain Behind a $63 Million Travel Fintech Bet—And a Valuation That Just Doubled

Anil Goteli was 4 a.m. awake in a Dharamshala hotel lobby, his family asleep upstairs, the December cold pressing against the windows. He had left Flipkart after nearly a decade—the books business, the home and furniture division, the entire marketplace, the pricing algorithms, the Big Billion Days. He had helped build India's largest e‑commerce company from a scrappy startup into a Walmart‑owned giant. And now, at 4 a.m. on what was supposed to be a vacation, he was trying to decide what to build next. "I was constantly thinking about what to build," he recalled. "Then one morning it struck me, why don't I build a card that rewards people for travel?"

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The Week India's Students, Its State, and Its VCs All Bet on the Same Thing: Deep Tech

Sometime in the past seven days, a handful of events occurred across India that, taken individually, would each be a modest news item. A venture capital firm you have probably never heard of announced a $100 million fund. A government board approved 22 research grants. A campus report noted that student founders are pivoting from consumer apps to quantum computing. Apple released a few short films about Indian college coders. None of these would, on their own, stop the scroll.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The 10-Minute Grocery War: How a 22-Year-Old Stanford Dropout Built a ₹9,669 Crore Empire—and Triggered India's Most Expensive Retail Battle

In the summer of 2021, two teenagers who should have been attending lectures at Stanford University were instead hunched over laptops in a Mumbai apartment, trying to solve a problem that most logistics experts considered unsolvable. Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra, both 19, had left one of the world's most elite universities with a conviction that bordered on absurd: that Indian consumers would pay a premium to have groceries delivered not in two hours, not in one hour, but in ten minutes. Not because ten minutes was a rational delivery window—it was not—but because the pandemic had collapsed the distinction between "urgent" and "routine." Everything was urgent. Everything was now.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The ₹65 Crore Gamble That Milk Can Beat Maggi: How Two IIM Graduates Built a ₹1,380 Crore Dairy Empire—and Are Now Taking On Zepto and Blinkit at Their Own Game

Chakradhar Gade was not supposed to be a dairy farmer. He was a software engineer at Infosys, then a consultant, then an IIM Indore graduate with the kind of resume that leads to corner offices and comfortable salaries. Nitin Kaushal was not supposed to be a milkman. He was a vice president at HSBC, rising through the ranks of one of the world's largest banks, on a trajectory that would have made his parents proud and his peers envious. Both had done everything right. Both were, by their own later admission, restless in ways they could not articulate.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The 10-Minute Grocery War: How a 19-Year-Old Stanford Dropout Built a $5 Billion Empire by Betting That Indians Would Pay for Speed—and Triggered the Most Expensive Retail Battle in Indian History

In the summer of 2021, two teenagers who should have been attending lectures at Stanford University were instead hunched over laptops in a Mumbai apartment, trying to solve a problem that most logistics experts considered unsolvable. Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra, both 19, had left one of the world's most elite universities with a conviction that bordered on absurd: that Indian consumers would pay a premium to have groceries delivered not in two hours, not in one hour, but in ten minutes. Not because ten minutes was a rational delivery window—it was not—but because the pandemic had collapsed the distinction between "urgent" and "routine." Everything was urgent. Everything was now.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The Investing App Where 90% of Users Are Under 25: Inside the Gen Z Wealth Platform That Raised $3.7 Million From Lightspeed—and Is Taking on Zerodha, Groww, and an Entire Generation's Financial Anxiety

Sometime in 2023, a 19-year-old college student in Pune opened a trading account for the first time. She did not call a broker. She did not fill out a paper form. She did not watch a YouTube tutorial on candlestick patterns. She downloaded an app her friend had sent her, linked her bank account, and bought her first stock—a fractional share of Tata Motors—for ₹500. The entire process took less than four minutes. She has since invested another ₹15,000, built a portfolio of six stocks and two ETFs, and checks the app roughly once a day. She has never spoken to a financial advisor. She has never read a company balance sheet. And she is, by every available metric, exactly the kind of investor that India's traditional brokerage industry was never designed to serve.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The Unicorn That Never Raised a Rupee of Venture Capital: How Two Brothers Built a ₹5,000 Crore Profit Machine—and a ₹1,500 Crore Startup Fund That Asks for Nothing in Return

Nithin Kamath was 17 years old when he lost everything. He had been trading stocks with money saved from odd jobs—a few thousand rupees, painstakingly accumulated—and in a single session, the market took it all. The loss was not a setback. It was an education. Most teenagers who blow their savings on the stock market either quit trading or spend years chasing their losses. Kamath did neither. He studied what went wrong. He learned about risk management, position sizing, and the psychological discipline that separates traders from gamblers. He rebuilt his capital, trade by trade, and by the time he was in his early twenties, he was managing money for other people. The boy who lost everything at 17 would eventually become the co-founder of Zerodha, India's largest stockbroker—a company that has never raised a rupee of venture capital, has been profitable since inception, and now generates annual revenue exceeding ₹8,500 crore with a profit approaching ₹5,000 crore.

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.