Most Indian households cook daily in non-stick pans coated with PFAS chemicals that degrade over heat. The Indus Valley was founded in 2016 to offer an alternative: cast iron, triply steel, clay, copper, brass, wood. In 10 years they built a D2C brand. Now Gaja Capital is backing the national expansion.
Sensex rises 200 points as OYO's parent files ₹6,650 crore IPO. AI startup Kapture CX raises $10 million from Bajaj Finserv. Kratikal Tech's SME IPO opens today. Indian markets show resilience despite monsoon concerns. Full market analysis and investment outlook inside.
In 2019, IKEA invested in Livspace. In 2022, KKR led a $180M round that made it a unicorn. In 2025, it completed a reverse flip from Singapore to India and raised INR 427 crore to prepare for an IPO. In December 2025, it acquired Abby Lighting for $23 million. This is the interior design platform that turned a fragmented, trust-broken industry into an e-commerce-grade experience — and is now building toward the public market.
He left BigBasket two days after Tata Digital acquired it in 2021. He could have rested. He started LaundryMate instead — targeting the ₹90,000 crore laundry market with machines from Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands and a target of 30 cities in 10 years.
In 2022, Swati Bhargava's kidney function had dropped to 3 to 4 per cent. She was closing a ₹130 crore funding round simultaneously. She attended investor calls in the evenings, hospital visits in the mornings, and closed the round before checking in for a kidney transplant. Then she got back to running the company.
They came back from a trip abroad carrying magnets from Paris and trinkets from Bangkok and asked a simple question: why can't India have something like this? They sold their house to find out. Fifteen years later, Chumbak has raised nearly ₹250 crore, built more than 70 exclusive stores, sells across home decor, fashion, accessories, and personal care, and has stayed fiercely itself through every market cycle and every competitive pressure.
Before SUGAR, Vineeta and Kaushik failed twice. Before FAB Bag taught them what Indian women wanted, they built a fashion e-commerce company nobody funded and a consulting firm nobody hired. They bootstrapped SUGAR with personal savings and a loan from Vineeta's father. Their first product insight was that international makeup did not work on Indian skin in Indian weather. Everything they built followed from that one honest observation.
More money. Fewer deals. Faster unicorns. India's startup funding in 2026 isn't bigger — it's narrower, sharper, and moving at a completely different speed than it used to.
Abhishek Kumar is an IIT graduate. Before building MyGate, he worked as a security guard at a gated community to understand what the job actually required and what was going wrong. That decision — to start at the lowest point in the system and learn it from the inside — explains everything about how MyGate was built, what problem it actually solves, and why 5.7 million households now trust it.
Equal AI was not supposed to be a consumer product. It was built as identity and consent-driven data infrastructure for banks and insurers. Then Keshav Reddy pivoted in October 2025 to build India's first AI call assistant, targeting the specific pain that every Indian smartphone user knows intimately: the endless stream of spam calls.