Prerna Sharma

**Bolna's Impressive Fundraising Highlights Self-Serve Success in India** Bolna's recent $6.3 million funding round led by General Catalyst underscores a significant trend in the Indian tech ecosystem. With 75% of its revenue generated from self-serve customers, Bolna is leveraging the growing demand for voice orchestration solutions. At ElevenX Capital, we see this as a strong indicator of how businesses are increasingly prioritizing scalable, user-driven tools. How can venture capitalists better assess the potential of self-serve revenue models in the future? #investing #innovation #venturecapital #entrepreneurship

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What a joy to speak with this brilliant cohort of innovators in the The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) ENTICE (Energy Transitions Innovation Challenge) 2.0 program and taking on their sharp questions at the investor bootcamp. 80% of global GHG emission reduction goals for 2050 can be met through energy system decarbonization, efficiency and electrification. This represents a US $100 trillion opportunity according to the IEA.     A stronger, more stable grid is at the heart of building a #resilient #energy future. This year’s program challenges innovators to tackle:  1) Behind-the-meter digital twins: #AI tools to analyse consumption and create appliance-level insights  2) Industrial flexibility at scale: AI solutions using smart meter data to identify flexible assets and operational inefficiencies    Kudos to the entrepreneurs and the GEAPP team for curating and executing such a thoughtful program.     Looking forward to seeing how these #innovations scale #impact.  Synapses Dalberg Media Vaishali (Vish) Mishra Anukul Tripathi (He/Him) Jayant Sinha Saurabh Kumar

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Natasha Malpani, former partner at Kae Capital, has launched Boundless Ventures, a ₹200 crore early-stage fund focused on AI-native startups from India. The fund will invest at pre-seed and seed stages, targeting consumer AI applications, infrastructure, agent tooling, healthcare, logistics, and Make-in-India AI hardware. Backed by Malpani’s personal network, Boundless has already made six investments, including Superhealth, Armatrix, PierSight, Knot, and two stealth AI ventures. Apart from capital, the fund will support founders with storytelling, market access, and network building. “Founders who combine technical depth with cultural fluency will set the terms of the next wave. Boundless exists to back them before the world catches on,” said Malpani. #seedStage #funding #opportunity #FundAlert #startupUpdates #startupro

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The Circle GTM Studio specializes in helping global startups soft-land in India. A structured accelerator designed to help growth-stage founders localize for India, run pilots, acquire early customers, and prepare for fundraising — backed by deep ecosystem access and real-world insights from founders who’ve successfully navigated the Indian market. If India is on your roadmap, this is where you begin. #thecircle #acceleratorprogram #startups #growth

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Aurva has launched out of stealth with a $2.2M seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from DeVC and angel investors including ex-Meta executives Christopher Bream, Rahul Sood, Karandeep Anand, Mala Ramakrishnan, and Postman founders Ankit Sobti and Abhinav Asthana. Founded by Apurv Garg and Krishna Bagadia, both ex-Meta engineers, Aurva monitors real-time data access across humans, services, and AI agents. Built on eBPF, its platform ties every query back to an identity, helping enterprises prevent unauthorized AI usage and risky data flows. Already serving customers like Razorpay and Meesho, Aurva is monitoring billions of daily transactions. With fresh funding, the team plans to expand engineering and deepen AI observability for global enterprise clients. Read full article: https://lnkd.in/dubj6E_T

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🇮🇳 Bengaluru-based startup Pronto has raised $25 million in a Series B round led by Epiq Capital, taking its valuation to $100 million. Existing investors Glade Brook Capital Partners LLC, General Catalyst, and Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) also participated, bringing total funding to around $40 million. Read more 👉 https://lnkd.in/g9U6A3s8 Anjali Sardana Chetna Gupta Manoj Jadhav Chirag Maheshwari Aashi Rathore #india #funding #investment #innovation #startups #technews #vcfunding #valuation #womenintech #femalefounders

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💰Aarthi Ramamurthy launches VC firm Schema Ventures with first fund of $20 million The fund will back early-stage startups founded by "exceptional outsider founders", Ramamurthy said in posts on LinkedIn and X. Read more at: https://lnkd.in/gUBnm6cb

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Bengaluru-based startup Pronto announced a $25 million Series B funding round, catapulting its valuation to $100 million in under a year. Led by Epiq Capital with participation from Glade Brook Capital Partners LLC, General Catalyst, and Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), the round brings total funding to about $40 million. Revolutionizing the Informal Domestic Help Sector Pronto is bringing structure to India's vast offline house help market by offering on-demand services like sweeping, mopping, and utensil cleaning with pros arriving in roughly 10 minutes. Trained and verified professionals, 99% women, earn a median of ₹23,000–₹25,000 monthly for 20 shift days, achieving over 70% retention rates.

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Sales automation startup Clay, co-founded by Kareem Amin and Varun Anand, has authorized a $20M employee stock tender offer at a $1.5B valuation, led by investor Sequoia Capital. The AI-driven platform—used by major companies like OpenAI, HubSpot, and Canva—has seen rapid growth and aims to launch tender offers annually to continue supporting employee liquidity. Marina Temkin, CFA | TechCrunch https://lnkd.in/gza6DXsi #AI #ArtificalIntelligence

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Gupshup raises $60M+ to scale Conversational AI globally. In a fresh funding round led by Globespan Capital Partners and EvolutionX Debt Capital, Gupshup has secured over $60 million in mixed equity and debt, fueling its next phase of growth. Use of Funds: • Expand in India, the Middle East, LATAM & Africa • Accelerate adoption of Conversational AI & AI Agent solutions • Strengthen product development and sales velocity By the numbers: • 50,000+ customers across 130+ countries • 120B+ messages processed annually • ~60% of revenue from India Founded in 2004, Gupshup continues to lead the charge in enterprise messaging and conversational commerce, now with AI at its core. #Gupshup #ConversationalAI #AIAgents #StartupFunding #EnterpriseTech #GlobalExpansion #CustomerEngagement #MessagingPlatform #IndiaStartups #AIProducts #TechFunding #GlobespanCapital #EvolutionX #EmergingMarkets

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Yes we did & yes it is. Friends: Do yourself a favor - let Stable AI automate your business operations whether you are a small business or a giant enterprise. Something as simple but painful as listing your home address as your corporate address (!) and then managing all the inbound correspondence, dealing with state/federal registration renewals, ensuring that your team can act quickly on urgent business communication with third parties - all of that minutiae involved in keeping a business running can be automated by AI. I have been sleeping peacefully for 5+ yrs as a Stable customer. You can too! cc Sarah Ahmad Collin Pham Elizabeth Harrow

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From our PearX S25 cohort, meet Pravāh, the AI-native operating system for the electric grid When Mohak Mangal, Dhruv Suri, and Aman Gupta looked at the strain on the U.S. electric grid, they saw a system pushed to its limits. Exploding demand and unpredictable supply have made blackouts increasingly common. This costs the economy more than $150B a year, a number that could 10x in the next five years. Mohak Mangal and team founded Pravāh to help fix it. Their platform helps utilities and grid operators make real-time decisions on load, generation, and congestion, reducing blackout risks, optimizing power procurement, and bringing much-needed stability to the backbone of modern life. We’re proud to support the Pravāh team as they take on one of the toughest and most important infrastructure challenges of our time.

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Part 1: Angel AIF — What the new regulation changes mean for Founders? Everyone is talking about the new Angel Fund AIF regulations just publised by SEBI—tighter investor accreditation, higher commitments from managers, and syndicates now restricted (no carry sharing outside the fund). Most commentary is focused on investors. However, this post is for founders—the core of the startup flywheel. Having built LVX last 12 years, I see it differently. This will impact founders -. some of the impact so subtle that you wont know till it comes up as a challenge to solve. When I first started #LetsVenture an angel investor told me: “What India needs is an SPV solution for investors to invest as one entity into startups.” I agreed but then had to google to know what “SPV” meant. Many investors I called didn’t know either. It was obvious that the solution would require working with regulators. Marketplace transaction process: In 2014–2018, LVX was a “pure” marketplace, connecting startups to investors. People oversimplified it as matchmaking. But the real complexity begins after commitment—due diligence, term sheets, filings, share certificates. Based on what we saw, we built C2C (commitment to closure) to solve this. This was also available to founders who raised outside the platform to help them close paperwork. Out of that came standardised term sheets, founder agreements, and SHAs— opensourced on LVX. However, the real pain comes when startups raise bigger rounds. VCs do not like crowded captables. I have seen deals fall apart because there were too many individual shareholders—or one investor went missing, delaying closure. Why SPVs Changed the Game SPVs solved for this: clean cap tables, pooled capital into one entity, with all complexities managed. As a by-product, investors also gain access to deals they otherwise would'nt. The Angel AIFs was the answer to the SPV Indian ecosystem needed. The Shift Today With the new regulation changing the definition of accredited investors, those who will lose are: a. Investors with capital but no social access. b. First-time founders, with limited networks. It feels like rewinding the clock to 2018. The balance of power will tilt to institutions and big players. And whenever power shifts, ecosystem behaviour changes. A Note to Founders - If you are fundraising today: 1. Keep cheque sizes at ₹5L minimum. 2. Don’t clutter your cap table. 3. Don’t cut corners—get a good CA, get the right legal help. Think process, rigor and compliance. 4. Be careful with “friendly advice”—it often leads to mistakes that hurt the next round. We will publish a playbook of best practices for founders navigating this shift. I am seeing the cycle repeat, and we need to be better prepared. #AngelInvesting #AIF #StartupIndia #Fundraising #PrivateMarkets #VC #Entrepreneurship #Founders

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India's Speciale Invest, a deep-science and technology-focused VC firm, has launched a $156 million growth-stage fund to back deep-tech companies. In August, Speciale Invest had closed its third fund at Rs 600 crore, surpassing its initial target of Rs 500 crore. PRAMUGDHA MAMGAIN's report:

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Natasha Malpani, former partner at Kae Capital, has announced the launch of Boundless Ventures, a ₹200 crore early-stage fund focused on backing AI-native startups from India. The fund will invest at the pre-seed and seed stages, supporting companies across consumer AI applications, infrastructure, agent tooling, vertical use cases like healthcare and logistics, and even Make-in-India AI hardware. Raised entirely from Malpani’s personal network of friends and family, the fund has already made six investments. Its portfolio features SuperHealth in healthcare, Armatrix in robotics, Piersight in spacetech, Knot in quick fashion delivery, along with two stealth ventures in AI infrastructure and consumer AI. Sharing her vision, Malpani said, “Founders who can marry technical depth with cultural fluency will be the ones who set the terms of the next wave. Boundless exists to back those founders before the world catches on. I built Boundless as the fund I needed as a founder: sharp, fast, and rooted in trust.” Beyond capital, Boundless Ventures aims to empower founders with storytelling, market access, and network building. With her experience of founding Boundless Media and scaling Dice Media, Malpani brings both operational and creative expertise to fuel the next generation of AI-driven ventures.

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Who’s Who in Venture Part 6: Lightspeed Venture Partners Founded in 2000 by Christopher Schaepe Barry Eggers Ravi Mhatre $25B+ in AUM Stages —> seed - series E Industries —> AI, infra, fintech, consumer Geographies —> global with a focus on US, India, Europe Reputation —> under the radar

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We Don’t just Consult. We Build. We Execute. CodeApto is a Growth Execution Firm and Venture Builder operating across the India-GCC corridor. We partner with ambitious founders, owner-led enterprises, and family offices to design, build, and scale systems that compound - operationally, technologically, and financially. Because strategy without execution is just presentation. We step in where consulting stops. We stay until systems run. We build what others only blueprint. From idea to infrastructure. From roadmap to revenue. From intent to impact. Reach out to us to build in Bharat. Warehouse Management - AptoWMS

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