1. KINTSUGI
Country: San Francisco, USA
News:
Raised $18M led by Vertex, including $15M minority investment (10% ownership) and $3M from existing investors. Deal values company at $150M post-money, nearly 4x valuation in one year.
Why It’s Interesting:
- AI-powered sales tax compliance solution that’s half the cost of competitors, solving complex regulatory challenges across borders
- Co-founded by Indian-origin entrepreneur Pujun Bhatnagar with plans to expand into India and China as key growth markets
Potential:
- Impressive 93% profit margins with 2,400 customers and remarkably low 0.1% churn rate
- Strategic partnership with Vertex includes IP sharing and revenue-sharing, accelerating global expansion
2. NUVO
Country: San Francisco, USA
News:
Raised $34M Series A led by Sequoia Capital and Spark Capital. Social network-like platform for B2B trade targeting the $11T physical goods purchasing industry in the US.
Why It’s Interesting:
- Co-founded by diaspora talent Sid Malladi, Nuvo applies Silicon Valley network-building expertise to transform traditional industries
- Created network effect platform comparable to PayPal/Stripe for payments, but for B2B commerce
Potential:
- Will reach 50,000 businesses by Q2 2025, including notable clients like Great Dane, Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, and Fender
- Vision to expand into payments, AI, and international markets including Asia-Pacific shows global ambition
3. POSHA
Country: Bengaluru, India
News:
Secured $8M Series A led by Accel, with participation from Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and other investors. AI-powered countertop kitchen robot with 500+ recipes across cuisines.
Why It’s Interesting:
- Perfect India-to-global journey with significant R&D in Bengaluru targeting US market
- $1,500 device automates entire cooking process using computer vision, AI, and robotics
Potential:
- Addresses universal pain point of time constraints for fresh meal preparation with sophisticated technology
- Demonstrates Indian engineering talent creating hardware solutions with global market potential
4. CODEANT AI
Country: Bengaluru, India / San Francisco, USA
News:
Raised $2M seed from Y Combinator, Uncorrelated Ventures, and VitalStage Ventures at $20M valuation. Founded by Amartya Jha and Chinmay Bharti in 2023.
Why It’s Interesting:
- Cuts manual code review time and bugs by 50%+ using proprietary language-agnostic AST engine
- Addresses critical bottleneck as AI-generated code proliferates globally
Potential:
- Already deployed at 50+ companies including Akasa Air, Cyient, and Fortune 1000 enterprises
- Elevates developers to focus on high-value work instead of tedious reviews in the AI era
5. WISDOMAI
Country: San Mateo, USA
News:
Secured giant $23M seed led by Coatue, with participation from Madrona, GTM Capital, and others. Founded by former Rubrik co-founder Soham Mazumdar.
Why It’s Interesting:
- AI data analytics that works with structured, unstructured, and ‘dirty’ data without hallucination issues
- Uses GenAI only for query formation, not answer creation, addressing enterprise AI trust problems
Potential:
- Early customers include ConocoPhillips, Cisco, and Descope demonstrating enterprise traction
- Democratizes data access – business managers can drill into complex data with ‘five key strokes’
6. CUEZEN
Country: Seattle, USA
News:
Secured $5M led by Point 72 Ventures. Founded by Indian tech leaders Ankur Teredesai, Sunil Shinde, and Singapore-based Aloysius Lim.
Why It’s Interesting:
- Leverages AI and sensor data for personalized healthcare recommendations with proven founding team
- Teredesai’s previous successful exit (KenSci acquired by Tegria) brings deep healthcare AI expertise
Potential:
- Global customer base includes US healthcare orgs (Titan, Microport) and Singapore government
- Positioned as foundational layer in emerging digital health stack with Big Tech validation
7. HIGH TIME FOODS
Country: Bengaluru, India (relocated from USA)
News:
Raised $1.2M led by Avaana Capital. Founded by Aakash Shah and Damian Felchlin, relocated HQ from US to Bengaluru in fascinating reverse innovation journey.
Why It’s Interesting:
- Develops non-refrigerated, plant-based protein solutions addressing critical global nutrition challenges
- Unique “reverse migration” shows India as strategic base for global operations
Potential:
- Already serving 30+ clients worldwide with B2B approach targeting food manufacturers and institutions
- Projects 25% India business, 75% global markets including Africa expansion
8. HYPERBOTS
Country: Delaware, USA/ Bengaluru, India
News:
Raised $6.5M Series A led by Arkam Ventures and Athera Venture Partners. Founded by Niyati Chhaya, Ram Jayaraman, and Rajeev Pathak in 2023.
Why It’s Interesting:
- AI co-pilots for finance automation trained on 30M+ finance-specific data points
- 55-strong engineering team primarily in Bengaluru serving US clients across healthcare, media, retail
Potential:
- Delivers 80% reduction in manual effort with 99.8% accuracy in document processing
- Plans to launch HyperLM, proprietary LLM pre-trained on finance data for vertical AI solutions
9. AVAMMUNE THERAPEUTICS
Country: Philadelphia, USA / Bengaluru, India
News:
Raised $12M Series A co-led by Capital 2B, Shastra VC, and Kotak Lifesciences Fund. Founded by serial biotech entrepreneurs Arun Papaiah, Srinivasan Namala, and Aditya Kulkarni.
Why It’s Interesting:
- Develops small-molecule immunotherapies targeting innate immunity with focus on accessible treatments
- Lead compound AVA-NP-695 could be more accessible than traditional biologics in $100B immuno-oncology market
Potential:
- 40+ member team with collaborations across UCSF, Oxford, and University of Queensland
- Oral/accessible therapies address limited access to expensive treatments in India and emerging markets
10. ADOPT AI
Country: San Francisco, USA / Bengaluru, India
News:
Raised $6M seed led by Elevation Capital. No-code platform for integrating intelligent agent capabilities. Founded by Deepak Anchala, Rahul Bhattacharya, and Anirudh Badam.
Why It’s Interesting:
- Perfect India-US tech corridor model: 11 engineers in Bengaluru collaborating with 5 AI engineers in US
- Transforms 6-month enterprise AI implementation into 24-hour process
Potential:
- Agent Builder targets SaaS and B2C companies in banking and healthcare with complex workflows
- Positioned for evolution where apps must ‘agentify’ themselves to stay relevant
11. SAMAYA AI
Country: Mountain View, California, USA
News:
Raised $43.5M led by NEA with participation from Eric Schmidt, Yann LeCun, David Siegel, and Marty Chavez. Founded by Indian-origin Maithra Raghu with team from Google Brain, Meta AI, AWS, Stanford.
Why It’s Interesting:
- Expert AI platform for financial services designed for “factuality over fluency”
- AI agents specifically trained for financial expertise, addressing critical trust issues in financial AI
Potential:
- Morgan Stanley as customer with 100% month-over-month growth demonstrating product-market fit
- Latest AI agent ‘Causal World Models‘ can autonomously model entire economy for quantitative predictions
