It was inevitable the pickleball craze would bounce outside the court and get funding - the setup doesn't need much space, the ROI is great. GoRally operates four centers across Bengaluru with 15 courts, including a 15,000 square feet indoor facility near Indiranagar. Will expand to eight centres and 42 courts by year end (two of which will be paddle courts). $750K pre-seed round. Other investors include Mohit Kumar and Vatsal Singhal (Ultrahuman), Viren Singhvi (ex-American Razor Safety Co.), Kartik Kapoor (East Africa Racquet Sports), Abhishek Goyal (Tracxn), Deepak Singh (Gameskraft), Arjun Vaidya (V3 Ventures).

Unified finance and banking platform for mid-size businesses ($10-40M revenue scale). The platform takes care of 1) Billing - ensuring bills are pulled in from various sources (email, slack) and errors in billing are automatically addressed, 2) Accounting - with AI replacing the need for large inhouse accounting teams and 3) Banking - automatically taking care of payments. Fundraise coincides with the company coming out of closed beta. The founders worked together on games and gamification at Flipkart. $2.8M seed round. Other investors in this round: Neon Fund, IIMA Ventures and angels - Sriharsha Majety (Swiggy), Mohit Kumar (Ultrahuman), Naiyaa Saagi (EDTLife, ex-MyGlamm), Nitin Gupta (Uni), Nishith Rastogi (Locus).

Chain of clinics to address chronic pain - knee, back, shoulder and neck pain - which effect 20% of Indians. Treated 10K patients and performed 1,400 procedures in the last 18 months. $4.25M seed round.

Farmer-centric sustainable tea brand from Tamil Nadu. Works with small farmers who have an average land holding of 1.6 acres. The focus is on building local collection points (a "Farmers' Factory") for every ~75-100 farms, so customers can track their tea down to a very particular cultivation area, i.e. farm to cup traceability. Farmers can increase their income by 3x. Aims to work with 3,000 small farmers in the Nilgiris by 2030. Coimbatore based. $125K pre-seed round by undisclosed angels.

Platform for webtoons in India. Webtoons are episodic digital comics that are usually meant to be read on smartphones. The company licenses comics from around the world, arranges them into episodes and translates them into Indian languages. 500K MAU, 2M+ downloads and over 3,100 comic titles in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. Working with Google's Gemini to drive translation, case study here (https://ai.google.dev/showcase/toonsutra). Seattle based. Vishal, Co-Founder & CEO, was CPO at DailyHunt, CleverTap and Freecharge. $3.2M seed round. Other investors in this round: T-accelerate Capital, Graphic India. Sony is an existing investor.

Full-stack NRI investment platform - "All things Money Crafted for Global Indians". Clients can easily open NRE/NRO accounts, process UPI payments and invest across asset classes in India, while being abroad. "In the USA alone, NRIs have over $300 billion in low-yield savings overseas because investing in India has been too complex". $1M pre-seed round. Angels in this round: Ravi Shankar (Active AI); Kishore Natarajan and Kedar Kulkarni (Hyperverge)

Orchestration platform bringing together GenAI components to build scalable enterprise applications. Also provides range of Gen AI agents for industry specific use cases, for example: Pic Agent for visual search and automated meta-tagging in fashion: Docu Agent simplifies document-based productivity in healthcare and finance. $500K seed (angel?) round.

Caregiving services provider - nannies and eldercare. Has onboarded 10,000 caregivers, at ₹22 lakhs monthly revenue. Aiming at ₹15CR annual revenue in FY26. ₹2CR pre-seed round.

Importer and distributor of alcoholic beverages - whiskies and wine - sold under their own brand. Distribution network across seven states. Seed round, amount undisclosed.

Cross border payments for Indian SMEs. Avoids the multi-bank hopping of an international transaction that happens in the SWIFT system, which leads to multiple fees, by enabling direct transactions between Infinity's partner banks in India and abroad. This can reduce fees by 70%. Also enables SMEs to earn interest on idle cash through investment in government securities. Bengaluru based, the founders are siblings. $1.9M pre-seed round. Differentiation is well explained in the YourStory article linked below. It's a real shame this startup wasn't funded by India-based VCs.