AI-native wearables startup. The first product, Neo 1, is a Personal AI Assistant (PAIA) that transforms everyday conversations into actionable insights. It builds upon persistent memory and analyzes emotions from conversations. Conversations are transcribed, not audio recorded. The larger goal is to build out NeoOS, their OS layer for AI assistants, for use on all wearable devices - from glasses to pendants, to watches and rings. Neo 1 is worn on a chain around your neck, currently priced at ₹11,999. $2M seed round. Angels in the round: Awais Ahmed (Pixxel), Anupam Mittal (Shaadi.com), Sameer Mehta (boAt), Namita Thapar (Emcure), Aprameya Radhakrishna (Koo). Founded in Jan 2023, Bangalore based. Founders: CEO Dhananjay (Christ Univ. '11, Virginia Commonwealth Univ. '12) is from Homelane (leading product and marketing for lead gen), ClearTax (head of marketing) and Razorpay (marketing); CTO Aryan (IIT Madras dual degree '21) had a brief prior stint as co-founder of SqFt 51 (co-pilot for architects) and as a PM at ICICI. Order here - https://neosapien.xyz

A new AI-led email client. Provides a contextually intelligent and prompt free email experience. The goal is to improve productivity, with superior thread organization, better attachment handling, semantic search and group summarization features. Currently available for Gmail and Google Workspace users in a desktop-only beta. 30-day free trial, then priced at ₹125 a month for two email accounts, and ₹49 a month for each additional account. $200K pre-seed round. Founded in Sep 2024, Mumbai based. Founder Neeraj (BITS Pilani '14, ISB '19) was the head of product design at Insider, and went on to JP Morgan investment banking and BCG after his MBA. Comps: this takes on Superhuman, Spark, Fyxer. Sign up for a free trial here - https://faraday.email

Voice AI startup. Provides evaluation, observability and a self-learning layer for voice agents used by enterprises. The platform helps enterprises move from voice AI pilots to production faster by improving voice AI reliability and reducing failure rates. Will focus on US clients in sectors that face a high risk from errors/mistakes: healthcare, finance, insurance. Current clients unknown. $1.2M pre-seed round by Kalaari's CXXO Initiative for women founders. Angels in the round: Rikant Pitti (EaseMyTrip), Arjun Pillai (Docket AI), Sharath Narayanan (Sanas AI), Harish Manian (BMH Group), Nivin Pauly (an actor). Founded in Feb 2025, Bangalore based. Founders: CEO Nikkitha was the co-founder of Shoppre (shop anywhere online in India and ship abroad) for close to nine years; CTO Neethu (BITS Pilani '10; IIT Madras PhD in voice AI '17) is an AI scientists from ZS and Uniphore, was briefly co-founder at Mila AI (Gen AI e-commerce) and was part of Antler India's fourth cohort.

Exclusively announced here: AI co-pilot for risk and compliance teams in financial institutions, using Graph AI and Agentic AI for fraud detection, better underwriting and automated due diligence. Launched with payments, wealth management and market listing platforms in India, POCs in the UAE. Seed round of an undisclosed amount. Angels in the round: Sidd Gandhi (Venture Builders Collective). Grant from WTFund earlier this year. Founded in Jan 2025, Bangalore based. Founders: CEO Sunit (IIT Kanpur '21) spent three years at Marcus by Goldman Sachs (its consumer banking brand), building ML capabilities for fraud detection for Apple Card; COO Somesh was at KPMG as Assistant Manager (in the financial crimes practice) and at the NSE as Deputy Manager.

AI platform for customer support teams to manage customer interactions; driving activation, retention, expansion opportunities and complete lifecycle personalization by ingesting signals from multiple enterprise systems. The product is yet to publicly launch beyond initial pilots with Coinbase, Adobe and Amazon. Legacy (i.e. SaaS!) account management systems constitute a $14-16B market in the US. Less than 5% of current customer interactions get reviewed, whereas Redapto will audit 100% of them. $500K round, part of the YC Fall 2025 cohort. Founded in July 2025, SF based. Founders: CEO Anirudh is BITS Pilani '24 and spent a year as an engineer at Coinbase (working remotely); CTO Cheril is Pune Institute of Computer Technology '24 and UC San Diego '25.

Cybersecurity startup providing Gen-AI native security. Its products include AgentIQ, which provides security where AI has a touchpoint with any kind of enterprise data; and DiscoverR, which continuously tests AI systems for vulnerabilities. The goal is to make sure enterprises can adopt AI while ensuring data confidentiality during model training and day to day usage. $2.5M pre-seed round. Founded in May 2024. Founders: CEO Pankaj was India Country Head at KATIM (secure comms for governments) and was Co-Founder & VP of Engineering at Mobiliya (a dev firm acquired by QuEST Global); co-founder Aditya's PhD thesis at University College Dublin ("Adversarial AI models for Cyber Security") was the genesis of Mirror Security. Prior to Mirror, Aditya was the co-founder of Maxime Tools (legal Gen AI).

AI led digital food labelling SaaS for the world. The goal is to transform food labels required by regulators from a manual to automated process - it streamlines label generation and artwork validation, and most importantly ensures compliance with regulation. This reduces the time taken to ensure compliance from hours to under 30 minutes. $500K seed round from undisclosed investors. Founded in June 2018. Founders: Partho was the head of marketing for Mahindra's tractor and agri business for 15 years, followed by the same role for 7 years at International Tractors (Sonalika/Solis brands); Rashida was a nutritionist in the same business unit at Mahindra, developing a new product range for their healthy food cafe brand, Saboro.

AI chatbots that act as debt counsellors for banks and other financial institutions, interacting with distressed borrowers to drive the debt recovery process. Works with lenders such as CRED, Nira, Propelld and Freo, managing collections for ₹100CR worth of NPAs each month. This funding will go towards building capabilities in credit risk workflows and managing multilingual conversations. $825K pre-seed round. Angels from Google, Meta, Tesla, M2P, HyperVerge. Founded in Feb 2024. Founders: CEO Ankit, CTO Jayanth and Co-Founder Abhishek are recent graduates from IIT Madras - Ankit went on to Carnegie Mellon before starting Riverline.

Connected mobility platform turning vehicle data into actionable intelligence for OEMS, mobility providers and fleet operators. Used, for example, by an OEM to predictively act on quality issues across 500K vehicles and 4 models; and by a global heavy vehicles manufacturer to identify road defects and accident zones for vehicles used in mining operations. ₹2CR round. Founded in Feb 2022. Founder & CEO Vikas was an MD at Accenture (12 years) in the UK. He worked in a contracted role as Deputy COO of Toyota Connected Europe (a tech outpost which uses vehicle data science to deliver mobility solutions for Toyota group companies).

Agentic AI credit intelligence platform to help US based lenders to automate the underwriting decision for small business loans. Agents undertake business verification, cash flow analysis and asset valuation analysis. This reduces lender costs and hastens decision making. $3.8M seed round. Other investors in the round: Karman Ventures, Pythia Ventures, Coughdrop Capital and a host of angels. Founded in Jan 2024. Founders: Utsav spent a decade at Uber and Cruise in the US; Shivi worked on risk analytics at Uber, Amex and Varo Bank also in the US.