Hobby-based offline community platform where club members, club leaders, and venues unite to form communities. Members build offline connections around shared interests - football matches, quiz nights, art, journaling, music jams. Club leaders curate meetups, venue partners get higher footfalls and a boost in revenue. 25,000K downloads and 3K social meetups since launch. ₹5CR seed round. Founders: all four are IIT Kanpur. The CEO was a PM at Delhivery; the CBO, ex-Unilever, was a PM at Urban Company; the COO was Assistant Manager - Strategy and Ops at Glance; the fourth co-founder & CTO, Shaswat Kar, not linked here, was a software engineer at Rippling.

Capsule hotels come to India! Starting with one location in Noida, the startup will provide affordable, hygienic, tech-driven stays in IT hubs and near religious sites. 20 properties planned by FY27. The budget hotel market in India is $20B and growing 13-15% a year. ₹2CR pre-seed round from IPV, following on a $500K round by T9L Qube in March. Nitin was the founder of 247around (acquired by Servify), repair and maintenance for home appliances. Himanshu comes with a decade of experience as a customer experience manager.

Wedding planning company, focused as much on weddings abroad as on NRIs planning their weddings in India. $2M seed round, little known on the company or investors.

Marketplace for salons, spas and wellness clinics. 700 outlets across NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Pune, no traction provided. $550K seed round. Angels in the round: the founders of Swiggy Dineout and Orra. One of the founders was a Business Development Manager at BBLUNT (salon chain), the other two recenty graduated from college and built AndBooks (home delivery of college books).

Micro-dramas platform (i.e., ReelShort for India), with episodes of 1-2 minutes each. $2.1M seed round, with funding towards creating localised content for India, SE Asia and the Middle East. Other investors in the round: 8i Ventures, Waveform Ventures, Warmup Ventures, Bombay54, Bharat Founders Fund. The three founders built used car platform Truebil, acquired by Spinny. Comps: ChaiShots (round in closing), DashReels (from Stellaris-backed Dashtoon), Kuku TV (from Kuku FM), ReelShort itself.

Hyperlocal fashion delivery out of Ahmedabad, with tie-ups with 50 local stores and brands. The app itself launches this month. Pre-seed round at a $1.2M valuation, fundraise amount and investors are undisclosed. Founders: the CEO started straight out of college; the CMO was Co-Founder at ZIPPIT, hyperlocal delhivery of anything.

AI-enabled astrology platform. AI is used to crunch astrological data while a network of vedic astrologers provide consultations. It has a registered user base of 30-40K, with 11 in-house astrologers. The model is pay per minute, with sessions starting at 5 minutes and going up to 20-40 minutes. $1.5M seed round. Angels in the round: Sumer Juneja and Sarthak Mishra (Softbank). Founders: the CEO founded bootstrapped Yeebo (Indian ethnic products marketplaced), before heading B2C Product at Atlys; the CTO had brief stints as tech lead at Atlys and Ripin, and co-founded Now&Me (mental health). Comps: Ask My Guru (Lumikai), Astrotalk (Elev8). India's "spiritual market" was ~$59B in 2023, of which 1.5% is online so far. The horoscope segment is $10B.

Chain of skincare clinics. "Korin": Korea+India, "Mi" = Beauty. ₹3CR pre-seed round led by angels including Vikas Agarwal (Kaya Skin Clinic UAE), Vivek Kumar (VentureGarage). Currently operates from two locations in NCR (Worldmark, Defence Colony), with 25 outlets planned over the next three years (entering Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad). The company is also launching its own skincare brand, sold D2C and via Nykaa etc. “We are formalising a new category in professional Korean skincare tailored for Indian consumers with a high-trust clinical approach". Founders: the CEO was a Senior Brand Manager at Mars (confectionary), the COO is a cosmetologist.

Offline social networking platform from the founder of Aisle. Launched last September, the product is in its early days - focused on getting the number of jams (group hangouts offline) to 500 a week. Aiming at a weekly frequency use case - "we've consistently seen over 40% weekly activity from our core member base". The company is also testing a second unnamed product in beta mode - "a link-in-bio to turn visitors into friends, clients, teammates and more". Seed round, amount undisclosed. Founder Able Joseph built dating app Aisle over a decade and sold 76% of it for ₹91CR to InfoEdge in 2022. Aisle has ~1M MAU today, made ₹35CR for IndoEdge in FY24 and is now focused on getting to profitability.

Platform aggregating hostels and PGs. Assures a common quality of service through the brand - food, hygiene, security - at 25 locations. ₹8.5CR round, including primary and secondaries. Vaibhav, Co-Founder & CEO, is from KPMG. Full stack student housing operators (not aggregators) have seen a clearing out in recent years - YourSpace (₹143CR revenue in FY24) and Stanza Living (₹458CR in FY23, now raising at a down round) continue to operate; NestAway raised $115M and sold for $11M in 2023; Oxfordcaps raised $11M and was sold in a distressed deal in 2021.