bengaluru
(34)
Purple Iris Communications and the business of making expertise readable
A former journalist’s B2B agency turns technical knowledge into something people can use. A six-week ESG assignment shows how much of that job happens before the sentences shine.
DERBI Foundation and the hard part after the prototype
A medical device can work on a lab bench and still struggle to reach a hospital. Bengaluru’s DERBI Foundation helps founders tackle the testing, clinical connections and commercial decisions in between.
Myntra wants to dress you before you know what to wear
The Indian fashion marketplace once shut its website to force a mobile future. Now it is chasing a more human problem: finding the right outfit, then getting it to you while the occasion still matters.
Saurabh Sharma Has Spent a Career Translating the Machines
Before he marketed AI agents, Saurabh Sharma wrote code, advised technology buyers and judged the middleware beneath modern business. His career is a study in learning the machinery before naming the market.
Paridhi Gupta Wants Utility AI to Speak Human
At SEW.AI, an electronics engineer turned marketer is making the case that the future of energy and water will be won with data, empathy and rooms where people still disagree productively.
Kartik Murugan Makes Complex Technology Sound Human
Across 27 years and eight enterprise brands, Kartik Murugan has built a career translating difficult products into clear propositions. At CitiusTech, that old marketing problem has acquired a new vocabulary: healthcare, AI and trust.
Malika Shrivastava Has Spent Her Career Teaching New Things How to Feel Familiar
After building markets for diapers, smartphones, browsers and lock-screen media, Qure.ai's first CMO has taken on a subtler assignment: giving a consequential technology a language people can trust.
Mukund Jha Is Turning Plain English Into Working Software
After Google, two early startup misses and eight years building Dunzo, Mukund Jha started again with his twin brother. Their bet is simple: the person who understands a problem should be able to build the software that solves it.
The Menswear Brand That Ships a New Wardrobe Every Single Day
Siddharth Dungarwal turned a shut-down B2B clothing business into a menswear machine that launches around 35 designs a day - and got all five sharks to write a cheque.
The Bootstrapped Bengaluru Label That Sold India on the Rs 3,000 Shirt
How Manish and Akshika Poddar turned a family garment factory's European know-how into one of India's fastest-growing premium fashion houses - and stayed bootstrapped until the numbers spoke for themselves.
Whatfix
The company nobody notices - because if Whatfix is doing its job, you never read the manual. Inside the Bengaluru-and-San Jose startup teaching a billion-dollar software stack to explain itself.
GIVA
A Bengaluru startup bet that Indians would buy jewellery on a Tuesday, not just for a wedding. Six years and 300 stores later, that bet is worth close to half a billion dollars.
Sourav Choraria
Sourav Choraria is the co-founder and CEO of Infinity (YC W24), a Bengaluru business banking platform that helps cross-border SMBs and startups send and receive international payments with multi-currency accounts, flat fees, and no FX markup. He built it with his brother Sidharth after watching their family business lose money to slow, opaque international transfers. Before Infinity he was head of growth at Paytm Money, where he helped scale the wealth platform to 20 million monthly users and launched India's first fixed-deposit-backed credit card.
Ranjan Kumar
Ranjan Kumar is a Bengaluru-based technology entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Entropik, a Human Insights AI company he started in 2016 to reinvent the century-old market research industry. An IIT Kharagpur graduate who once headed business at Citrus Payment Solutions before its acquisition by PayU, he built Entropik around Emotion AI - facial coding, eye tracking and voice analysis - to read the subconscious signals behind consumer decisions. He is now building his next venture, DecisionX AI, and describes himself as a three-time founder.
Bharat Singh Shekhawat
Bharat Singh Shekhawat is a co-founder and Head of Engineering at Entropik, the Bengaluru-based human insights company he helped start in 2016. He builds the systems that turn signals from faces, voices, and eye movement into measurable read-outs of how people feel and decide, and has spent more than fifteen years designing data-intensive platforms and turning research ideas into shipping products.
Infinity
Infinity is a Bengaluru-based cross-border payments platform that lets Indian freelancers, exporters, and small businesses receive money from global clients through multi-currency virtual accounts. It converts foreign payments to INR at live FX rates with a flat 0.5% all-inclusive fee, settles funds in about a day, and handles RBI compliance paperwork like FIRA automatically. Founded in 2024 by brothers Sourav and Sidharth Choraria, the company is part of Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch.
Rivia.AI
Rivia.AI is a Bengaluru-based, Y Combinator (S21) startup that lets marketing, sales and demand-generation teams build interactive, self-guided product demos without code. Using a Chrome extension, teams capture pixel-perfect clones of their live product, layer on guided tours, checklists and video narration, then share or embed the demos and track how prospects engage. It positions itself as an affordable alternative to demo platforms like Walnut, Storylane and Navattic.
Trell
Trell was an India-founded lifestyle social commerce platform where users shared roughly three-minute vertical videos about their interests - travel, beauty, food, fashion and wellness - across eight regional languages. Started in 2016 by four IIT-Bombay friends, it grew a large community skewed toward Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, then pivoted in 2020 into in-app shopping through 'Trell Shop.' It raised about $66 million from investors including Sequoia/Peak XV, KTB Network, Samsung Ventures, Mirae Asset and H&M, before a 2022 governance probe and cash crunch triggered mass layoffs and a steep revenue collapse.
Verloop.io
Verloop.io is a Bengaluru-based conversational AI platform that automates customer support, sales, and marketing conversations across chat and voice. Founded in 2015 by Gaurav Singh, it builds AI-powered chatbots and voice agents that handle inbound and outbound interactions in 80+ languages for unicorns and Fortune 500 companies across India, Southeast Asia, MENA, and the US. In July 2026 it was acquired by Mukesh Bansal-led Nurix AI to form a combined voice-and-chat automation platform handling more than 20 million customer interactions a month.
Swarm
Swarm is an AI consulting and engineering company that assembles on-demand GenAI teams to help enterprises move from prototype to production. It addresses the high failure rate of AI projects by deploying boutique 'Hives' of specialists - covering strategy, data, modeling, MLOps, and delivery - for Fortune 100 customers across finance, healthcare, energy, legal and retail.
Hiranjith H
Hiranjith H (also Hiranjith GH) is the Chief Business Officer of Algorithmic Biologics, a Bengaluru-founded deeptech startup that embeds algorithms inside test tubes to make molecular testing dramatically cheaper and faster. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he leads the company's commercial operations and US expansion. He spent more than a decade scaling MedGenome's research-services business in the US and earlier built commercialization and analytics strategy for life-sciences clients at Novartis, ZS Associates, and Accenture Management Consulting.
Pronto
Pronto is a Bengaluru-based on-demand and subscription house-help platform that dispatches trained, background-verified cleaning professionals to urban homes in roughly 10 minutes. Founded in 2025 by Anjali Sardana, it applies a quick-commerce playbook to India's largely informal domestic-work market - transparent per-visit pricing, instant or scheduled booking, and structured shifts that give workers (about 99% of them women) predictable income. The company scaled from roughly 1,000 daily bookings to 24,000-25,000 in about a year and was valued at $200M in April 2026.
Amit Dayal
Amit Dayal is Vice President and General Manager of Adobe's Digital Advertising, Learning, and Publishing Business - a portfolio that puts him at the intersection of AdTech, streaming media, and enterprise e-learning. With 30+ years of product leadership spanning Sequent Computer Systems, Oracle, Motorola, Yahoo, Samsung Electronics, and multiple Silicon Valley startups he co-founded or built PM functions from scratch, Dayal brings a rare depth of engineering-to-executive experience to one of tech's most creative companies. Based in Bengaluru, India, he leads strategy, product management, technology, marketing, and sales for Adobe Primetime and related platforms serving major media and entertainment companies globally.
Flam
Flam is an AI-native mixed reality publishing platform that turns ordinary brand touchpoints - TV spots, magazine pages, posters, packaging, WhatsApp messages - into instant, app-less 3D experiences via a QR scan or link. Used by 100+ global brands including Google, Samsung, Emirates and Mahindra.
Juno
Juno (formerly OnJuno) is a crypto-friendly banking platform that lets users in the US hold cash and crypto in one account, receive paychecks in stablecoins, and on-ramp to 20+ blockchain networks without withdrawal holds. Founded by Varun Deshpande, Ratnesh Ray, and Siddharth Verma, the company raised an $18M Series A in 2022 led by ParaFi Capital.
Abhishek Kumar
Abhishek Kumar is the co-founder and CTO of Xoxoday, a Bengaluru-based SaaS platform that powers rewards, incentives, and employee engagement for 5,000+ enterprises worldwide. An IIT Bombay alumnus who previously co-founded EveningFlavours (an early food-discovery startup), Abhishek has helped grow Xoxoday from a 2012 experiences marketplace into a $100M+ funded global platform processing 250,000 transactions daily, with products spanning employee engagement, sales gamification, consumer loyalty, and API-based transactional rewards.
Chaithanya Yambari
Chaithanya Yambari is the Co-Founder and CTO of Zluri, a next-generation Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) platform that helps enterprise IT teams discover, manage, secure, and automate their SaaS applications. An engineer from BITS Pilani, he spent nearly a decade rising from software developer to Director of Engineering at gamification startup KNOLSKAPE before co-founding Zluri in 2020 alongside Ritish Reddy and Sethu Meenakshisundaram. Under his technical leadership, Zluri has raised $32M in total funding - including a $20M Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in July 2023 - and now serves 270+ employees and hundreds of enterprise customers worldwide.
Kaushik Arakalgud
Kaushik Arakalgud is a technology entrepreneur and builder based in Bengaluru, India, currently working in AI at Domestika - the global creative learning platform that reached unicorn status with a $1.3B valuation in 2022. As Co-Founder and CTO of Aimwiser, an AI and neuroscience-powered people and wellness intelligence SaaS platform, he brings together his passion for education technology, artificial intelligence, and human development. Trained as a computer science engineer at PES College of Engineering, Kaushik has spent his career at the intersection of technology and meaningful societal impact.
Lalith Gudipati
Lalith Gudipati is Co-Founder of Dashverse, a San Francisco-based AI entertainment company building tools to democratize storytelling at scale. With a background in high-velocity growth at Pocket FM and Moonfrog Labs, Lalith brings a data-driven operator's lens to an ambitious creative vision - Dashverse's suite (Dashtoon, DashReels, Frameo.AI) has amassed over 20 million users worldwide. In August 2025, the company closed a $13M Series A led by Peak XV Partners, cementing its place as a leader in AI-native entertainment.
Kushal Agrawal
Kushal Agrawal is a co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Xoxoday, a B2B SaaS platform that powers rewards, recognition, and loyalty programs for 5,000+ businesses globally. He co-founded the company in 2012 at age 22, helping transform it from a consumer gifting startup called Giftxoxo into a global enterprise platform processing nearly 250,000 daily transactions across 75+ countries. An adventurer who has traveled to 70+ countries, Kushal brings an unconventional, storytelling-driven approach to building enterprise growth - serving simultaneously as angel investor and co-founder of multiple Xoxoday sub-brands including Empuls and Compass AI.