Weekly Funding Tracker — Week Ending September 29, 2026

Verified funding rounds by Indian startups for the week of September 22–29, 2026. The week was headlined by two large rounds — Ultraviolette’s $85M Series E for global EV expansion and Ema’s $77M Series B for enterprise AI — that together account for more than three-quarters of the week’s disclosed capital. Strip those two out and the rest of the week looks like a healthy mix of seed and early-stage activity across agritech, spacetech, healthtech, and AI. Two new fund closes — IITM Unicorn Frontier Fund I (₹450 Cr first close toward a ₹1,000 Cr target) and WEH Ventures Fund III (₹250 Cr target) — signal continued LP appetite for early-stage and deeptech vehicles in India. Sourced from Inc42, YourStory, Entrackr, StartupTalky, and company announcements. Rounds without disclosed amounts are listed but excluded from totals. Fund closes tracked separately.

Week on Week — Funding Value & Deal Count

Investor Snapshot — Week on Week

Comparing active investors this week (Sep 22–29) vs last week (Sep 4–10). 🔁 Repeat investors signal active deployment.

From the Founder Graph Desk

Stories we covered in depth this week — with links.

Tier 1 · Large Rounds

Above $10M · 4 deals

Tier 2 · Mid Rounds

$1M – $10M · 9 deals

Tier 3 · Early-Stage and Undisclosed Rounds

Below $1M or amount undisclosed · 11 companies

Fund Closes This Week

Editor’s Notes — What Stood Out This Week

• Ultraviolette’s $85M Series E is a strategic round, not just a financial one. The Bengaluru-based premium EV motorcycle maker pulled in Japan’s TDK Corporation — the industrial components giant whose materials go into everything from hard drives to EV batteries — as a strategic investor alongside a personal bet from Lip-Bu Tan, the semiconductor veteran who ran Cadence Design Systems and briefly served as Intel CEO. These aren’t passive financial investors; they are companies and people who have built deep expertise in the hardware supply chains that Ultraviolette will need to scale globally. The US market launch in 2027 targets a $50 billion two-wheel commuter market that has seen almost no meaningful EV penetration. The $85M gives Ultraviolette enough runway to attempt that entry without compromising its India operations, where it has already sold 25,000+ units of the F77.

• Ema’s $77M Series B is the most compelling enterprise AI metrics story in this tracker’s six-week run. The company — which builds AI employees (multi-agent systems) for enterprise functions like HR, IT, finance, and customer service — reported 50x revenue growth over two years and over $150M in revenue bookings before this round closed. Its customer list (Google, Microsoft, Wipro) is not a list of early-adopter experiments: these are production deployments at organisations that have hundreds of thousands of their own employees. Creaegis leading this round is also notable — the Bengaluru-based growth fund has backed a small number of companies and this is its largest disclosed bet. The participation of Section 32 (the fund of former Twitter and Dropbox executives) and Prosus (Naspers’ tech arm) adds further institutional weight to what is quietly one of the better-funded enterprise AI companies to come out of an Indian founding team.

• Balwaan Krishi is the undercovered opportunity of the week. A Jaipur-founded farm machinery company raising ₹100 crore at Series B, serving four lakh farmers through 800+ dealers, gets a fraction of the media attention that a Bengaluru AI company raising a similar amount would command. But the structural case for affordable farm mechanisation in India is among the most durable in the entire startup ecosystem: 86% of Indian farmers are smallholders with less than two hectares, power tillers and mini tractors are replacing human labour for the first time in their farming lives, and the government’s PM-KISAN and sub-mission on agricultural mechanisation actively subsidise purchases. First Bridge India Growth Fund PE leading this round signals that institutional PE capital is starting to take the agritech hardware opportunity seriously, not just the software and marketplace models that dominated the sector’s earlier wave of investment.

• Rivet is Indian founders building for America — and Peak XV is following them there. Taru Kapoor spent years as Tinder’s General Manager for India. What she learned is that the dating app model built for the US does not translate to Indian social contexts — and conversely, that Indian social norms around community introductions and vouching may actually translate better to American Gen Z than Tinder’s swipe-based model. Rivet’s community-powered matching (users nominate friends into each other’s dating pools) is a design insight that came from India being forced to solve the social context problem that Western apps ignored. Peak XV backing this as a seed round signals confidence in the thesis. Rivet will compete in one of the world’s most saturated consumer app markets — but the differentiation is structural, not just a feature.

• The IITM Unicorn Frontier Fund I is a landmark for India’s deeptech funding infrastructure. India has dozens of IIT-affiliated incubators that have collectively produced significant startups — but none has raised a ₹1,000 crore institutional fund of its own to deploy capital into that pipeline. The fact that SIDBI, Infosys, HCL, and the Tata Group are all LPs means this fund can deploy government mandate capital, corporate strategic capital, and industrial conglomerate capital into the same pipeline simultaneously — which is the kind of patient, connected capital that deeptech companies need but rarely get in India. The first close of ₹450 crore is large enough to be meaningful; the ₹1,000 crore target makes it the largest IIT-anchored fund India has seen. The companies it backs will benefit not just from capital but from a network that spans government defence procurement, Fortune 500 IT services, and industrial manufacturing.

Data sourced from Inc42, Entrackr, YourStory, StartupTalky, PRNewswire, Business Standard, The Economic Times, and company announcements. 🔁 denotes repeat investor from a previous week in this tracker. All figures verified as of September 29, 2026. The Alive App, Nudge, Autoheal, Amaani, IITM Fund, Bharat Housing Network, and SiMa.ai deals are covered in fuller detail in this week’s special edition.