Nikhil Kamath’s ₹200 Crore Data Centre Bet and Peeko’s $7 Million Baby Commerce Play

Two funding announcements from India’s startup ecosystem this week sit at opposite ends of the scale spectrum — one involves a 19-year-old hyperscale data centre operator raising capital from two of India’s most high-profile individual investors, the other a two-year-old babycare startup doubling its dark store footprint in Bengaluru. What connects them is a shared logic: both are building in categories where the defensible position belongs to the company willing to invest in depth, specificity, and operational infrastructure before the market makes it obvious. In 2026, that is precisely the kind of conviction that is attracting capital.

CtrlS DataCenters: why Nikhil Kamath just wrote a ₹200 crore cheque

On August 19, CtrlS DataCenters announced that Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath had invested ₹200 crore in the company, with Sreeram Reddy Vanga — co-founder of adtech firm Kofluence — contributing an additional ₹50 crore. The total round was ₹250 crore (~$26.1 million), entirely equity, and the capital will go toward infrastructure expansion and capacity build-out to serve growing enterprise and hyperscaler demand.

Founded in 2007 by Sridhar Pinnapureddy and headquartered in Hyderabad, CtrlS is one of India’s oldest and largest hyperscale data centre operators. It currently operates 19 data centre campuses across nine key markets — Mumbai, Hyderabad, Noida, and Bengaluru among them — with over 370 MW of operational compute capacity and 4.4 GW of projects at various stages of execution. Its client base spans enterprises, cloud providers, financial institutions, and government organisations.

In June 2026, CtrlS received commitments of up to ₹7,000 crore from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) at a valuation of approximately $4.7 to $4.8 billion — including ₹4,000 crore for an 8.2% stake and ₹3,000 crore toward a hyperscale data centre joint venture. The Kamath-Vanga round follows that institutional commitment as a separate equity infusion. Beyond India, the company is testing international markets: a 150 MW hyperscale campus is under development in Thailand’s Chonburi Eastern Economic Corridor, with further expansion planned for the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The company’s target is 4 GW of total installed capacity by 2031.

“Every meaningful technology shift of the next decade — AI, cloud, and digital public infrastructure — runs on data centres. India is at an inflection point where the underlying infrastructure either keeps pace or becomes the bottleneck. CtrlS has spent years building the kind of depth that does not get assembled overnight. That is what made this an easy decision.” — Nikhil Kamath, investor and co-founder, Zerodha

Kamath’s framing deserves examination. Data centres are not a fashionable investment theme — they are capital-intensive, operationally complex, and slow to generate returns. The decision to put ₹200 crore of personal capital into one reflects a specific thesis: that India’s AI and cloud ambitions will be constrained not by talent or software capability but by physical compute infrastructure, and that the window to build that infrastructure before demand overwhelms supply is narrow.

The broader data supports this view. India currently holds nearly 20% of the world’s data but has just 3% of global data centre capacity, according to Deloitte’s 2025 AI infrastructure report. The colocation market is growing at a CAGR of approximately 24.68% through 2029. Investment commitments in India’s data centre industry are expected to exceed $100 billion by 2027. Amazon has committed $12.7 billion toward Indian cloud infrastructure by 2030. OpenAI is planning a 1 GW data centre in India in partnership with TCS. Meta has tied up with Reliance for a 168 MW facility in Gujarat. The demand is structural and accelerating — and CtrlS, with 19 years of operational depth, is positioned to capture a disproportionate share of it.

What distinguishes this round is also the investor combination. CPP Investments buying an 8.2% stake at a $4.7 billion valuation provides institutional validation of CtrlS’s asset quality. Kamath writing a personal cheque of ₹200 crore adds a different layer of conviction — that of one of India’s most credible founder-investors who has studied the infrastructure opportunity and made a deliberate, large, personal bet on it. The two signals together make a strong case that CtrlS is building something genuinely category-defining in Indian digital infrastructure.

Peeko: building vertical quick commerce for the hardest customer in India

Peeko, a Bengaluru-based babycare quick commerce startup, has raised $7 million (~₹67.4 crore) in a Series A round led by Chiratae Ventures, with participation from existing investor Stellaris Venture Partners and angel investors. Total funding since founding now stands at approximately ₹95 crore, including a ₹28 crore raise in 2025.

Peeko was founded by Chetan Sharma and Abhijit Gairola — both former Leap Finance executives — and Vivek Khetan, formerly of OYO. The company came out of stealth in 2025 and operates a vertical quick commerce platform delivering babycare products within approximately 60 minutes. Its product portfolio spans kid apparel, toys, shoes, accessories, hard goods, diapers, wipes, personal care products, and baby food — over 30,000 SKUs from more than 100 Indian and international brands including Dr. Brown’s, Cetaphil, Sebamed, Mothercare, and Pantaloons.

Peeko currently operates three dark stores in Bengaluru covering approximately 55% of the city’s pincodes. The Series A capital will fund three additional dark stores by the end of 2026, expanding to full Bengaluru coverage, with entry into new cities planned for early 2027.

“Touch and feel becomes a very central proposition along with the right selection.” — Chetan Sharma, Co-founder and CEO, Peeko

The product insight that makes Peeko structurally different from generic quick commerce platforms is worth examining closely. New parents buying babycare products — particularly in categories like diapers, formula, clothing, and safety hardware — have historically wanted to physically verify products before purchasing. A diaper that fits one baby may not fit another. A feeding bottle that works for one household routine may not suit a different family. The tactile verification that physical retail provides has been difficult to replicate online.

Peeko’s answer is a “try before you buy” delivery model: a rider delivers the order, waits while the customer inspects the products, and accepts returns on the spot with instant refunds. Most customers use this option during their first transaction. The resulting retention improvement — customers who try and keep a product are significantly more likely to reorder — directly addresses the unit economics problem that has challenged quick commerce in tactile categories. Peeko’s revenue has grown approximately 5x since the beginning of 2026, from a single city with three dark stores.

The broader quick commerce market provides substantial tailwind. Quick commerce players in India are expected to reach $68 billion in gross merchandise value by 2031, up from $8.3 billion in 2026 — a near 8x increase at a CAGR of 52%, per Inc42’s D2C 3.0 report. Within that, vertical platforms targeting specific high-frequency, high-loyalty consumer segments are attracting growing investor attention. Peeko’s closest competitor in vertical babycare quick commerce is Ozi, which currently operates in Delhi NCR — a different geography for now, making the competitive dynamic a future question rather than a present one.

Chiratae Ventures leading the Series A is a credible endorsement for the category. Chiratae has backed companies including Myntra, FirstCry, and Cure.fit — a track record in Indian consumer internet that gives their bet on Peeko meaningful context. A Series A in a two-year-old, single-city company at this stage of development reflects a view that Peeko’s product differentiation — the SKU depth, the brand relationships, the “try before you buy” model — is building a defensible position that general quick commerce platforms will find difficult to replicate at the same quality level.

What both companies share

CtrlS and Peeko are building in completely different domains. But the capital logic connecting them is the same: in India right now, the funding is following depth over breadth, category specificity over platform generalism, and operational infrastructure over market size claims.

CtrlS has been building data centre infrastructure since 2007 — long before AI became a mainstream investment theme — and is now attracting the personal capital of one of India’s most credible individual investors because that patience has produced genuine asset depth. Peeko is two years old and operating in a single city, but it has built a product model — “try before you buy,” 30,000 SKUs, 100+ specialist brands — that creates real switching costs and a retention flywheel that general quick commerce cannot easily replicate. Both are making the same underlying argument to their investors: we are building something that compounds with time, and we are doing it in a category where the defensible position belongs to the company that invested in depth before it was obvious.

That is the investment thesis that is working in India in 2026.

Sources: Inc42, Business Standard, YourStory, Free Press Journal, Dealroom, Deloitte AI Infrastructure Report 2025, Mordor Intelligence, Inc42 D2C 3.0 Report 2026. All figures verified as of August 20, 2026.