Nexus Venture Partners has raised a $700 million Fund VIII to support early-stage startups across India and the US. The fund will target AI, enterprise software, consumer tech and fintech, backing around 30 companies. Nexus continues its dual-market model, strengthened by notable exits and stakes in Zepto, Postman and Apollo.io.

Ultraviolette has raised $45 million from Zoho and Lingotto in its Series E round, following $21 million from TDK Ventures. The funds will scale F77 and X47 production, support expansion to 100 cities by 2026, and grow its presence in 12 European markets, as the EV maker readies new platforms Shockwave and Tesseract.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar joined Tim Draper at Sri Sri University in Odisha for a unique episode of Meet The Drapers India, where four startups pitched health-tech and deep-tech innovations built for Bharat. The panel blended investment insight with spiritual perspective, spotlighting solutions for rural healthcare, infrastructure safety and emergency response.

Legal teams process large document sets and rule-heavy logic. Agentic AI assists by reviewing contracts, summarising clauses and structuring compliance checks through multi-step reasoning. While expert oversight remains essential, these systems reduce repetitive tasks and improve research speed without replacing statutory judgment or human interpretation.

AI agents range from reactive and model-based agents to goal-driven and learning agents. Each type handles information, memory and decision-making differently. Knowing these distinctions helps teams select the right agent architecture for planning, environment navigation or multi-step tasks, improving reliability and performance across applications.

OttoPilot streamlines lead acquisition by automating outreach, tracking engagement and qualifying prospects. By combining workflow automation with performance analytics, businesses reduce manual effort while increasing conversion accuracy. Teams can prioritise high-value leads, shorten sales cycles and maintain consistent pipeline health with minimal human intervention.

Influencer-led referrals work when trust, relevance, and timing converge. Users adopt products more readily when recommendations come from credible voices. Structured referral loops, combined with authentic creator advocacy, increase conversion likelihood and keep acquisition costs controlled, allowing brands to scale through community-led momentum.

Human-in-the-loop systems rely on supervised oversight, ensuring control in high-risk tasks. Agentic AI performs multi-step operations autonomously using reasoning loops. Choosing between the two depends on error tolerance, speed needs and governance demands. Understanding both models helps teams deploy AI that fits operational safety and efficiency requirements.

Prescriptive systems analyse creative signals, audience shifts and channel behaviours to recommend actions that raise performance. Instead of reviewing dashboards, teams act directly on insights tied to probable outcomes. This reduces experiment wastage, speeds planning and improves accountability by connecting each suggestion to measurable campaign impact.

Revenue models differ widely, and selecting the wrong metrics slows growth. SaaS depends on retention and payback periods, ecommerce on contribution margins and repeat cycles, and B2B on pipeline quality. Mapping metrics to how money actually compounds helps operators avoid vanity indicators and align decisions with sustainable performance.

Venture capital provides funding in exchange for equity, supporting startups that lack immediate revenue but have high growth potential. Beyond money, VCs offer mentorship, networks and strategic guidance. Understanding term sheets, valuation and dilution helps founders leverage capital efficiently while accelerating product development and market entry.

Building a social media community requires consistent content, active engagement, niche targeting and genuine interactions. Listening to followers, encouraging user-generated content and rewarding participation strengthens loyalty. Brands that prioritise dialogue over broadcast messaging achieve higher trust, better reach and sustained online influence.

Achieving market fit requires consistent pull, rising repeat behaviour and strong message–product alignment. Fit becomes evident when users adopt without heavy incentives and feedback converges on the same value drivers. Recognising these signals early enables teams to double down on the strongest use cases and scale responsibly.

Launching a D2C brand requires product-market validation, strong branding, e-commerce platform selection, logistics setup and marketing strategy. Early focus on customer experience, repeat purchase incentives and clear value propositions reduces acquisition friction and positions the brand for sustainable growth in competitive digital marketplaces.

Whitespace analysis examines gaps in consumer needs, pricing, formats and category saturation. Brands spotting unmet expectations can design offerings before competitors notice. Identifying these gaps early allows faster product adaptation, clearer targeting and stronger differentiation, especially in categories where incumbents overlook nuanced behavioural shifts.

Product teams juggle research, prioritisation and feedback cycles. Agentic AI helps by synthesising data, stress-testing requirements and simulating outcomes before execution. It speeds discovery, reduces manual review burdens and provides scenario-based clarity. This allows managers to focus on strategy, customer value and cross-functional momentum.

SpinItUp — an interactive music‑commerce startup that lets club‑goers request songs during DJ sets — has secured ₹50 lakh in pre‑seed funding from investors including Zee TV’s Ideabaaz Titans, Jimmy Mistry, Anupam Bansal and Archana Jehagirdar. The funds will support tech upgrades, venue partnerships, DJ onboarding and marketing to scale its nightlife‑focused music marketplace across India.

Deep‑tech startup Planys Technologies has raised ₹100 crore to expand its underwater‑robotics and inspection business worldwide. The funding will support growth of its industrial inspection operations and the launch of a new defence arm, Planys Ark, to build mission‑ready unmanned underwater vehicles for security and defence use.

CoreOps.AI, a deep‑tech startup, has raised $ 3.5 million in a Pre‑Series A round led by Siana Capital Management, with participation from other investors. The funds will grow its engineering team, boost AI‑native platform capabilities, and scale enterprise AI modernisation globally, helping businesses update legacy systems, unify data, automate operations, and deploy AI agents across sectors.

Delhi Police officials pressured Delhi-based startup Wherehouse.io's Co-founder Vaibhav Chawla to visit the police station alone, without a lawyer, Wherehouse.io said. Officials began calling Chawla from November 16, refusing to share complaint details or documents. Police officers visited Wherehouse premises six times and obstructed work before an officer threatened staff on November 28.

Skyroot Aerospace Co-founder Pawan Kumar Chandana, the man behind launch of India's first private rocket to space, was an average student who scored just 51 marks in mathematics. According to Deedy Das, Chandana's father didn't give up and instead got him enrolled in IIT-JEE coaching, where he improved academically and began loving science and mathematics. In 2007, he joined IIT-Kharagpur.

TIDA Sports, a Chandigarh‑based multi‑sports coaching platform, has raised ₹3 crore in a seed round led by Inflection Point Ventures. The funds will help TIDA expand to five states and 30 cities, onboard more coaches, upgrade tech, and partner with 200 schools — aiming to reach 100,000+ students. It works via school and academy tie-ups for structured sports training.

Jeff Housenbold, CEO of Beast Industries, the company behind MrBeast, reacted to the plans of the company for an initial public offering (IPO). "We want to…give 1.4 billion…people…who have watched Jimmy’s content…last 90 days a chance to be owners of the company," Housenbold said. If it goes ahead, MrBeast's IPO would be the first public offering by a creator-led business.

InMobi's founders have repurchased a stake worth about $250 million from SoftBank, reducing the Japanese investor's holding in the company from around 35% to over 5%, reports stated. The share buyback deal was executed at a valuation of under $1 billion. SoftBank had invested around $200 million in InMobi from 2011 and will receive $250 million from this transaction.

Government’s probe into Ola and Uber’s pricing algorithms has slowed due to challenges in technically decoding how fares are calculated, Moneycontrol reported. This marks a stark contrast to the swift action taken against Rapido over misleading cashback claims. The probe into these platforms was initiated following reports of price discrepancies between Android and iOS users for the same journey.