Syndication and co-investment for institutional venture capital.

🇮🇳 Indian home services startup Instafix has raised over ₹7 crore in a pre-seed funding round as it looks to expand its technology-driven repair and maintenance platform across major urban markets. The round saw participation from a mix of angel investors, operators, and early-stage backers focused on India’s rapidly growing consumer services ecosystem. Founded by Kunal Khattar and Siddharth Maheshwari, Instafix operates an on-demand home services platform focused on repairs, maintenance, appliance servicing, and household assistance. The company is positioning itself as a tech-enabled solution for India’s fragmented home services market by integrating AI-driven workflows, technician management systems, and customer support automation into a unified platform. The startup plans to use the newly raised capital to strengthen product development, improve operational infrastructure, expand city presence, and grow its network of trained service professionals. Instafix is also investing in AI-powered diagnostics, automated scheduling systems, and quality assurance tools aimed at improving customer experience and service reliability. India’s home services market has witnessed rapid digital adoption over the last few years as consumers increasingly rely on app-based platforms for household maintenance and repair requirements. Startups operating in this segment are attracting investor interest due to rising urbanization, increasing disposable incomes, and growing demand for organized service marketplaces. The funding reflects continued momentum within India’s consumer-tech and services infrastructure ecosystem, particularly among startups leveraging automation and technology to modernize traditionally unorganized industries.

🇺🇸 Seattle-based optical semiconductor startup Lumotive has raised $45 million in fresh funding to accelerate commercialization of its programmable optical chip technology used in LiDAR, robotics, AI infrastructure, autonomous systems, and advanced sensing applications. The round included participation from Swisscom Ventures, East Bridge, EDOM, Grazia Equity, Hokuyo Inc., and other strategic investors. Founded by former Microsoft engineers Dr. Sam Heidari and Dr. Bill Colleran, Lumotive develops Light Control Metasurface (LCM™) technology - a programmable optical semiconductor platform that enables software-defined beam steering and sensing without moving mechanical components. The company’s technology is designed to significantly reduce the cost, size, and power consumption of next-generation LiDAR and optical sensing systems. Lumotive said the newly raised capital will be used to scale manufacturing, accelerate product commercialization, expand engineering operations, and strengthen partnerships across industrial automation, autonomous vehicles, robotics, smart infrastructure, and AI-driven sensing markets. The company is also increasing investment in semiconductor production capabilities as demand grows for compact, low-power optical systems. The startup has positioned itself at the intersection of photonics, semiconductors, and AI infrastructure, with programmable optics increasingly becoming critical for machine perception systems powering robotics, autonomous mobility, industrial automation, and spatial computing applications. Lumotive’s technology has already been integrated into multiple industrial and automotive-grade sensing solutions through partnerships with global hardware manufacturers. The funding reflects growing investor interest in photonics and next-generation semiconductor technologies as industries increasingly require faster, lower-cost, and software-configurable sensing systems for AI-native applications. Optical computing and programmable photonics are rapidly emerging as key enabling technologies across robotics, defense, automotive, and industrial AI markets.

🇮🇳 Pune-based fintech startup FPL Technologies has raised $75 million in a Series C funding round led by existing investor Peak XV Partners, with participation from Temasek, Matrix Partners India, and Prosus Ventures. The latest funding comes as the company accelerates expansion of its OneCard credit platform and strengthens its position within India’s rapidly growing digital credit ecosystem. Founded in 2019 by Rajeev Ahuja, Anurag Sinha, and Gaurav Chopra, FPL Technologies operates OneCard, a mobile-first credit card and consumer finance platform that combines digital onboarding, rewards, expense management, and lending services into a unified app experience. The company has emerged as one of India’s most prominent fintech players focused on younger digitally native consumers seeking app-centric banking and credit products. The company plans to use the fresh capital to expand product offerings, strengthen technology infrastructure, scale distribution, and deepen partnerships across banking and financial institutions. FPL Technologies is also investing heavily in artificial intelligence, underwriting systems, fraud prevention, and customer engagement capabilities as competition intensifies across India’s fintech sector. OneCard has gained significant traction in India’s premium consumer fintech market by offering metal credit cards, real-time spend controls, instant rewards systems, and app-based financial management tools. The startup has partnered with multiple banks and financial institutions to issue co-branded cards while maintaining a technology-first user experience layer. The funding reflects continued investor confidence in India’s digital lending and consumer fintech ecosystem despite tighter regulatory scrutiny in recent years. With rising smartphone penetration, UPI adoption, and demand for digital financial services, fintech infrastructure companies focused on consumer credit and embedded finance continue attracting major institutional capital.

🇺🇸 Indoor vertical farming startup Oishii has announced the first close of its $150 million Series C funding round as the company accelerates production capacity, robotics integration, and international expansion across the smart agriculture sector. The round was led by SPARX Asset Management, with participation from Nomura Real Estate Development, MISUMI Group, Mizuho Bank, and other strategic investors. Founded in 2016 by Hiroki Koga, Oishii operates one of the world’s largest indoor vertical strawberry farms and has become one of the highest-profile companies in controlled-environment agriculture. The startup combines robotics, AI-driven automation, advanced environmental controls, and Japanese farming techniques to produce pesticide-free strawberries year-round inside indoor smart farms. The company plans to use the fresh capital to increase production capacity, expand farm infrastructure, deepen robotics deployment, and strengthen research and development capabilities across the United States and Japan. Oishii is also building a large-scale Open Innovation Center in Tokyo focused on next-generation vertical farming technologies and automation systems. Oishii has continued scaling despite broader challenges in the vertical farming industry, which has seen multiple startups struggle with profitability and operational efficiency over the past few years. The company has differentiated itself through premium produce positioning, advanced automation, and tighter operational execution. Following its acquisition of Tortuga AgTech in 2025, Oishii significantly strengthened its robotics and harvesting automation capabilities. The startup has also expanded retail distribution across 18 U.S. states and entered Canada as its first international retail market. Since launching its premium Omakase Berry product in 2018 at nearly $50 per tray, the company has broadened its portfolio with more affordable product lines and packaging formats aimed at wider consumer adoption. The funding highlights renewed investor confidence in AI-powered agriculture infrastructure startups focused on automation, climate resilience, and controlled-environment food production. As food supply chains face increasing pressure from climate change, labor shortages, and resource constraints, vertically integrated smart farming companies are increasingly attracting strategic capital from industrial, financial, and technology investors.

DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab that upended the global AI industry last year, is in talks to raise its first round of external funding at a valuation of approximately $45 billion — up sharply from $20 billion when discussions first began just weeks earlier, and from an earlier reported target of $10 billion. The round is expected to raise between $300 million and $4 billion, with proceeds earmarked for expanding computing infrastructure and boosting staff compensation. China's state-backed China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund — widely known as the "Big Fund" — is in talks to lead the round, according to the Financial Times, citing four sources. It would mark the Big Fund's first known investment in a large language model developer. Tencent and Alibaba are also among the parties still in discussions for a stake, though the final structure and investor lineup have not been finalised. DeepSeek was founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, a 40-year-old computer scientist and co-founder of the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer Capital Management, who controls nearly 90% of the company. Until now, the lab had been funded entirely from High-Flyer's balance sheet, repeatedly rebuffing approaches from venture capital firms and major technology companies. It rose to global prominence in early 2025 after releasing a large language model that matched the performance of leading US systems at a fraction of the cost and compute, briefly rattling stock markets worldwide. The fundraising reflects both operational and strategic imperatives. Developing and maintaining frontier AI models increasingly demands substantial capital, and a deal with state-backed investors would likely bring more than funding — including access to state-aligned customers and a signal that DeepSeek is now considered strategically important to China's national AI ambitions. Neither DeepSeek nor the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund provided a public statement on the reported talks.

Lithosquare, a Paris-based startup using AI and geological science to speed up the discovery of critical minerals, has raised €21.3 million ($25 million) in seed funding. The round was co-led by World Fund and Kindred Capital, with participation from Daphni, Omnes Capital, and Ovni Capital. The company was founded in 2024 by mining engineer Aymeric Préveral-Etcheverry, with Simon Leclair joining shortly after as founding COO. Both spent years in mineral exploration before deciding the process needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. Lithosquare's platform combines foundational AI with science-based geological models of the subsurface — going beyond pattern recognition to understand how mineral deposits actually form underground, enabling more accurate targeting of where to drill for copper, lithium, nickel, and other critical metals. The problem the company is addressing is one of scale and time. Today, getting from an initial exploration idea to a confirmed deposit typically takes 7 to 15 years, with geologists spending up to 80% of their time on data processing rather than actual geological interpretation. Lithosquare claims its platform can compress those analysis timelines from months to days, improving exploration efficiency by up to 10x. Rather than replacing geologists, the platform is designed to augment them - freeing expert teams to focus on fieldwork and interpretation rather than manual data processing. The urgency is significant. By 2040, the supply gap for critical metals like copper, lithium, and nickel could reach €299 billion ($350 billion), according to the company, with lithium demand alone projected to grow by over 400% and copper by around 50%, driven by EV batteries, AI data centres, and grid infrastructure. More than 1,000 new mineral deposits will need to be discovered to meet that demand - a target that recycling alone cannot achieve. Lithosquare plans to use the funding to grow its team of geologists and AI engineers, continue platform development, and expand globally. The company is already working with exploration and mining partners across the US, Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and recently announced its first partnership with UK-based mining company Aterian.