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Funding to fintech companies marginally dips to $889 million in H1CY25

Funding to fintech companies marginally dips to $889 million in H1CY25

Fintechs in India raised $889.2 mn in H1CY25, down 5.3% YoY and 25.9% from H2CY24, as deal count dropped significantly and late-stage rounds led capital inflow
Ajinkya Kawale Mumbai
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Funding to fintech companies in India declined to $889.2 million in the first half of calendar year 2025 (H1CY25), a marginal 5.3 per cent drop from the $936.4 million the sector raised in H1CY24.
The amount of funds raised by these companies shrank 25.9 per cent from $1.2 billion recorded in H2CY24, data from market intelligence platform Tracxn shows.
The number of funding rounds decreased sharply from 195 in H1CY24 to 109 in H1CY25. The sector saw 131 funding rounds in H2CY24.
Among the top fundraisers were Cred, which secured $75 million in a Series G round; InsuranceDekho, with $70
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ET Soonicorns Summit 2025: Building real defensibility—a unicorn panel to dive into the hard truths of AI moats
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Economic Times

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  • Economic Times

ET Soonicorns Summit 2025: Building real defensibility—a unicorn panel to dive into the hard truths of AI moats

ET Special In an age where generative (Gen) AI models are increasingly open-source and entry barriers are dissolving, the defining question for India's burgeoning tech ecosystem has shifted. It's no longer just about being AI-powered; it's about building a lasting competitive advantage. For the nation's celebrated unicorns and ambitious soonicorns, the key to market leadership lies in constructing formidable 'AI moats'—strategic, defensible barriers that protect against the commoditisation of artificial critical conversation will take centre stage at the ET Soonicorns Summit 2025 in Bengaluru on 22 August. Featuring Piyush Shah, Co-founder of InMobi and President and COO of Glance; Saahil Goel, Managing Director and CEO of Shiprocket; and Saurabh Garg, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of NoBroker, the headline session, 'Unravelling AI Moats for Market Leadership,' will decode the architecture of sustainable innovation. According to data intelligence platform Tracxn, India is now home to 121 unicorns as of July 2025. The latest to join the club is Jumbotail, a business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce platform in the food and grocery sector, which achieved unicorn status on June 30, 2025. As India's startup landscape matures, the focus is intensifying on how these companies embed AI not as a feature, but as a core structural advantage. The discussion will dissect the mechanics of creating these moats, from proprietary data network effects to balancing speed-to-market with the creation of defensible intellectual property. Here's what you can expect to hear from leaders who have successfully built and scaled businesses across diverse sectors by leveraging AI in unique and defensible ways: The 'everyone has GPT-4' problem – If powerful AI models are available to everyone, what makes your company stand out? – If powerful AI models are available to everyone, what makes your company stand out? Hardware making a comeback – Has AI unexpectedly made physical machines, chips, and devices valuable again? Why are investors now showing interest in hardware after years of focusing on software? – Has AI unexpectedly made physical machines, chips, and devices valuable again? Why are investors now showing interest in hardware after years of focusing on software? Data or distribution? – Is owning unique data the ultimate advantage, or is getting your product in front of users early even more powerful? History shows the best product doesn't always win; so what's your unique way of reaching customers? – Is owning unique data the ultimate advantage, or is getting your product in front of users early even more powerful? History shows the best product doesn't always win; so what's your unique way of reaching customers? Going big vs. going deep – Can focusing on one specific industry lead to a large, scalable company, or do niche AI businesses usually end up being bought out? How specialised is too specialised? – Can focusing on one specific industry lead to a large, scalable company, or do niche AI businesses usually end up being bought out? How specialised is too specialised? The people factor – Are skilled human experts your biggest strength, or do they slow you down? And can you grow a company when AI itself is trying to automate human judgement? The panel will also confront some hard truths: Who is your customer, specifically? Why does AI make your solution uniquely valuable? What can you solve that only you can solve? Meet the unicorn leaders at ET Soonicorns Summit 2025As the Co-founder of InMobi and President and COO of Glance, Piyush Shah has been at the epicentre of mobile technology and AI-driven content delivery. Glance, an AI-powered smart lock screen platform, is an example of a powerful AI moat built on user engagement and personalisation. By transforming the lock screen into a curated content discovery platform, Glance has created a unique company's AI algorithms analyse user preferences to deliver personalised content, news, and entertainment without requiring the user even to unlock their phone. This creates a powerful data flywheel; the more users interact with the content, the smarter the AI becomes, leading to a continuously improving and highly sticky user experience. Shah's experience in building Glance provides a masterclass in how to leverage AI to create a new content consumption paradigm and a deeply integrated product that is difficult for competitors to the Managing Director and CEO of Shiprocket, Saahil Goel has steered his company to become a successful logistics and e-commerce enablement platform for millions of online sellers in India. 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A key innovation is ConvoZen, an AI tool that analyses conversations to generate customer insights, which was initially developed for internal efficiency but is now being adopted by other companies. Garg can be expected to share insights into building a defensible business and solving a core consumer problem by using AI, thereby creating a trusted, data-centric ecosystem that becomes harder to challenge over Indian unicorns and soonicorns navigate an increasingly competitive global landscape, the ability to build and defend these AI moats will be the ultimate differentiator between fleeting success and enduring market leadership. The ET Soonicorns Summit 2025, India's largest congregation of soonicorns, returns for its fourth edition to Bengaluru on August 22, bringing together unicorn and soonicorn founders, investors, policymakers, and AI leaders for a day of sharp dialogue, bold ambition, and hard questions. 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ET Soonicorns Summit 2025: Building real defensibility—a unicorn panel to dive into the hard truths of AI moats
ET Soonicorns Summit 2025: Building real defensibility—a unicorn panel to dive into the hard truths of AI moats

Time of India

time2 days ago

  • Time of India

ET Soonicorns Summit 2025: Building real defensibility—a unicorn panel to dive into the hard truths of AI moats

The 'everyone has GPT-4' problem – If powerful AI models are available to everyone, what makes your company stand out? – If powerful AI models are available to everyone, what makes your company stand out? Hardware making a comeback – Has AI unexpectedly made physical machines, chips, and devices valuable again? Why are investors now showing interest in hardware after years of focusing on software? – Has AI unexpectedly made physical machines, chips, and devices valuable again? Why are investors now showing interest in hardware after years of focusing on software? Data or distribution? – Is owning unique data the ultimate advantage, or is getting your product in front of users early even more powerful? History shows the best product doesn't always win; so what's your unique way of reaching customers? – Is owning unique data the ultimate advantage, or is getting your product in front of users early even more powerful? History shows the best product doesn't always win; so what's your unique way of reaching customers? Going big vs. going deep – Can focusing on one specific industry lead to a large, scalable company, or do niche AI businesses usually end up being bought out? How specialised is too specialised? – Can focusing on one specific industry lead to a large, scalable company, or do niche AI businesses usually end up being bought out? How specialised is too specialised? The people factor – Are skilled human experts your biggest strength, or do they slow you down? And can you grow a company when AI itself is trying to automate human judgement? Academy Empower your mind, elevate your skills Who is your customer, specifically? Why does AI make your solution uniquely valuable? What can you solve that only you can solve? In an age where generative (Gen) AI models are increasingly open-source and entry barriers are dissolving, the defining question for India's burgeoning tech ecosystem has shifted. It's no longer just about being AI-powered; it's about building a lasting competitive advantage. For the nation's celebrated unicorns and ambitious soonicorns, the key to market leadership lies in constructing formidable 'AI moats'—strategic, defensible barriers that protect against the commoditisation of artificial critical conversation will take centre stage at the ET Soonicorns Summit 2025 in Bengaluru on 22 August. Featuring Piyush Shah, Co-founder of InMobi and President and COO of Glance; Saahil Goel, Managing Director and CEO of Shiprocket; and Saurabh Garg, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of NoBroker, the headline session, 'Unravelling AI Moats for Market Leadership,' will decode the architecture of sustainable to data intelligence platform Tracxn, India is now home to 121 unicorns as of July 2025. The latest to join the club is Jumbotail, a business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce platform in the food and grocery sector, which achieved unicorn status on June 30, 2025 . As India's startup landscape matures, the focus is intensifying on how these companies embed AI not as a feature, but as a core structural advantage. The discussion will dissect the mechanics of creating these moats, from proprietary data network effects to balancing speed-to-market with the creation of defensible intellectual what you can expect to hear from leaders who have successfully built and scaled businesses across diverse sectors by leveraging AI in unique and defensible ways:As the Co-founder of InMobi and President and COO of Glance, Piyush Shah has been at the epicentre of mobile technology and AI-driven content delivery. Glance, an AI-powered smart lock screen platform, is an example of a powerful AI moat built on user engagement and personalisation. By transforming the lock screen into a curated content discovery platform, Glance has created a unique company's AI algorithms analyse user preferences to deliver personalised content, news, and entertainment without requiring the user even to unlock their phone. This creates a powerful data flywheel; the more users interact with the content, the smarter the AI becomes, leading to a continuously improving and highly sticky user experience. Shah's experience in building Glance provides a masterclass in how to leverage AI to create a new content consumption paradigm and a deeply integrated product that is difficult for competitors to the Managing Director and CEO of Shiprocket, Saahil Goel has steered his company to become a successful logistics and e-commerce enablement platform for millions of online sellers in India. Shiprocket's success is a testament to building an AI moat in a complex, operational-heavy the heart of Shiprocket's defensibility is its AI-powered courier recommendation engine, CORE, which analyses multiple parameters to suggest the optimal shipping partner for each order, balancing cost, speed, and reliability. This is said to not only enhance efficiency for sellers but also generate vast amounts of proprietary data on logistics performance across the country. This data, in turn, fuels a feedback loop that continually refines the platform's intelligence, making its recommendations increasingly accurate and valuable. His journey with the unicorn offers crucial lessons on building moats through operational excellence and data network effects, showcasing how AI can create structural advantages in traditional sectorsJoining Shah and Goel would be Saurabh Garg, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of NoBroker, which has been instrumental in disrupting India's massive real estate market by eliminating intermediaries. The platform's entire value proposition is built on an AI-powered framework that connects property owners directly with tenants and buyers. This approach has not only created immense value for users but has also established a powerful AI moat for the leverages AI for a multitude of tasks, from predicting property prices and recommending localities to verifying listings and filtering out brokers. A key innovation is ConvoZen, an AI tool that analyses conversations to generate customer insights, which was initially developed for internal efficiency but is now being adopted by other companies. Garg can be expected to share insights into building a defensible business and solving a core consumer problem by using AI, thereby creating a trusted, data-centric ecosystem that becomes harder to challenge over Indian unicorns and soonicorns navigate an increasingly competitive global landscape, the ability to build and defend these AI moats will be the ultimate differentiator between fleeting success and enduring market ET Soonicorns Summit 2025 , India's largest congregation of soonicorns, returns for its fourth edition to Bengaluru on August 22, bringing together unicorn and soonicorn founders, investors, policymakers, and AI leaders for a day of sharp dialogue, bold ambition, and hard questions. With the theme 'From Research Labs to Revenue Models: The Billion-Dollar Blueprint for Scaling Indian AI Startups,' this year's edition is poised to redefine what scale means in the Indian for the ET Soonicorns Summit 2025 is now open. Register Here. 360 ONE is the Presenting Partner of the ET Soonicorns Summit 2025, with Raymond as the Wardrobe Partner and Shiv Nadar University as the Ecosystem Partner.(This article is generated and published by the ET Spotlight team. You can get in touch with them at etspotlight@ .)

Identity verification startup 1Kosmos raises $57 million in Series B
Identity verification startup 1Kosmos raises $57 million in Series B

Mint

time3 days ago

  • Mint

Identity verification startup 1Kosmos raises $57 million in Series B

BENGALURU : Identity verification and security startup 1Kosmos Inc. has raised a $57-million Series B round led by Oquirrh Ventures and Origami Capital Partners at a valuation of approximately $360 million (~ ₹3,000 crore), said a top executive at the US-based firm. Existing investor ForgePoint Capital also participated in the round, which included a $10 million line of credit from Bridge Bank. The latest round brings the total funding to $72 million for the company, which has raised two rounds before—a $15 million Series A fundraising led by ForgePoint Capital in 2021 and an undisclosed amount from cybersecurity investor Gula Tech Adventures in 2022, according to data from Tracxn. 'With the new funds we're going to double down on Southeast Asia, and one of the growing markets we're going to focus on is the Middle East," Siddharth Gandhi, chief operating officer, Asia Pacific at 1Kosmos, told Mint. 1Kosmos positions itself as a multi-factor authentication (MFA) provider that replaces old security measures like two-factor authentication (2FA) and passwords. It uses methods like one-time passwords, push notifications, FIDO Passkeys (which allow users to sign into apps and websites using their device biometrics) and even facial and fingerprint recognition. The company also does employee and vendor onboarding using MFA. It competes with IDfy, HyperVerge, Zoop, OnGrid, and inVOID, among others, in the Indian identity verification and management market, which, according to Tracxn, boasts 90 players. These companies receive small cheques, starting as low as $250,000 and going as high as $11 million, which is what the digital transaction and enterprise documentation management platform Digio received in 2022 as seed funding from Groww Invest Tech Pvt. Ltd and Rainmatter by Zerodha. Product development 1Kosmos will be directing 35-40% of the funds raised towards research and development for product development. Currently, it has three products: 1Kosmos Verify, 1Kosmos Workforce, and 1Kosmos Customer. Specifically, the company is doubling down on improving its AI-detection algorithms. 'We're improving capabilities around deepfake detection and injection attacks," said Gandhi. Injection attacks occur when artificial intelligence is made to behave like a user, thereby breaching enterprise ecosystems. Second on the company's list of priorities is deepening its presence in Asia and the Middle East, for which it's putting aside 25% of the funds raised. The remaining is being split between deepening its services to government entities in the North American geography and increasing its sales and marketing spending. North America accounts for 65% of its revenue, while Asia accounts for the remaining 35%. 'With Southeast Asia and the Middle East kicking in, we will continue to maintain that ratio," said Gandhi. 'The balance that Asia brings in is in terms of contract volumes, not in terms of value." India plans When 1Kosmos, founded by Hemen Vimadalal, Rohan Pinto, and Mike Engle, launched simultaneously in the US and Indian markets in 2018. Since then, its client list in the country has grown. It began the year with 22 clients. As of last week, it had onboarded six more clients, bringing its total to 28 clients in India. It plans to bring its total number of clients in the country to 50 by the end of 2026-27. Initially, the company's clients, including India Infoline and Kotak Securities, mostly came from banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI), telecom and a few business process outsourcing companies. It is trying to broaden its client base to more sectors. 'We're moving towards pharma and education. A country with a population of 1.4 billion is a very large addressable market for us to cover. That's including customer-facing businesses," said Gandhi. 1Kosmos' India subsidiary recorded a revenue of ₹14 crore in 2023-24, up 5% year-on-year. Its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (Ebitda) rose to ₹2.7 crore and profit to ₹1.8 crore.

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