Startup and news updates: Daily roundup (July 21, 2025)
YourStory presents the daily news roundup from the Indian startup ecosystem and beyond. Here's the roundup for Monday, July 21, 2025.
From Reliance Retail’s entry into the quick commerce race with Ajio Rush to EduFund securing $6 million in Series A funding, YourStory brings you today’s headlines with the latest developments across sectors.
Featured stories
Reasoning LLMs, AI agents: Infibeam looks beyond fintech with Rs 700 Cr rights issue
Avenues is branching out by placing a bold bet on artificial intelligence. The Ahmedabad-based fintech is launching a rights issue worth nearly Rs 700 crore to fund what its founder Vishal Mehta calls the “full-stack agent AI ecosystem of the future.”
With this ambitious raise, Infibeam is looking beyond its core payments and fintech operations, doubling down on a vision that spans multimodal models, AI agent infrastructure, and marketplace and custom e-mail solutions, thanks to its recent acquisition of Rediff.
“This is not just about fintech. It’s about creating an open, scalable agentic AI platform that works across industries—something that allows any entrepreneur or enterprise to build, deploy, and monetise intelligent agents without needing to write a single line of code,” Mehta, also the managing director of Infibeam Avenues, tells YourStory during an interview in June.
Of the Rs 700 crore capital, the company plans to set aside nearly Rs 300 crore for its AI initiatives, which rest on three pillars—reasoning models, agentic frameworks, and real-world deployment platforms.
How Flyers Soft is redefining tech services with AI-powered accelerators
Growing up in Andhra Pradesh, Uday Kanth spent his summers in his father’s bakery, learning about scheduling and coordinating with clients. Today, he uses those lessons to run Flyers Soft, a Chennai-based tech company serving global clients in fintech, healthcare, and enterprise sectors.
At 31, Kanth is the sole founder of Flyers Soft, a digital solutions company founded in 2019 with no external funding. A BCA graduate from SRM University in Chennai, Kanth began his career in business development at Tech Affinity and later worked with Happiness Interactive, a Bengaluru-based startup.
There, he gained his first experience in managing finances, handling clients, and hiring developers. “I never planned to enter IT services,” he recalls. “Even as a sales guy, I never saw myself getting into software.” “But I had strong mentors and a network of tech professionals across cities like Chennai, Hyderabad, and Vijayawada,” he said.
With their support and Rs 50,000 borrowed from his mother, he started Flyers Soft. Kanth points out a key industry gap: while most engineers follow instructions, few take ownership and think like product builders. “The market has software talent, but lacks people who understand and solve problems end-to-end,” he says.
Dear Diary is a celebration of our land and stories: Rashmika Mandanna on her new fragrance line
Scent is the most evocative of senses. The distinctive whiff from the pages of old books, the petrichor of the first drops of rain, or the wafting aroma of cake baking in the oven can instantly summon a memory you didn’t even realise you were holding on to.
Fragrance has this remarkable quality of tugging at the heartstrings and evoking evergreen memories and emotions. It’s this intimate relationship between scent and the self that inspired actor Rashmika Mandanna to create Dear Diary—a fragrance brand that strives to be personal and poetic, and take one down memory lane. Kind of like time travel through a bottle, if one may say so.
“Scent has always been the most emotional sense for me,” Mandanna tells YS Life.“Growing up, certain smells would immediately take me back to places and people I loved—my mom’s body lotion or the coffee estates of Coorg.” She adds, “One day, I just thought, if these scents bring me comfort, confidence and connection, could I create something that does that for others too?’”
Other news:
Eternal Q1 preview: Strong GOV growth likely for Blinkit, Zomato
Deepinder Goyal-led Eternal, the parent company behind , , and others, is set to announce its financial results for the first quarter (Q1) of FY26 at the close of markets today.
According to a recent report by brokerage JM Financial Institutional Securities, (JMFISL) the Delhi-NCR-based company is expected to report EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) improvement to Rs 170 crore in the three months ended June 30, 2025, from Rs 72 crore in the previous quarter.
During the same period, analysts expect its after-tax profit to improve to Rs 78.5 crore from Rs 39 crore in the previous quarter.
Reliance Retail enters quick commerce race with Ajio Rush
Reliance Industries' retail arm, , has announced the launch of Ajio Rush, a quick commerce platform launched in six major cities.
During a post earnings call with analysts, the company, which operates ecommerce platform Ajio, along with Reliance Digital, Reliance Trends, and Reliance Fresh, among others, said it has carved out spaces in its stores to fulfill online orders, enabling deliveries in under four hours.
The service currently offers a curated selection of over 130,000 products across the six cities where it is live.
Funding news
EduFund bags $6M in Series A funding led by Cercano Management, MassMutual Ventures
, a full-stack platform for education planning and financing, has secured $6 million (~Rs 50 crore) in a Series A funding round led by private equity and investment firm Cercano Management, and global venture capital firm MassMutual Ventures.
The company will use the funding to enhance its AI-driven advisory services with a personalised planning engine, expand loan options for underserved undergraduates, and extend access to education financing in Tier II and III cities.
Founded in 2020 by Eela Dubey and Arindam Sengupta, the education-focused fintech platform helps Indian families plan and fund education from early years to higher studies. Its services span investments, loans, visa and immigration support, remittances, and counselling. Since its inception, the company claims to have gained over 250,000 users and built a network of over 40 asset managers and more than 15 lenders, including banks, NBFCs, and international institutions.
Hudle secures $2.5M Series A to expand sports network
, a sports community platform, has raised $2.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Sky Impact Capital, with participation from Physis Capital, Atrium Venture, Mahesh Bhupathi (12-time Grand Slam winner), Gaurav Kapur (TV presenter and producer), and the founders of Blue Tokai (Shivam Shahi) and Nitro Commerce (Umair Mohammed).
The funds will be used to enhance product features such as seamless booking, match discovery, and performance tracking, with a focus on growing sports like pickleball and padel. Hudle also plans to launch India’s first player rating system in August and expand its venue partner network across Tier 1, 2, and 3 cities to meet the rising demand for recreational sports.
Founded by Suhail Narain (CEO), Arjun Singh Verma (COO), and Sonam Taneja (Head of Business Development), Hudle connects 1.5 million players with 2,000 sports venues. In the past year, it achieved 3.5x growth in gross transaction value and 2.5x revenue growth. The platform enables easy discovery, booking, and participation in sports like badminton, pickleball, padel, football, and box cricket, while leveraging technology to enhance facility management and player engagement.
Plenome Technologies raises Rs 6.5 Cr seed funding to advance blockchain-AI solutions
IIT Madras-incubated startup Plenome Technologies, focused on secure data management solutions using Blockchain and AI, has raised Rs 6.5 crore in seed funding from Indian and international investors.
The round was led by Luxembourg-based Ovington Capital Partners, with participation from UAE-based AADI and angel investor Manish Gandhi, who has backed ventures like ePlane, CynLr, and LegalKart.
Plenome Technologies founders
Plenome is developing technologies for sensitive sectors such as healthcare and voting. Its BlockTrack ‘OraganEase’ solution, designed for organ donation database management, is undergoing trial runs with the apex organ transplant body of a South Indian state. The company’s BlockVote platform, a blockchain-based remote election software, has been successfully deployed for IIT Madras student elections and is being scaled using a pay-per-use model for large organizations.
Plenome is also testing ‘Ashwin’, an AI-powered platform for electronic data capture, record maintenance, and analytics, currently in pilot use within dental healthcare and planned for expansion into eye care, cosmetic, and fertility segments. Ashwin offers voice-enabled data entry in multiple Indic and foreign languages.
Founded by Prof. Prabhu Rajagopal, a Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Awardee, along with Vijayaraja Rathinasamy (MS Entrepreneurship, IIT Madras) and Anirudh Varna (Blockchain specialist, IIT Madras), Plenome aims to create interoperable, privacy-focused digital applications capable of operating securely and at scale.
ANNY raises Rs 10 Crin pre-Series A round led by Atomic Capital
ANNY, a fashion brand, has raised Rs 10 crore in a pre-Series A funding round led by Atomic Capital. This capital raised will be used by the startup towards expanding product categories, enhancing its proprietary tech stack, hiring, strengthening distribution channels and marketing.
Founded in 2023 by Japjot Singh, Aveen Kaur, and Rahul Tanwar, ANNY offers affordable luxury fashion, and the startup claimed that in just over a year, the brand has scaled 8X, driven by a vertically integrated model, trend-led design, and deep consumer insight. “This investment fuels our ambition to become a Rs 100 crore plus ARR brand by next year and drive a true movement in India’s fashion-tech landscape,” said Japjot Singh, Founder and CEO of ANNY.
Other news
Amazon India launches 5th edition of ML summer school to train 3,000 students in 2025
India has announced the fifth edition of its Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS) for 2025, aimed at training 3,000 engineering students graduating in 2026 or 2027 from recognised institutes in India. Registrations will be open from July 21 to 31, 2025, with the program starting in August 2025.
Conducted virtually over four weekends, the free program will feature eight expert-led modules covering key topics such as supervised and unsupervised learning, deep learning, generative AI, and large language models, along with live Q&A sessions with Amazon scientists.
Since its launch in 2021, MLSS has trained nearly 10,000 students and has expanded globally with editions in Australia and the EMEA region under 'Amazon Science Campus.' Participants will be selected through a qualifying assessment, with the top 3,000 scorers receiving access.
Amazon’s ML expertise spans applications like search optimisation, personalized recommendations, delivery route planning, fraud detection, language translation, and Alexa’s speech recognition, reflecting the broad impact of machine learning across industries.
(This article will be updated with the latest news throughout the day.)