India adds a millionaire every 30 mins; Meet Bengaluru startup Investorant

Hello,

What happens when two tech titans shake hands?

In an unprecedented alliance, Nvidia said it would invest $5 billion in Intel. This comes weeks after the White House engineered an extraordinary deal for the US government to take a massive stake in the struggling chipmaker.

The stake will instantly make Nvidia one of Intel’s largest shareholders, giving it roughly 4% of the company. A timely save for Intel, which has had several turnaround efforts fall flat in recent years. 

But wait, there’s a challenger to Nvidia’s throne: Huawei detailed timelines for its Ascend AI chips and Kunpeng server chips, and said it was ready to launch some of the world’s most powerful computing systems.

China has stepped up efforts to challenge Nvidia’s supremacy in the AI chip market in recent weeks. Add to it, DeepSeek just published training costs for its R1 model—a staggeringly low $294,000.

To put it in context, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had said in 2023 that what he called “foundational model training” had cost “much more” than $100 million—although the company did not give detailed figures. 

Lastly, Meta is set for a take two on its consumer-ready smart glasses. But this time, it wants to go even further beyond and reach for “superintelligence”, according to Zuckerberg.

Fashion, meet the future. 

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• India adds a millionaire every 30 mins
• Meet Bengaluru startup Investorant
• Redefining wealth management in India

Here’s your trivia for today: Which 1984 one-hit wonder by Nena features lyrics about red balloons causing an international incident?

Report

India adds a millionaire every 30 mins

India’s prosperity story is gathering pace, with wealth creation not just rising but speeding up. According to the Mercedes-Benz Hurun India Wealth Report 2025, the number of households in India with a net worth of Rs 8.5 crore or more has jumped from roughly 4.58 lakh in 2021 to 8.71 lakh in 2025, nearly doubling in four years. 

That growth amounts to something almost hard to believe: India is effectively adding a millionaire household approximately every 30 minutes. 

Wealth & happiness:

• The Mercedes-Benz Hurun India Wealth Report 2025 estimates that millionaire households comprise about 0.31% of all Indian households and are projected to keep rising, driven by strong economic momentum.
• Mumbai is home to 1.42 lakh millionaire households, more than Delhi and Bengaluru combined. The financial hub continues to tower over other Indian cities in wealth concentration. Maharashtra, India’s richest state, accounts for 1.78 lakh millionaire households, nearly a fifth of the national total.
• Over 60% of Indian millionaires rate their happiness at 8 or above on a 10-point scale, despite modest consumption compared to wealthy individuals in developed markets. Travel tops spending preferences, with it being the most popular hobby among 45% of respondents, followed by reading and cooking.

Funding Alert

Startup: Infra.Market

Amount: $83M

Round: Fresh

Startup: Blue Energy Motors

Amount: $30M

Round: Fresh

Startup: Supply6

Amount: $1.1M

Round: Seed

Startup

Meet Bengaluru startup Investorant

In the wake of COVID-19, India’s F&B industry was left in near desolation across multiple avenues. In 2021, Guru Shivaram, Amrit Hemdev, and Salman Sait realised that an alternate way to mitigate loss margins in the F&B sector would be through fractional ownership by a team of investors, thus launching Investorant. 

“We enable talent to have their own spaces without any other stress, such as raising funds, building the project, and others. They get creative freedom, the investors get absolute transparency on how their money is being spent,” CEO Shivaram tells YourStory. 

Key takeaways:

• The F&B investment platform ensures it gets interested investors for each project. To do this consistently in the F&B sector, generally considered to be a space with thin profit margins, Investorant banks heavily on its transparent model. 
• Investorant has established three “concepts” till now: Whisky Samba in Hyderabad (an extension of the one in Gurugram), Spirit Forward and Una Hacienda in Bengaluru. The CEO says all three establishments have been profitable from day one. 
• With about 100 people employed across the three establishments, Investorant has raised and deployed a total of Rs 13 crore, including an investment of Rs 75 lakh from the founders’ pockets over two years. 

Enterprises

Redefining wealth management in India

According to Deloitte India, the demand for wealth management services in terms of AUM will almost double, from $1.1 trillion in FY24 to $2.3 trillion by FY29. This is creating substantial opportunities for established players and new entrants in the sector. 

Ionic Wealth, a Mumbai-based wealth management firm and part of Angel One, wants to play a different role by betting on the growing population of HNIs with Rs 1 to 25 crore in assets, who need guidance but often remain underserved.

News & updates

• Expand: Edtech startup upGrad is exploring more university tie-ups in the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific as fewer students are opting to study in the US and the UK due to visa restrictions and cost hurdles. 
• Acquire: Atlassian is making its largest acquisition yet to add a developer productivity tool to its product suite. The company will acquire the developer productivity insight platform DX for $1 billion in cash and restricted stock. Enterprises use DX to analyse how productive their engineering teams are and identify bottlenecks slowing them down.
• Lawsuit: The families of four passengers killed in the crash of an Air India Boeing 787 said in a lawsuit that the accident resulted from allegedly faulty fuel switches, which the US FAA has said do not appear to have caused the accident that killed 260 people. The lawsuit blames Boeing and Honeywell, which made the switches, for the crash.

Which 1984 one-hit wonder by Nena features lyrics about red balloons causing an international incident?

Answer: 99 Luftballons.

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