Startup news and updates: daily roundup (September 23, 2026)
YourStory presents the daily news roundup from the Indian startup ecosystem and beyond. Here's the roundup for Wednesday, September 23, 2026.
YourStory brings you today’s headlines with the latest developments across sectors.
Featured stories
Building privacy-first cybersecurity tech
Silence Laboratories, a Palo Alto-based cybersecurity startup built on deep cryptography research, is building technology that lets organisations work with sensitive data without exposing the underlying information.
Founded by Jay Prakash, Andrei Bytes and Tony Quek, the 30-member team works across 14 countries and has developed privacy-enhancing products based on Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Its technology lets multiple parties compute on encrypted data while retaining control of their own information—a model the company says replaces reliance on third-party trust with cryptographic guarantees.
Angel One Founder Dinesh Thakkar charts the stock broking company’s stellar growth
Angel One began in 1996, when stockbroking was still conducted through noisy trading pits, hand signals and phone calls. Founder Dinesh Thakkar’s first technology intervention was using walkie-talkies, allowing customers to confirm their trades within five to 10 minutes.
Over three decades, the company moved from screen-based trading and internet terminals to mobile investing, eventually shutting all its physical offices in 2018 to become fully digital. Today, Angel One has 3.95 crore users and is looking at AI as the next major shift in how retail investors access financial products
How Nuvr built a business managing Rs 1,200 Cr in ecommerce sales for brands
Nuvr started out as a software idea. In 2023, founder Pulkit Chhabra was pitching an ecommerce analytics product when a consumer-brand founder asked a simple question: if the software could identify what was going wrong, why not have the team run the business themselves?
That conversation pushed Nuvr to become an ecommerce and quick-commerce operator, managing everything from pricing and advertising to inventory, catalogues, and platform relationships. More than three years later, the Bengaluru-based bootstrapped company says it manages over Rs 1,200 crore in online sales for brands including Origami, Medimix, Nilon’s and CLEAR.
‘AI is the new UI’: Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu
Zoho is betting on what co-founder and chief scientist Sridhar Vembu calls “ubiquitous intelligence”, where AI is embedded across products and workflows rather than treated as a standalone tool. Speaking at Zoholics in Chennai, Vembu said AI is becoming a new interface for interacting with software, with the focus shifting from traditional user interfaces to systems that can understand context and respond intelligently.
Zoho has begun putting this vision into practice with Zia Chat, an AI interface designed to let users interact with multiple business applications through a single conversational layer.
Funding news
Hughes Precision raises Rs 250 Cr funding
Hughes Precision Manufacturing has raised Rs 250 crore from family offices and ultra-high-net-worth individuals to expand its defence manufacturing operations. The Goa-based company plans to increase its small-calibre ammunition production capacity from around 80 million rounds to 220 million rounds and set up a new facility for medium-calibre ammunition.
The company’s order book has crossed Rs 1,000 crore, with around 60% of orders coming from India and the rest from overseas markets. Hughes Precision supplies the Indian armed forces and paramilitary forces and exports to more than 20 countries.
Eapro Global raises Rs 40 Cr from institutional investors, family offices
Roorkee-based solar and power-backup solutions manufacturer Eapro Global Limited has raised Rs 40 crore in a funding round backed by institutional investors, family offices and individual investors. The company manufactures inverters, batteries and energy storage systems and is preparing for a proposed public listing in FY28.
Aarth AIF Growth Fund, NAV Bharat Investment Opportunities Fund, VentureX Fund, Kyro India Opportunities Fund-I and JK Family Office, among others, participated in the round. Eapro will use the fresh capital to scale its manufacturing capacity, strengthen its technology capabilities and expand its presence across India's growing renewable energy and power-backup markets.
Other news
Maharishi Ayurveda launches new campus in the Netherlands
Maharishi Ayurveda Wellness Hospitality has launched a new centre at the Maharishi European Research University (MERU) campus in the Netherlands as part of a €5 million expansion across wellness, hospitality, education and research infrastructure.
The facility will serve as Maharishi Ayurveda’s European Centre of Excellence, bringing Ayurvedic treatments, Panchakarma therapies, wellness hospitality, practitioner education and research under one campus. It will offer personalised consultations, rejuvenation programmes, preventive health packages, meditation, therapeutic yoga and Vedic nutrition.
The centre will also function as a training and knowledge hub for Ayurveda practitioners from Europe and other international markets.
Alongside patient and wellness services, the facility is intended to support education and scientific research around Ayurveda and holistic health.
BITS Pilani Startup Hub Bengaluru invites applications for Demo Day
BITS Pilani Startup Hub, Bengaluru, has invited applications for its first Demo Day, scheduled for October 9, 2026, at Hustlehub Tech Park, HSR Layout. The event will feature 12 curated startups pitching to investors and industry leaders, with alumni founders, VCs and organisations including NASSCOM, KDEM and RBIH expected to attend. Applications are open until October 2.
The Hub connects founders with alumni mentors, customers, industry partners, talent and investors, with alumni contributing through mentorship, workshops, networking and angel investments.
The Hub is also launching a 12-week, on-site acceleration programme for selected startups, combining one-on-one mentorship, strategy sessions, founder-led workshops, investor interactions and pitch refinement. The programme will focus on areas such as product positioning, go-to-market strategy and business model refinement. For deeptech startups building hard-tech products, the Hub will offer a six-month, high-touch acceleration track limited to five startups.
IIT Kharagpur, upGrad expand executive AI portfolio
IIT Kharagpur and upGrad have expanded their executive AI portfolio from four to seven programmes, following a 3x quarter-on-quarter increase in enrolments across the portfolio. The collaboration, announced in April 2026, has attracted learners from 133 cities across India and seven countries, including the UAE, US, UK, Germany, Canada, Australia and Kuwait.
The programmes are drawing a largely senior professional audience, with learners having a median work experience of 12 years and nearly 63% having more than a decade of professional experience. Participants include professionals from companies such as TCS, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, HSBC, Infosys, Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini, IBM, Oracle, Cognizant, Salesforce, Wipro, Citi and Qualcomm, across roles including VPs, principal engineers, engineering managers, tech leads, staff software engineers, senior consultants and data scientists.
The Sleep Company partners with Unicommerce to streamline ecommerce operations
The Sleep Company has partnered with Unicommerce to strengthen its ecommerce operations as it expands across digital and offline channels. The comfort-tech brand, known for its patented SmartGRID technology, offers mattresses, ergonomic chairs, recliners, sofas, pillows, mattress protectors and other products.
As order volumes and sales channels grow, The Sleep Company has deployed Unicommerce’s Uniware platform for order and warehouse management. The platform will provide a unified system to manage inventory and fulfil orders across the company’s website and leading online marketplaces.
The implementation also supports multipart shipments, allowing bulky or multi-item orders to be fulfilled through multiple packages where required. The solution includes customised financial reporting, while intelligent courier selection capabilities are expected to be introduced soon.
(The copy will be updated with the latest news)