Articles by Pranav Mukul

Technology

Dunzo’s Kabeer Biswas eyeing funds for AI concierge startup

Dunzo cofounder Kabeer Biswas, who recently left Flipkart, is in discussions to raise about $12 million for his new venture, a personal AI concierge service, according to people in the know. Biswas has held talks with Peak XV Partners, Lightspeed, Blume Ventures and other early-stage investors for the funding round.The startup is being pitched as a personal AI agent that can book travel, make reservations and handle errands along with delivery and pickup services. The positioning is that of a Dunzo 2.0, a person in the know said.“It is as a broader concierge layer that can deliver something, pick something, buy something or coordinate tasks. It is Dunzo 2.0…,” the person cited above said on the condition of anonymity.Peak XV, Lightspeed and Blume Ventures did not respond to queries. Biswas did not respond to queries either.Biswas’s fundraising efforts come close on the heels of his exit from Flipkart, where he spent less than a year after joining to head the ecommerce major’s quick commerce unit under Flipkart Minutes. His hiring was seen as a significant move for the Walmart-owned Flipkart, given his background in running Dunzo. People familiar with the matter said Biswas had held talks to join Tata Group-owned grocery delivery platform BigBasket, though he had denied any such discussions when contacted by ET in August and September.Dunzo started in 2015 as a hyperlocal, on-demand concierge app in Bengaluru, facilitating WhatsApp-based pickup and drop requests without being operations-heavy. After scaling and raising $200 million from Reliance Industries in 2022, the company pivoted to a quick commerce model which finally led to massive cash burn and led to its shutdown in 2024. Venture Capital firm Blume was an early backer in Dunzo, too.Large food delivery and quick commerce firms too have tried to capture the growing need for urban consumers to spend for convenience and quick deliveries.“We’ve been tracking a new habit taking shape among India’s urban professionals…which is to outsource the small and time-consuming tasks of daily life. Also, there’s a clear shift toward paying for ease rather than investing personal effort…and this is leading to opening up of a sizeable opportunity in the lifestyle services space for offerings that are centred on automation,” a venture capital investor told ET.Bengaluru-based Swiggy launched its travel and lifestyle concierge app, Crew, earlier this month, after a pilot programme it had rolled out in June this year. Crew is now available to users in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru regions. It lets users secure restaurant reservations, curate travel itineraries, organise birthday parties and gifts, get Aadhaar updates and book airport transfers.Biswas’s shift into a consumer-facing AI concierge reflects the broader rush towards agentic AI, where startups are building digital assistants that execute tasks rather than simply providing suggestions.Notably, a clutch of chat-based concierge services had come up in the 2014-2015 period but failed to scale up. These included Delhi-based Goodservice, which raised $1.6 million in seed money from erstwhile Sequoia Capital India. Goodservice was acquired by Urban Company in 2016. Another startup, JoeHukum, which raised funds from Tracxn Labs, Jupiter founder Jitendra Gupta, Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau and 1mg founder Prashant Tandon, was acquired by Freshworks in 2017 after two years of operations.

Business

Busy startup IPO season gives risk investors Rs 15,000 crore in cash exits

The busy IPO cycle of 2025 is handing out some of the biggest returns that venture and growth investors have seen in India’s startup ecosystem.The half a dozen new-age companies — Urban Company, Lenskart, Groww, Ather Energy, Bluestone and Pine Labs — that have listed so far this year have collectively unlocked more than Rs 15,000 crore ($1.6 billion) in cash liquidity for their early- and late-stage shareholders, as per ET’s calculations. Beyond the realised gains, investors are also sitting on over $8 billion in mark-to-market value on the shares they continue to hold, buoyed by strong post-listing performance by some of these companies.The largest paper gains have come for Peak XV’s (formerly Sequoia Capital India) residual stake in wealth-tech platform Groww, now valued at around $1.7 billion. SoftBank with its $1.1 billion position in Lenskart is next.Silicon Valley’s famed startup accelerator Y Combinator has also raked in multi-fold returns on Groww. It sold around a 2% stake in the firm through the offer-for-sale (OFS) portion of the IPO and is still holding on to around 10% in the firm, which crossed Rs 1 lakh crore in market capitalisation on Friday.New York-based Tiger Global and Palo Alto-headquartered Ribbit Capital have both sold a small part of their shareholding in Groww during the IPO and as per the current market cap of the fintech firm, their stakes are worth Rs 4,726 crore and Rs 11,511 crore, respectively.“These IPOs have given a clear message to global investors that Indian startups can facilitate sizeable exits,” said an early-stage investor who has backed fintech and consumer tech startups. “If there ever was any doubt or question in the minds of large global venture funds, the successful IPOs of startups like Groww have given a larger statement on behalf of the sector.” ETtech Peak XV’s big IPO seasonPeak XV Partners has taken home the largest cash exits from Groww and Pine Labs, two of its very large bets. Accel, Elevation Capital and SoftBank also liquidated parts of their holdings across Lenskart, Ather, BlueStone and Urban Company at a premium.Between wealth-tech startup Groww and digital payments platform Pine Labs, Peak XV Partners sold shares worth more than Rs 2,000 crore through the OFS process, which lets existing investors sell shares during an IPO. Their remaining stake in the two companies is worth more than Rs 20,000 crore as per closing stock prices on Friday.“Peak XV’s investment in Pine Labs was a unique case of long-term patient capital which is typically unlikely for venture investors, but the returns have been huge as well,” said a senior fintech industry executive and an active angel investor. Peak XV had invested around $35 million in Pine Labs over two or three rounds since first backing it in 2009. It is today sitting on likely gains of over $1 billion, with $575 million already coming in.For Peak XV, the series of cash-outs come at a time when it is in the midst of raising its first independent fund at over $1 billion, after the split from Sequoia Capital in 2023, as reported first by ET in April.The Pine Labs IPO gave partial exit opportunities to two large corporate investors as well: PayPal and Mastercard. However, some of the late-stage backers like Vitruvian Partners and Nordmann Investment are in the red having come in at a $5 billion valuation. Pine Labs took a 40% cut on its private valuation when it fixed the IPO price.SoftBank snagged a multimillion-dollar exit from the eyewear retailer Lenskart. The fund had invested $280 million in the company and its current stake in the firm is valued at more than $1 billion. The Masayoshi Son-led group sold shares of around $200 million through secondary transactions and the OFS component in the IPO. SoftBank’s remaining stake in Lenskart is worth over $1 billion.“We’re in the business of making money, so if incremental IRR (internal rate of return) isn’t attractive, we redeploy, but there’s no mandate to liquidate. We don’t report performance by region, but it’s safe to say India is one of the strongest-performing geographies in the Vision Fund,” Sumer Juneja, managing partner and head of EMEA and India at SoftBank Investment Advisers, told ET in an interview earlier this month.Strong gains for early backersIn the case of Urban Company and BlueStone, early investors including Accel and Elevation Capital generated strong returns.Accel first backed jewellery retailer BlueStone in 2012 and participated in multiple funding rounds for the company since then. The venture capital firm invested a total of Rs 200-215 crore in BlueStone and is sitting on paper gains of six times its investment, including realised and unrealised returns.With Urban Company, where Accel was the earliest institutional backer along with Elevation Capital, the VC fund made paper gains of 29 times its investment of Rs 70-75 crore. Elevation Capital, which ploughed Rs 95-100 crore across various stages in the at-home services platform, meanwhile saw a multiple of 19x on its investment.In the Groww IPO, YC took out Rs 1,054 crore, thereby marking the first such instance of a public market exit for the venture firm in India.Another YC alumnus, ecommerce firm Meesho, is slated for a December IPO at a valuation of $6-7 billion, which could change depending on market conditions. The IPO will see investors including Elevation Capital, Peak XV Partners and Y Combinator sell stakes.Ribbit Capital, an active investor in Indian fintech startups, sold shares worth Rs 1,181 crore in the Groww IPO and has a shareholding worth of Rs 11,511 crore currently.Tiger Global, which was an investor in electric scooter manufacturer Ather, sold shares worth Rs 12.8 crore in the IPO and exited the company fully by selling shares worth Rs 1,204 crore through post-IPO block deals.