Divyanshu Bansal

Natasha Malpani Launches ₹200 Crore Fund to Power India’s AI Startups Former Kae Capital partner Natasha Malpani has launched Boundless Ventures, an early-stage venture fund with a corpus of ₹200 crore, dedicated to supporting homegrown AI-native startups across India. The fund will focus on pre-seed and seed-stage investments in companies innovating across consumer AI, infrastructure, agent tooling, healthcare, logistics, deep tech, and make-in-India hardware. Boundless has already written its first cheques to startups including Superhealth, Armatrix, PierSight, Knot, and two stealth ventures in AI infrastructure and consumer AI. Beyond capital, the fund promises to bring narrative and network support to founders. As Malpani puts it, India today has a once-in-a-generation advantage talent density, digital rails, and ambition to build global AI leaders from day one. At Startup Veda, we’re thrilled to see local capital fueling the AI frontier. This fund signals rising maturity in India’s venture ecosystem—placing conviction behind AI-first founders well before the rest of the world catches on. Join the conversation: Which early-stage AI ventures excite you the most? How powerful is the mix of capital + storytelling for building AI startups? #Startup #AI #VentureCapital #DeepTech #StartupIndia #FounderStories

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If you had to build a hypothetical, fast-moving, AI-backed startup to shake up a traditional industry ruled by incumbents, which one would you target, and how would you do it? That’s the challenge we’re throwing to smart, ambitious college students across India. I’m super excited and thrilled to launch the second edition of The Ken's Case Competition, in partnership with Zerodha. Last year’s debut was built on a format that was unique and powerful. Our intention was to radically reimagine the tired, old, formulaic case-study format to simulate the real world, with all its choices, complexities, and challenges. And so, in 2024, at the peak of India’s 10-minute delivery boom, we challenged India’s top MBA students to pick a real-world quick-commerce company and craft a winning strategy. The premise? We gave all teams a notional $1 billion in capital to spend as they saw fit. Teams from hundreds of B-schools went head-to-head over a three-month period in a fiercely contested, innovative battle for the winning prize of Rs 10 lakh—making it the case competition with the biggest prize in India. This year, we’re taking it up a notch. In most case competitions, students step into the shoes of a company and design a theoretical strategy to tackle a business problem. Our competition inverts this. The Ken’s next case-study challenge casts students as disruptors. They’ll analyse incumbents across sectors, uncover blind spots, design attack strategies, and eventually build AI-powered prototypes that show how they’d turn opportunities into products. Thus, we’re calling this a case-build competition—a first-of-its-kind, truly pioneering format. We’re doing this because the world has changed. It’s time for students to do much more than “study” stiff and constructed cases. Instead, it’s time for them to build out their true ambitions and ideas. Against incumbents in the real world. Because AI is forcing a reset of everything we knew about innovation and disruption. In the age of AI, the biggest opportunities are in identifying where legacy incumbents fall short. They’re holding onto customers whose needs have changed but don’t yet realize it. If AI can make anyone a builder, why can’t students be builders too? The winner of The Ken’s Case Competition 2025 will be awarded a cash prize of Rs 10 lakh. We envision this to be the gold standard of business and technology competitions in India. Open to all college students across the country, it’ll take place over three months, lasting until the end of 2025. In each round, participants will be pushed to go deeper into the sector of their choice—they’ll evaluate what incumbents are doing, conduct market research, sharpen their approach, and eventually craft and build solutions, using AI tools to bring them to life. And just like last year, we’ll involve The Ken’s community of subscribers by publishing the best and most innovative solutions and feedback we receive. Link to case in comments.

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On this Independence Day, we are proud to announce the launch of Vizuara's first-ever AI product Our product team (Pritam Kudale and Pranavodhayam P R) has been working on this for months, and today we're launching DynaRoute - an intelligent router that automatically selects the best language model based on your query complexity and category. Here is the problem we solved: Most applications use one expensive model (like GPT-4) for everything. Simple questions like "What is the capital of France?" get the same treatment as complex reasoning tasks. It's like using a hammer for every job, even when you just need a screwdriver. DynaRoute analyzes each query and routes it to the optimal model. Simple questions go to efficient models like Gemini Flash. Complex reasoning tasks get routed to more powerful models. The result? 50-70% cost savings while maintaining performance. We tested this extensively. On our GPQA benchmark, we achieve a 9.7:1 performance-to-price ratio compared to 6.9:1 for single model solutions. For typical enterprise queries, we're seeing 93% cost savings over 300k tokens. What makes this different from AWS or Azure routers is the full spectrum access. We support open source and closed source models across GCP, AWS, and Azure. Their routers lock you into their ecosystem - Microsoft only gives you GPT models, Amazon only Claude/Llama. The integration is seamless. Drop-in replacement for OpenAI API, works with CrewAI agents, includes an MCP server for Claude, and comes with a comprehensive dashboard showing real-time savings. This is Vizuara's first AI product for enterprises, and Raj Abhijit Dandekar, Rajat Dandekar, and I are incredibly proud of what the team built. We have transitioned from education to solving real industry problems. Try it at https://lnkd.in/dGSx2KRq - free tier includes 50k tokens to test the $$ savings yourself. We just posted our product launch video on Vizuara's YouTube channel, where we give you a very detailed product walkthrough. We also explain how you can use this as an individual customer or as an enterprise to save $$$: https://lnkd.in/dtEHtHMn We will soon be publishing a paper on the concept of dynamic intelligent routing. Stay tuned. Happy Independence Day to my fellow countrymen! 🇮🇳

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