India Approves ₹10,000 Crore Startup Fund
India has approved a ₹10,000 crore Startup India Fund of Funds to boost financing and innovation across the ecosystem. Meanwhile, AI platform CheerioAI raised Rs 8 Cr in seed funding led by Artha Venture Fund, and Australian startups including Lyka and Firmable collectively raised $123.2M in recent rounds.
The newly approved ₹10,000 crore fund is the second phase of the government's Fund of Funds for Startups (FFS) initiative. The first FFS, launched in 2016, also had a corpus of ₹10,000 crore, which was committed to 145 alternative investment funds (AIFs). These AIFs leveraged the initial government capital to invest over ₹25,500 crore into more than 1,370 startups across a wide range of sectors, including AI, robotics, fintech, and healthcare. The second fund aims to build on this, with a specific focus on deep-tech, innovative manufacturing, and early-growth stage companies to reduce funding-related failures. The funding environment in India has been showing signs of recovery, with total venture capital investments reaching over $11.6 billion in 2024, a 5.4% increase from the previous year. Investors are now prioritizing startups with proven business models and operational efficiency over a growth-at-all-costs strategy. Bengaluru-based CheerioAI, an enterprise workflow automation platform, will use its new capital to develop multimodal AI capabilities and build proprietary language models for ad generation. The funding round was led by Artha Venture Fund, a firm that concentrates on early-stage investments in sectors like B2B SaaS and fintech. Meanwhile, the Australian startup scene saw a significant rebound in 2025, raising over $5.1 billion, a 24% increase year-over-year. Similar to trends in India, AI was the top-funded sector in Australia, attracting over $1 billion in investments.
