ideaForge’s Road To IPO, Zolve Bags $251 Mn & More

Decoding ideaForge’s Road To IPO

From managing college projects at IIT Bombay to helming ideaForge, Ankit Mehta has come a long way. Under his leadership, the drone maker has crossed many milestones, including making a stellar stock market debut in 2023.

While ideaForge’s journey has not been without its pitfalls, we thought of speaking with Mehta, as part of Inc42’s Griffin Dialogue series, about the learnings he gathered while building a drone manufacturing behemoth.

He started by dissecting the unique challenges of building a hardware startup in India. Alongside, he highlighted the power of a long-term vision aligned with the core growth thesis of an organisation. In this quest, he said, hiring plays a key role, as an employee in sync with the DNA of a company can propel a business to new heights.

He also mentioned that the drone maker’s ascent as a listed company was a bag full of trials and tribulations — however, all is well that ends well. Notably, the ideaForge IPO was oversubscribed 106X compared to its issue price. On a different note, however, the listed entity has clocked an operating revenue of INR 140 Cr so far in FY25.

Having already achieved what many Indian startup founders aspire to in 2025 (which is to shine on the public markets), let’s understand from the man himself what the future holds for the company. Continue reading…

From The Editor’s Desk

Zolve Bags $251 Mn: The neobanking startup has secured the funding, in a mix of debt and equity, as part of a round led by Creaegis at a valuation of $800 Mn. Zolve allows Indian immigrants in the US to open a bank account sans social security numbers.

Ather Eyes $1.6 Bn IPO Valuation: The EV maker will likely file its updated DRHP with SEBI next week and aims to get listed by April. The company is now said to be eyeing a valuation of $1.6 Bn for its upcoming IPO.

Zerodha, Groww Lose Users In Market Dip: Amid the ongoing bloodbath on the D-Street, all discount brokerages lost active users last month. While Groww’s user base fell by 30%, Nikhil Kamath-led Zerodha saw a 10% fall in its users amid the ongoing market correction.

Zepto Pins Hope On Domestic Capital: CEO Aadit Palicha is looking to up domestic shareholding in the company by 8% before Zepto files IPO papers. As part of this, he is mulling options such as raising a debt or setting up an AIF to buy back shares from existing investors.

Uptime Secures $35 Mn: The deeptech startup has raised fresh capital in its Series C round led by Avataar Ventures. Founded in 2015, the startup offers real-time fault diagnostics and monitoring for key mechanical equipment.

Swiggy Eyes All-Electric Fleet: The foodtech major said that it plans to transition to an all-electric delivery fleet by 2030. Notably, rival Zomato announced last year that it will completely switch to an electric delivery fleet by 2030.

ANI Vs OpenAI: The news agency has alleged that the usage of its content by the ChatGPT maker causes dilution of its market, thus leading to unfair competition. The news agency has dragged the AI major to the Delhi HC over copyright infringement claims.

Airtel Joins Forces With Starlink: The telecom giant has inked a pact with Elon Musk-led SpaceX to provide Starlink’s satellite-based internet services to customers in India. The deal is contingent on SpaceX getting necessary approvals to offer Starlink’s services in the country.

Inc42 Startup Spotlight

Can Quanfluence Build India’s First Quantum Computer?

As the world runs ahead to enter the realm of quantum computing, India continues to lag in the race. Bengaluru-based Quanfluence is looking to change this.

Founded in 2021 by Sujoy Chakravarty, Ravi Mehta, Biman Chattopadhya, Anil Prabhakar, Aditi Vaidya, and Sandeep Goyal, Quanfluence has built an Optical Ising Machine, which specialises in solving a specific class of optimisation problems, rather than functioning as a general-purpose computer.

In addition, the startup is also building quantum computers from the ground up, specifically photonic-based ones, which can handle up to 20,000 variables. Backed by pi Ventures, the startup is actively developing a full-stack quantum computing system, which could be deployed commercially in the next 4-5 years.

By the end of this year, the startup plans to launch a more powerful version of its Ising Machine, capable of handling 1 Lakh variables, and deploy it for production systems.

Quanfluence has built an Optical Ising Machine, which specialises in solving a specific class of optimisation problems, rather than functioning as a general-purpose computer.