India’s Startup Pulse: Unicorns, Big Bets & Boardroom Power Moves

Skyroot Aerospace just became India’s first space-tech unicorn, raising sixty million dollars. In our last episode on India's tech tipping point, we talked about billion-dollar bets—well, this is what they look like in orbit. It's not just any money, either; it’s coming from GIC, BlackRock, and Ram Shriram of Alphabet fame, who is now joining Skyroot's board. That wasn't the only massive number this week. Indian startups just pulled in about seven hundred ninety million dollars... in a single week. That’s up from one hundred twenty million the week before. The biggest piece of that was Rapido, raising two hundred forty million dollars in a late-stage round that values them at three billion.

And speaking of big players making moves, Apple Pay is finally set to launch in India. So the entire UPI payments ecosystem, from PhonePe to Google Pay, is about to get a very, very big new competitor. This will change things. Meanwhile, Google just held its developer conference and basically put AI into everything. They have a new AI coding model, Gemini 3.5 Flash, that’s faster and cheaper, and they've redesigned Search to be an AI-first experience. Sundar Pichai said AI is "lighting up every part of the company." It certainly seems like it. And a few more quick ones you should know about. Bengaluru-based semiconductor startup HrdWyr raised thirteen million dollars for AI-native chips meant for edge computing.

Piper Serica launched the Bharat Tech Fund, aiming to raise eight hundred crore rupees for Indian tech. And after a finance ministry meeting on April twenty-third, India's biggest banks like HDFC and Axis are now racing to build up their AI-driven cybersecurity defenses. Okay, let's go back to that funding number for a second. Seven hundred ninety million dollars. It's easy to see that and just think, "oh, Rapido raised a ton of money." And they did. But that's not the real story. The real story is what's happening underneath that headline. Early-stage startups still raised over thirty-five million dollars this week. Seed-stage startups raised another twelve million.

A year ago, that same week in May saw just one hundred twenty million dollars… total. So this isn't just one mega-deal propping up an otherwise dead market. The whole engine is starting to fire again, from the smallest garages to the biggest late-stage players. The system is getting healthier. But the other shoe is about to drop. And its name is Apple Pay. For years, India's UPI has been this incredible, homegrown success story. A public digital utility that private companies like PhonePe and Google Pay built absolute empires on. Together, they control, what, over eighty percent of the market? Now Apple, with its locked-in hardware, its seamless software, and its massive, loyal user base, is just… walking in.

The question isn't whether Apple Pay will get users. Of course it will. The real question is what it does to everyone else. The smaller apps? They're terrified. They worry this doesn't create more competition, it just creates a three-headed monster—PhonePe, Google Pay, and Apple—sucking all the oxygen out of the room. And they might be right. So you have India’s first space-tech unicorn, a company literally building rockets, being validated on a global stage by investors like Ram Shriram. At the exact same moment, you have a global giant in Apple finally deciding it can’t ignore India's payments market any longer and preparing to crash the party. It feels like two sides of the same coin.

We're past the point of just building for India. We're now in a phase where Indian companies are building for the world, and the world's biggest companies are having to build specifically for India. The game just got a lot harder, and a lot more expensive. It's not about potential anymore. It's about power.