Startups
Seed to Series B. Founders at this stage are pitched constantly, so this page is what the work consists of and where it stops.
Three things decide a round — the list, the file and the terms — and the first two are settled before any investor sees anything.
Concentration from one trade compilation of H1 2026 — the trackers differ on the level of funding, not on the direction; 80-IAC as re-enacted at section 140 of the Income-tax Act, 2025.
A narrower funnel, not a closed one
Inc42, Entrackr and Tracxn do not agree on how much money moved in the first half of 2026, because their inclusion rules differ. They agree on the shape: three rounds were roughly 31% of H1 2026 funding on one compilation, and the pool of first-time-funded companies is shrinking. More money, fewer first cheques.
That is not a window closing, it is the bar moving — and the two weeks a diligence gap costs is the difference between being inside the round that closed and outside it.
Benchmarks, and what they are worth
Advisory and lender material through 2026 puts pre-seed cheques at ₹20 lakh to ₹2 crore, seed at ₹2–15 crore, Series A at $5–15 million and Series B at $15–40 million, with a Series A bar of roughly $1–2 million of ARR. All of it comes from marketing pages rather than a primary dataset. It calibrates a conversation; a deck built to hit one of those numbers has optimised for the wrong reader.
What you will not get here is a raise timeline: the duration figures that circulate trace to no dataset anyone publishes. The planning question is how much runway is left if the next round takes six months.
What is hard to do alone
Investor targeting is a list of who is deploying now, not of funds that exist — a fund three years into a vehicle with no new investment in eighteen months is not a target however well it fits on paper, and that is not visible from outside. Order matters too: term sheets landing inside the same fortnight produce a negotiation, while the same names approached one at a time produce a company the market has passed on.
The data room is where rounds are lost quietly. The cap table has to reconcile to what was filed, because investor counsel reads the ROC record rather than the spreadsheet; IP has to be assigned by everyone who touched it; and with a foreign investor the FEMA filings have to exist before diligence rather than during it.
On terms, the clause specific to this stage is the option pool: created out of the pre-money, so founders carry all of that dilution while it is presented as housekeeping. Moving it to post-money is usually worth more than the valuation increase most founders spend their leverage on.
What the tax and FEMA file has to survive
Angel tax is gone and the scrutiny it stood for is not. The abolition of section 56(2)(viib) is prospective, so a raise in an earlier year can still draw a notice and still needs its valuation file — and section 68 was never touched: an assessing officer can still require you to establish the identity, creditworthiness and genuineness of whoever paid the premium.
DPIIT recognition is not the tax holiday. The three-year holiday under section 80-IAC needs separate certification by the Inter-Ministerial Board, the company has to have been incorporated on or before 31 March 2030, and certification cannot be applied backwards — so every cycle that passes without the application is an eligible holiday year that cannot be recovered.
Domicile is live again in both directions: the FEMA amendment of 16 August 2024 liberalised cross-border share swaps, and those rules were amended again in June 2026. If a foreign individual sits on your cap table, the applicable rule is younger than your last round.
What we do not do
We are not a fund: no investor network to be admitted to, no accelerator programme, and no promise of a raise. Where the honest read is that the round needs two more quarters of evidence, that is the read you get before the mandate rather than after it — and below seed there is nothing an advisor adds that a founder cannot do faster alone.
Questions we answer in the first conversation
What documentation makes a high-premium round survive a section 68 enquiry, and who has to produce it?
Is the 80-IAC holiday actually secured, or only DPIIT recognition — and how many eligible years has the delay already cost?
How large should this round be, given that the next one may not arrive on the schedule the deck assumes?
How is a SAFE or CCPS priced when the lead is foreign, under FEMA pricing and Rule 11UA together?
Send the shape of the round
Stage, how much, what the money buys, and how much runway is left if it takes six months. That is enough for us to say whether we are useful — and enough to say when we are not.
Answer the five questions