This week on Eximius Echo, we’re looking back at the signals, sectors, and nine new bets that shaped our year.
If you’re new here, Eximius is a pre-seed VC fund backing bold ideas in ConsumerTech, FinTech, and Enterprise AI.
Let’s dive in.
The last year sharpened the market in a few important ways.
Capital became more selective, not absent. In India, startup funding eased 8% year on year to $11Bn in 2025, even as the ecosystem continued to consolidate around higher-conviction outcomes. Globally, AI moved well beyond fascination and into the centre of venture allocation, accounting for 48% of all venture funding in 2025, the highest share on record. Geopolitics kept redrawing supply chains, incentives, and strategic priorities. In that environment, the companies that kept standing out were the ones solving hard problems with stronger products, clearer use cases, and deeper operating discipline.
That broader shift shaped us, too.
At Eximius, this was the year Fund II took real shape. It was also a year that sharpened our pattern recognition. Fund I outcomes gave us stronger clarity on what early quality actually looks like. Our sector work deepened across ConsumerTech, FinTech, and Enterprise AI. Our community, research, and sourcing engine widened our aperture across the pre-seed market. We now see roughly 800 to 1000 deals a month, which gives us a broad view of where conviction is forming early and where noise still outweighs substance. One thing kept standing out: the earliest stage still rewards clarity before consensus.
Three themes kept coming back to us across the year.
Those themes did not stay theoretical. They shaped where we invested.
9 NEW BETS WE MADE THIS YEAR
1. MyNaksh
An AI-led astrology product that feels less like a marketplace and more like India’s first astrology copilot. What stood out to us was the daily retention loop: a category with deep cultural pull, strong ritual behaviour, and real monetisation potential in a market where even skeptical Gen Z users still end up relying on guidance, pattern recognition, and personalised insight.
2. DevAssure
A horizontal QA platform solving hard testing problems, especially in edge cases and regulated environments like fintech and healthcare. We liked the combination of technical depth, product-native testing, and an India-to-the-world wedge in a category with broad software relevance and growing global demand.
3. Triple Tap Games
A gaming studio building hybrid-casual visual puzzle titles with stronger production value, deeper narrative, and real IP potential. This is a timely bet on a format that AI is making far more viable: visual puzzle games that used to be expensive and difficult to build, now opening up for focused teams with strong taste and disciplined execution.
4. Amicco
A spare-parts marketplace with a moat rooted in operations, not just software. Inventory orchestration, warehouse depth, logistics discipline, delivery within 45 minutes, and 20% margins in a category where the norm is often single digits all matter here. This is what a structurally better marketplace can look like.
5. DecoverAI
A vertical legal AI platform built for lawyers and legal teams, with a strong wedge in commercial disputes. What we liked was the move beyond search toward better insight: more context-aware discovery, stronger legal intelligence, and a product that helps teams work through large, complex case material with more precision.
6. CuePilot
A voice-first operating system for preschools, designed so users do not need to learn a traditional system at all. No dashboards to navigate. No heavy clicking. Just voice as the default interface for attendance, observations, parent communication, report cards, and admin. That product insight felt unusually sharp to us.
7. EarthSync
A techno-commercial intelligence layer for solar, wind, and battery assets. As renewable markets become more complex, spreadsheet-led planning and consultant-heavy decision-making start to break. EarthSync replaces that with a software layer built for forecasting, procurement, and infrastructure precision in markets now shaped by sub-hourly settlement and more dynamic operating logic.
8. Stealth
An AI-native operating system for agribusiness execution, built for the coordination layer that still lives in WhatsApp, calls, photos, and spreadsheets. We were drawn to software that does not just report on activity, but actually helps run the field, reduce human middleware, and bring structure to messy real-world execution.
9. Stealth
A consumer learning product being built for Gen Alpha, a cohort already tuned to audio, video, and more dynamic forms of information consumption than traditional coursework allows. What stood out to us was the behavioural shift itself, along with the strength of the direct-to-consumer subscription opportunity emerging around it.
WHAT THE YEAR TAUGHT US
A few patterns kept repeating across our work this year.
Some of the most compelling early-stage companies are being built in categories where the economic value is already large, but the software is still poor.
The strongest AI companies are not adding intelligence to existing tools. They are turning labour-heavy workflows into software and fragmented processes into systems.
Founder-market fit matters even more when companies are still pre-scale, and the market around them is still taking shape.
And in India, many of the most exciting opportunities still sit in sectors that look messy, operationally hard, or easy to overlook from the outside.
That is often where category-defining businesses begin.
WHAT WE’RE EXCITED ABOUT NEXT
Looking ahead, we’re most excited by businesses where the market has already done the hard part, and the product can now do the differentiating.
In ConsumerTech, that means products with built-in daily behaviour, clear monetisation, and stronger retention from day one, especially in categories that used to look too niche or too unstructured to scale well.
In FinTech, that means companies building on existing rails rather than rebuilding them, especially where better decisioning can unlock stronger underwriting, wider insurance access, or more meaningful participation in wealth products.
In Enterprise AI, that means products built for sectors where software adoption is still low, but the underlying workflows are now digital enough to support real operating systems, not just point tools.
Over the last year, we’ve made 9 new bets. Over the next year, we plan to make 10 more. If you’re building for the future from India, for India and the world, across ConsumerTech, FinTech, or Enterprise AI, write to us at pitches@eximiusvc.com. We’d love to hear what you’re building.