Freshworks defied its past losses by swinging to a $3.2 million net profit in Q2 2026, powered by a 16% surge in revenue as corporate appetite for artificial intelligence tools kept growing.
The software as a service firm, traded on Nasdaq, booked $237.4 million in revenue for the April to June window, up from $204.7 million the year prior. A year earlier, that same quarter had delivered a $1.7 million net loss. The reversal signals how deeply enterprises now lean on AI-driven platforms to run operations.
**Venture capital flows to insurance tech, commerce and AI assistance**
Ahmedabad-based InRisk Labs closed a $27 million Series A round co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Northpoint Capital. The fresh capital aims to sharpen its underwriting, actuarial modeling and climate risk analytics while scaling parametric reinsurance products through its EarthRe subsidiary.
Meanwhile, personal assistance platform Hulp picked up $2.6 million in seed money from Sparrow Capital and BITKRAFT Ventures. Former PolicyBazaar executive Tarun Mathur and cofounders Neha Kulwal and Vishal Singh Khutel built the service to blend AI with human aides for household and lifestyle tasks. Operating in Delhi NCR now, Hulp plans to add six more cities.
Consumer marketplace Vingo raised Rs 10 crore, roughly $1.2 million, in a seed round led by IndiaQuotient. Founded by BITS Pilani and IIT Delhi graduates, the platform enables identity verified reselling via escrow payments and community discovery. Its initial focus remains on Bengaluru.
**Defence tech and startup partnerships pick up speed**
Finvolve and India Accelerator committed Rs 6.5 crore to Zoppler Systems, a defence startup developing radio frequency sensing hardware paired with a vendor agnostic Edge AI platform. The system classifies signals and supports autonomous decisions across ground, air, naval and future space uses without forcing legacy hardware replacement.
Cars24 formed an official alliance with the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade. The arrangement will deliver founder mentorship, AI enablement through Cars24 Labs and investment access via the Fuel by Cars24 program. DPIIT backs the effort through Startup India, linking founders to markets and joint initiatives.
**AI governance, education and infrastructure rollouts**
UNESCO placed a free nine hour AI ethics course on Coursera, available in 11 languages including Hindi. Designed for students, policy makers and tech professionals without requiring advanced credentials, the curriculum draws on faculty from Carnegie Mellon, the University of Toronto and the Alan Turing Institute.
Cisco and IIT Delhi launched a joint technology hub targeting AI and cybersecurity research. Over three years, the centre plans to build talent and strengthen digital security frameworks across the Indo-Pacific region.
Bengaluru startup BLUE introduced an AI native video infrastructure platform that encodes meaning instead of raw pixels. It claims bandwidth savings up to 90 percent, a tenfold drop in storage costs and adoption by Britannia, Haldiram’s and HPCL already.
**Health, travel and fintech expansions**
Medi Assist upgraded its AI document processing, cutting cashless pre authorizations to under five minutes in more than half its cases and lifting fraud detection by up to 50 percent. QubeHealth Pay partnered with Petos to embed veterinary payment tools and cashback features into the Petos app, targeting Rs 50 crore in pet healthcare payments over 18 months.
Cleartrip widened its bus network to roughly 95 percent of India’s private inventory, spanning 6.5 lakh routes. Gen Z travellers now drive over 55 percent of these bookings.
As enterprise AI investments multiply across sectors, the week’s announcements suggest the next phase of growth will depend less on novelty and more on how quickly startups turn capital into operational scale.
