From Investorant that enables fractional ownership in the F&B industry to IBM’s collaboration with BharatGen, YourStory brings today’s headlines that highlight significant developments across industries.
Featured stories
Bengaluru-based Investorant enables fractional ownership in the F&B industry
Founded by Guru Shivaram, Amrit Hemdev, and Salman Sait in 2021, Investorant is an investment platform that enables fractional ownership of curated food and beverage (F&B) concepts.
“We enable talent to have their own spaces without any other stress such as raising funds, building the project, and others. They get creative freedom, the investors get absolute transparency on how their money is being spent, CEO Shivaram says.
The startup has established three concepts so far—Whisky Samba in Hyderabad, Spirit Forward and Una Hacienda in Bengaluru. According to Shivaram, all the three establishments have been profitable from day one.
Bengaluru-based Investorant is looking to open three more establishments by the end of this year.
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Iconic Wealth wants to redefine wealth management in India
Mumbai-based firm Iconic Wealth is betting on a mix of technology and human expertise to make wealth management inclusive, not just for the UHNIs, but also for the growing affluent class.
Founded by Dharmendra Jain, Srikanth Subramanian and Shobhit Mathur, Iconic Wealth started operations in March 2024. The firm has scaled rapidly and has reported assets under management worth Rs 50,7 billion at the end of first quarter of FY2026, recording a quarter-on-quarter growth of 33.6%.
A part of Angel One, Iconic Wealth is leveraging technology to enhance the rigour in its research where it can generate new insights on investments. It also aims to deepen the expertise of its bankers through technology. It has over 1,000 clients across nine Indian cities.
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Funding news
Atomicwork announces strategic investment from Okta Ventures
Agentic service management platform Atomicwork has announced a strategic investment from Okta Ventures to strengthen its mission to reinvent enterprise IT. Through this partnership, Atomicwork and Okta will enable IT teams to deliver personalised, proactive support across every business app, channel, and device, making enterprise IT both seamless and secure.
According to a release from Atomicwork, its AI-native universal agent has reduced ticket volumes by up to 60% for IT and service teams, with omnichannel and multimodal agentic AI, while improving end-user satisfaction by more than 25%.
UGC.ai raises $1M in seed round to accelerate manufacturing adoption
Industrial DataOps platform UGX.ai has raised $1 million in a seed round led by Blue Ocean Venture Partners. The round also saw participation from DeVC, iSeed, Atrium Ventures, and Point One Capital, along with angel investors Ramakant Sharma (Livspace), Prateek Maheshwari (PhysicsWallah), Lovleen Bhatia (Edureka), Meghna Agarwal (IndiQube), Varun Pahwa (Pahwa Group), Asad Khan (LambdaTest), Dinesh Prasad (ex-Qualcomm India), Sai Yagnyamurthy (ex-Ford Motor Company), Gopi Prasad (ex-Salesforce), Shekhar Vemuri (Emerge-In), and Manish Agarwal (KGeN).
The funds will be used for UGX.ai’s India and overseas expansion plans, product innovation, and scaling adoption of its AI-powered enterprise apps and connectors for manufacturing.
Other news
IBM collaborates with BharatGen to accelerate AI adoption
IBM and BharatGen have entered into a collaboration to advance AI adoption in India.
Combining IBM’s expertise in data, governance, and model training with BharatGen’s sovereign LLMs, the partnership will build inclusive, India-focused AI models tailored to the country’s linguistic and cultural landscape.
The collaboration aims to build and scale multimodal and language-specific AI models for sectors like education, agriculture, healthcare, banking, and citizen services.
IBM and BharatGen will jointly develop solution templates for Indic use cases, demonstrations on Watsonx and OpenShift AI, and scalable data pipelines with Indic capabilities. They will implement IBM’s governance framework for responsible AI, establish new Indic benchmarks, and research emerging model architectures.
Edited by Swetha Kannan
