Startup news and updates: Daily roundup (May 21, 2025)

YourStory presents the daily news roundup from the Indian startup ecosystem and beyond. Here's the roundup for Wednesday, May 21, 2025.

May 21, 2025 - 13:50

Startup news and updates: Daily roundup (May 21, 2025)

From MudhalVC wanting to build the Y Combinator of Tamil Nadu to Azeedo using weeds to battle pests and plant diseases, YourStory brings you today’s top stories from the Indian startup ecosystem.

Featured stories

“We’re building the Y Combinator of Tamil Nadu”: Aravind Suresh on MudhalVC’s grassroots startup push

When Y Combinator was launched in 2005, little did its founders—Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston—know that nurturing scrappy startups early on would lay the foundation for a whole ecosystem.

Theirs was a bold bet on potential over perfection, one that reshaped venture capital.

Nearly two decades later and thousands of miles away, Chennai-based MudhalVC is bringing that same spirit to Tamil Nadu. Aptly named after the Tamil word mudhal, meaning “first,” the VC firm is addressing a similar gap.

“Traditional VCs wouldn’t indulge—no-pedigree, no traction,” Aravind Suresh says, speaking for the struggles faced by early-stage entrepreneurs from the state’s Tier II and III cities.

MudhalVC is now investing Rs 25 crore across 50 idea-stage startups by mentoring founders, helping them build core competencies, achieve early product-market fit, and mostly, survive long enough to attract larger investments. Read more.

Azeedo is battling pests and plant diseases with invasive weeds

When biotech student Koushik Bose was struggling to narrow down the focus of his final year project, the head of department at his college turned him towards an abundantly available, yet unwanted resource: weeds.

The weed in question? Parthenium hysterophorus—a highly invasive alien species and notorious weed that has expanded its range from a couple of islands in the 18th century to more than 46 countries and territories across the world today. This weed species was also encroaching upon the grounds of Bose’s university campus. Following his belief that every natural source is useful, he decided to put it under the microscope.

“My research revealed that this weed is immune to most diseases that other crops like paddy are susceptible to pest attacks, fungal diseases, and bacterial infections,” Bose says. He realised then that the weed must have a unique property that could be utilised for crops. Read more.

How Deepa Pawar’s Mann Boli is contextualising mental health for marginalised communities

Shaped by her own experiences as a woman from a tribal community, Deepa Pawar’s book 'Mann Boli' builds a vocabulary of mental health that emerges from metaphors, games, folk idioms, personal histories, and cultural memory.

In a country as diverse and complex as India, mental health conversations are often layered with cultural silences, linguistic barriers, and historical exclusions. Deepa Pawar, Co-founder of Anubhuti Trust, has spent years listening to those silences and breaking them open with the empathy and wisdom that comes with lived experience and innovation.

Pawar’s recently released book, Mann Boli—which translates roughly to ‘Language of the Heart’—is a pioneering work that shines a crucial light on the systemic barriers, cultural stigmas, and lack of culturally relevant frameworks that Dalit and Adivasi communities face in accessing mental health care.

“What is the name for the heaviness we carry every day, without even comprehending it’s traumatic or painful?” Read more.

Funding news

Jason Kothari-led Mythik bags $15M in seed funding round

Jason Kothari-led Mythik on Wednesday said it raised $15 million in a seed funding round from a clutch of investors, which the startup claims is the largest seed round in India’s media technology space.

Last month, Kothari, former CEO of Housing.com, unveiled his latest venture, Mythik, a new global entertainment company from India. Mythik aims to share Eastern mythology, folktales, and history with a worldwide audience and create a version of ‘Disney from the East,’ the company said in a statement. Read more.

Other news

TagHive launches SaathiGPT

Edtech company TagHive launched SaathiGPT, which is based on a powerful new language model interface purpose-built for education, designed to deliver highly personalised and contextually relevant learning experiences.

SaathiGPT will allow each student to access personalised tutors. “The model is trained on a proprietary data set drawn from millions of anonymised student interactions captured using classroom clickers—TagHive’s signature technology deployed across schools in multiple regions,” the company said in a statement.

Incorporated in 2017, TagHive is a Samsung-funded edtech company with 24 registered patents and trademarks. Its solutions are used in over 10,000 classrooms in India, South Korea, Vietnam, South Africa, Cambodia, and South America.

Zendesk acquires Local Measure

Agentic AI-powered customer service company Zendesk acquired Local Measure, a CCaaS (Contact Centre as a Service) and advanced voice solutions provider.

“This strategic move expands Zendesk’s customer experience platform into larger, high-volume service environments through Local Measure’s integration with Amazon Connect, AWS’ AI-powered contact centre solution,” the company said in a statement.

The integration will unify digital and voice channels within a single intelligent platform, called Zendesk for Contact Centre, which will deliver scalable, secure, and flexible AI-powered voice and CCaaS solutions.

“By combining Zendesk’s AI-powered platform with Local Measure’s advanced voice capabilities, we offer a scalable solution that adapts to our customers’ needs, streamlines workflows, personalises interactions, and protects data,” said Adrian McDermott, CTO, Zendesk.

(The copy will be updated with the latest news throughout the day.)

Edited by Suman Singh