Growthpal Raises $2.6M in Funding Led by Ideaspring Capital to Accelerate Its AI-powered M&A Copilot for Deal Sourcing and Execution

Growthpal founders (L to R) - Maneesh Bhandari, Shalu Mitruka, Amaresh Shirsat

GrowthPal, co-founded by Maneesh Bhandari, Shalu Mitruka and Amaresh Shirsat today announced a $2.6 million funding round to accelerate its AI-powered M&A copilot for deal sourcing and execution. The round was led by Ideaspring Capital with participation from prominent angel investors globally. The new capital will support product development and expand GrowthPal’s presence across international markets as demand grows for faster, more programmatic approaches to inorganic growth.

The announcement comes as M&A teams face increasing pressure to do more with less. For most companies, inorganic growth depends on timing, context, and access. Yet M&A deal origination from mid-market and early stage companies, has changed little in decades, still driven by banker networks, static databases, and fragmented research workflows. Buyers often see only what is already on the market, while high-quality, off-market opportunities remain hidden.

Corporate development teams are leaner, timelines are compressed, and competition for quality assets is intensifying. While platforms like PitchBook, D&B, Datasite, and Tracxn have made company data more accessible, they largely stop at aggregation. GrowthPal addresses a different need by applying AI-driven reasoning to help teams identify which companies actually matter, based on strategic intent, sector context, and readiness to transact.

“M&A sourcing is where most time and effort is wasted, especially for smaller and mid-market deals,” said Maneesh Bhandari, co-founder and CEO of GrowthPal. “Teams spend weeks researching, filtering, and chasing opportunities that never go anywhere. We built GrowthPal to help buyers focus only on high-intent, high-fit targets and move from mandate to meaningful conversations far faster.”

Product Snapshot - AI Powered M&A search

GrowthPal’s platform acts as an intelligent M&A copilot. When a buyer defines a growth objective - like acquiring a specific capability or entering a new geography - the system translates that goal into a structured acquisition thesis. Its AI agents then scan an enriched database of more than four million technology companies using signals from public filings, web activity, hiring trends, funding history, and other indicators. The result is a short list of precision-fit, often off-market targets that align closely with the buyer’s mandate, rather than broad lists of loosely relevant companies.

The company was founded to address a structural gap in the market. While more than a million meaningful startups exist globally, fewer than one percent scale successfully, often due to lack of timely exits or strategic partnerships. At the same time, many acquirers struggle to find the right targets efficiently, particularly for transactions under $70 million that fall below the focus of traditional investment banks. GrowthPal was created to connect these two sides by making deal sourcing proactive, discreet, and data-driven.

GrowthPal has already supported more than 42 completed M&A transactions and facilitated over 210 LOI-stage conversations across North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Clients include large and mid-market enterprises, fast-growing startups, private equity-backed firms, and corporate development teams across sectors such as IT services, SaaS, fintech, and vertical software. In one case, a single client closed seven acquisitions within 18 months using the platform.

The broader M&A landscape is increasingly shaped by data abundance and decision scarcity. Teams have more information than ever, yet struggle to turn it into conviction. As acquisitions become a core growth lever for companies of all sizes, the ability to reason across signals, context, and intent is becoming a competitive advantage.

“GrowthPal is solving one of the most under-optimised parts of the M&A lifecycle,” said Naganand Doraswamy, Managing Partner at Ideaspring Capital. “By focusing on qualified deal discovery and using AI to compress timelines, the team is enabling a more systematic approach to inorganic growth that traditional tools cannot offer.”

Looking ahead, GrowthPal plans to extend its intelligence deeper into the transaction lifecycle, supporting valuation reasoning, deal structuring, and preparation for negotiations. The company’s long-term vision is to become the system of intelligence that helps teams make better M&A decisions earlier, with greater confidence and clarity, starting from discovery and extending through execution.

About GrowthPal

GrowthPal’s AI-powered M&A copilot helps users identify off-market targets, validate fit, and accelerate deal execution turning strategy into action within days, not weeks.

Its data and intelligence-driven digital investment banking platform helps corporates acquire small to mid-sized targets globally to add to their revenues, markets, geographies, customers, products, and teams. We specialize in add-ons, tuck-ins, and bolt-ons and cover global markets including US, LATAM, UK, Europe, Asia, and specialize in Business Services and Software. The experienced team has helped 100+ clients and closed 40+ deals.

IISc Incubated Simulation Tech Startup SimYog Raises ₹6.3 Crore from Robert Bosch, IdeaSpring

SimYog, a startup incubated at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), has raised Rs 6.3 crore in the funding round led by Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions (RBEI) along with contribution from of Ideaspring Capital,

The Bangalore-based startup will utilize the funds to expand its product offering.

Founded in 2017, by former Intel engineer Dipanjan Gope, SimYog operates in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) space and is focused on providing “Design and Sign-off tools for Automotive Electronics”. The startup's vision is a harmonious integration of physical science and data science to enable cost-effective and performance rich automotive hardware design saving time-to-market, reducing bill-of-material costs and improving yield-rate.

The startup’s deep-learning-based software solution allows hardware developers to test an electronic components’ resistance to electromagnetic interference (EMI) in the design stage. Typically, auto component makers develop multiple prototypes and test for EMI before mass production.

“Typically, a lab requires $4-5 million of investment and with the huge number of electronics being built, there’s also a significant wait time to use the lab. Instead, if every developer can test for EMIMC in the design stage, this was our interest,” said RK Shenoy, senior vice president at RBEI. “SimYog is using data analytics and machine learning to solve this problem and we believe this will reduce development time as well as cost for us. This is why we worked with them to bring this to the market and also invested in them.”

AS of now SimYog's solution only tests one parameter, with the second coming by the middle of 2019. The 5-people company intends to expand its team to 12 people over the next one year, as it adds customers and products.



“In the automotive sector 20 years ago, the bill of materials was largely mechanical, but now we’re seeing a transition, where a large portion of the cost of the vehicle is in electronic and electrical components,” said Dipanjan Gope, CEO of SimYog, who was an Assistant Professor at IISc in past.

"In electric vehicles, 50-70% of the bill of materials IS FOR electronics, and if we can help a company like Bosch reduce the number of prototypes in developing these components, it will greatly reduce their time to market and costs.”

The startup is also an example of collaboration between industry and academia, showcasing the power of programmes put in place by IISc, said CS Murali, chairman of STEM CELL, the deep-tech startup incubator at IISc. SimYog emerged out of collaborative research that began in 2012 between Bosch engineers who enrolled for a PhD programme at IISc and Gope. The intellectual property is jointly held by the institute and the company.

Source - Economic Times | Images - Simyog.com

AI-based Coach for Employees Worxogo Raises ₹16.5 Cr from Inventus, Ideaspring Capital

Bangalore-based Worxogo, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) led tech startup driving performance in enterprises, has raised ₹16.5 crore in Series A funding from Inventus India and Ideaspring Capital.

The startup will use the funds primarily to scale its AI engine, called Mia and enter the US market, where it has also applied for a patent for its Mia. The startup, which already has presence in Singapore, will also use funds to expand into global markets.

Launched in 2015, by a team of seasoned professionals with decades of experience with organisations such as PwC, IBM, KPMG and Ernst & Young - Ramesh Srinivas, Ravi Bhamidipati and Sudha Bhamidipati, Worxogo uses an AI engine to improve employee performance and claims to increase sales by 40% in 3 months of implementation.

The startup's flagship product 'Mia' is employees’ personal digital coach which is a self-learning AI engine, that uses proprietary deep-learning algorithms to assess employees’ individual performance, personality traits and uses predictive analytics to nudge, and improve their performance.

Mia gives actionable advice using principles of neuro-economics and behavioural science. It understands what makes employees tick by recognizing workplace behaviour preferences (intrinsic and extrinsic motivations) and their responses to nudges. Mia coaches over 1 lakh people every day across over 35 organisations and five countries.

“We believe that our first-of-its kind cognitive engine Mia will bring a radical shift in how performance is managed in the near future. We are focused in our approach to reach every employee in an organisation individually and allow Mia to coach them in a way that aligns personal growth with company objectives,” said Ramesh Srinivas, CEO and co-founder of Worxogo, which counts Axis Bank and Piramal group as its clients.

Built on proprietary machine-learning algorithms that assess each employee’s unique behaviour preference, along with performance data, Mia sends customised nudges to employees regularly to help drive business performance, said the firm. It added that Mia delivers significant business impact — including at least 25 per cent rise in sales, higher productive employees and reduced supply chain risk.

“Behavioural science is a relatively recent body of work which is at variance with classical economic thinking. That paradigm in combination with the ubiquitous mobile, always-on connectivity and machine learning enable productivity benefits in enterprises in real-time, in a personalised fashion and at considerable scale,” Parag Dhol of Inventus India said.

Source - Business Line

Project Management Platform Zapty Raises $500K from IdeaSpring Capital

Ideaspring Capital is excited to announce its investment in Zapty Workplace Inc, their fourth one this year and their first in the horizontal B2B SaaS collaboration and workflow space. The investment will be Zapty’s first institutional round of capital funding. Zapty was originally bootstrapped by serial entrepreneurs Arvind Agarwal (previously founder of Skelta, a popular product in Embeddable Workflow and BPM space, with a successful exit to Invensys, Plc.), Sanjay Shah (a serial entrepreneur with several successful exits) and Manav Garg (a prolific angel investor and CEO of Eka Software).

Through Zapty’s cloud-based solution using real-time collaboration and its proprietary micro-workflows (or “Zaplets”) technology, it enables today's business user to collaborate, discover, manage and eventually automate processes using AI techniques. Zaplets enable smaller work to be done with clear action, responsibility and accountability. Automating these Zaplets using AI, allows any business to become process driven without having to go through a large process reengineering exercise of any kind and provides one single tool which encompasses collaboration, process discovery and automation.

Traditional Business Process Management (BPM) and Workflow products, a rapidly growing $9 Billion market, have focused too much on upfront process discovery and automation. This makes the implementation extremely complex and lengthy since mapping all possible human interactions is required.. This results in rigid workflows with users losing the freedom to go beyond what they originally designed.

Over the next year, the team will focus on significant enhancements to the product including integrations to several popular SaaS products and opening the micro-workflow technology to creating departmental and verticalized industry solutions. The first is for Digital Marketing teams and Creative Agencies.

Arvind Agarwal, CEO of Zapty, describes the problem faced by thousands of business owners and project managers in the SMB and enterprise space : "Traditional workflow solutions make it increasingly difficult to adapt to ever changing business needs. Ultimately, business ends up adapting to the tool, rather than tool adapting to the business. We are excited with our partnership with Ideaspring Capital. Their deep technology expertise will help us increase our pace of innovation, and leverage their network to better understand the market and improve adoption."

“Collaboration tools have mass appeal, and Zapty is designed to serve many facets of collaboration including communication, document reviews, tracking, process discovery and management. Product education and a good user experience is of paramount importance to us, and a core part of our strategy," says Teja Shah, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing and Customer Success Officer.

“Zapty offers a compelling and efficient customer experience delivered with cloud-scale cost and flexibility," said Naganand Doraswamy, Managing Partner at IdeaSpring Capital. "We are excited to be part of Zapty’s next level of growth and believe their vision and their background in workflow automation will put them at the forefront of an impending evolution into the next generation of SaaS.”

Ideaspring Capital Invests in Homegrown AR Startup ‘Whodat’

Early stage venture fund Ideaspring Capital has invested $600,000 in Whodat. This is Ideaspring’s third investment, and the first in the Augmented Reality technology domain. The investment will be Whodat’s first institutional round of capital funding, following four years of bootstrapped and profitable growth.

“Whodat is building a proprietary hybrid SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) system to seamlessly place digital content within indoor environments without markers. Their system handles advanced features like - fast initialization, accurate ground plane estimation, real world scale estimation and re-localization.

Whodat has a great team led by Sriram and Kaushik and their vision is to solidify their SLAM approach and also provide contextual information about the scene using Deep Learning approaches and eventually productize the overall package so developers can easily create great AR experiences without any knowledge of Vision and Learning systems.” said Arihant Patni from Ideaspring Capital.

“We are super excited to partner with Ideaspring Capital and work closely with them to build a revolutionary AR company. Whodat’s AR platform will make it very easy for developers with minimal knowledge of Computer Vision and Deep Learning to develop AR experiences. Our platform uses state-of-the-art technologies while providing a simple interface for developers so they can focus on building great AR experiences. We plan to invest heavily in R&D and Product Development over the next 18 months to take our vision one step closer to reality.” said Sriram Ganesh, CEO of Whodat.

Whodat is building an inclusive, first of it’s kind technology platform. Whodat’s goal is to minimize developers’ efforts to deploy across platforms, and enables them to build engaging, unified AR experiences. “We will also be expanding our team and acquiring talent across verticals like Computer Vision and Mobile Performance Optimization. Building an R & D team with very capable Research Scientists and Software Optimization Engineers will enable us to build a state-of-the-art AR platform” said Kaushik Das, CTO of Whodat.

High-Profile Technocrats Team-up To Form Rs 125-crore Fund For Product Startups In India

India's high-profile technocrats and investors including T V Mohandas Pai, Rajiv Mody, Naganand Doraswamy (CEO - TiE-Bangalore) as well as descendents of notable Patni family - Amit and Arihant Patni, have joined hands to form a Rs 125-crore fund, Ideaspring Capital, to back product startups in the country.

The venture fund will invest in early-stage product innovation startups, seed funding of up to Rs 3 crore and subsequent co-investment at series A stage of up to Rs 5 crore, a statement said.

Ideaspring Capital is planning to invest in only 4-6 startups a year and provide high touch 'Startup Assist' programme, it added.

The fund is backed by entrepreneurs and investors, like Mohandas Pai, Naganand Doraswamy, Prashant Deshpande, Sharad Sharma (Co-founder, iSpirt), Ravi Gururaj, Amit Patni and Arihant Patni amongst others.

Ideaspring Capital has raised majority of its investment from Indian investors with Aarin Capital as anchor investor.

"The fund will work with entrepreneurs having deep technical and domain expertise, developing early stage enterprise products in major cities across India," it said.

Intellectual property in the form of algorithms and deep technology will be a key differentiator.

"We see immense growth potential for enterprise product innovation from India and are confident that India's next wave of innovation will come from this space," Doraswamy, Managing Director and CEO of Ideaspring Capital, said.

Key areas the fund will cover include Machine Learning and Deep Learning, Computer Vision and Image Processing, Big Data Analytics, Internet of Things, Augmented and Virtual Reality, HealthTech, FinTech and other such new-age technology.

Through its 'Startup Assist' programme, Ideaspring Capital will help startups to build scale in product management, customer management and building products for a global footprint.

Ideaspring Capital will provide key interventions in aspects that include Business Market fit, product management, customer connects and connect to next level of investors.

In 2015, the total amount of investment in the startup ecosystem stood at USD 5.4 billion, Ideaspring Capital said citing VCCEdge data.