All posts tagged: Incubated

IIT Madras incubated deep tech firm Solinas Integrity raises funds for expansion

IIT Madras incubated deep tech firm Solinas Integrity raises funds for expansion

Solinas Integrity, an IIT Madras incubated climate deep tech and robotics company based at the IIT Madras Research Park, has secured $5.5 million in a Series A1 funding round led by Hero Enterprise Partner Ventures and co-led by Mela Ventures, with participation from the Luthra Group. Existing investor SBI Ventures, through the SVL-SME Fund, doubled down on its position, alongside continued backing from Rainmatter and 8X Ventures Fund I. The round follows Solinas’s Series A, led by SBI Ventures through the SVL-SME Fund (Neev II) in May 2024. Kumbhat Advisors, led by Akash Sethia, served as Exclusive Financial Advisor to the transaction. Solinas will use the fresh capital to scale aggressively and deepen its penetration in existing markets while expanding into new states and municipal corporations across India and building out its international footprint with a strategic focus on the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Founded by Divanshu Kumar and Moinak Banerjee, Solinas builds robotics and AI systems that inspect, clean, and digitize underground water and wastewater infrastructure, solving problems of water leakages, contamination & elimination of manual scavenging. …

Incubated in Pune, this startup founder is turning banana waste into leather | Pune News

Incubated in Pune, this startup founder is turning banana waste into leather | Pune News

3 min readPuneJun 10, 2026 01:12 PM IST Marlon Brando, Arnold Schwarzenneger, Tom Cruise, Shahrukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan. Some of the biggest names in films have helped make the leather jacket a symbol of swag and style. Leather has spread into a number of other locations as well, such as the auto industry, luxury products workshops, sports goods makers and industrial gear manufacturers. Environmentalists have been calling out the leather industry for its large carbon footprint, especially deforestation, the release of methane, a Greenhouse Gas, from cattle farms and the irreversible pollution of water bodies with chemicals used in tanning, and animal cruelty. While working in the laboratory at Pune’s Venture Center, a technology incubator hosted by the National Chemical Laboratory, Mumbai-based Jinali Mody had enough reason to think about the need for an alternative to leather. She had grown up scuba-diving from the age of 12 and had seen the oceans deteriorate. She once spent six months doing beach cleanups and conservation work. “I am passionate about climate change and studied climate change …