Daily Indian Funding Roundup & Key News - 16 September 2026: VerifAIX Raises $5 Million, TRUE ARTIS Raises INR 11.4 Crore, and More

Here's your daily dose of Indian startup funding roundup and key business news for 16 September 2026. VerifAIX raises $5 million, TRUE ARTIS raises INR 11.4 crore, and Activate closes its maiden $105 million AI fund. Four funding rounds closed on 16 September 2026, spanning semiconductor verification, aesthetic surgery, fashion discovery and beauty quick commerce. Endiya Partners, Bluehill VC, Zeropearl VC and AJVC were among the day's lead investors. The headline raise is VerifAIX's $5 million seed round to scale its AI-native chip verification platform. Away from funding, Aakrit Vaish's Activate closed its maiden VC fund at $105 million to back AI startups, while Reliance Jio partnered with Canva to offer free Canva Pro to subscribers on select recharge plans. VerifAIX raised $5 million in a seed round co-led by Endiya Partners and Bluehill VC. The proceeds will fund product development, customer deployments and expansion of its engineering teams across the US, India and Israel. Co-founded in 2024 by Madhulima Tewari, Kenneth Roe and Avner Landver, VerifAIX is building an AI-native verification platform for semiconductor design. Its "Formal Brain" combines AI with formal methods to reason across specifications, RTL and verification assets, helping engineering teams verify increasingly complex chips with greater speed and rigour. Firi raised $3 million in a funding round led by 360 ONE Asset, with participation from Better Capital, CRED founderKunal Shahand other angel investors. The company plans to use the funds to expand into makeup, fragrances and other beauty categories, and to add more dark stores in Gurugram before expanding to other cities. Founded in 2026 by former Uber India executives Vivek Madani and Karishma Rathaur, Firi is a Gurugram-based beauty and personal care quick commerce startup that uses AI to analyse product reviews before listing products on its platform. The company claims to have analysed more than 50 million reviews and shortlisted around 3,000 products, with deliveries in parts of Gurugram taking as little as nine minutes. TRUE ARTIS raised INR 11.4 crore in a seed round led by Zeropearl VC, with participation from Eleven, a business group of Medanta co-founder Sunil Sachdeva, and a group of angel investors including PhonePe CBO Vivek Lohcheb. The fresh funds will open two new centres in Delhi NCR over the next six to eight months, strengthen surgical and recovery capabilities, and expand its network of plastic and aesthetic surgeons. Co-founded in 2025 by Ankit Joshi and Sandeep Upadhyay, TRUE ARTIS is an integrated aesthetic surgery platform offering facial aesthetics, breast procedures, body contouring, hair restoration and non-surgical treatments across two centres in Delhi and Gurgaon. The company claims to have served more than 10,000 clients and completed over 400 surgeries in the past nine months, with its first centre reaching EBITDA break-even. Slayd raised INR 1.5 crore in a pre-seed round led by ajvc, an

Original source: StartupTalky