India’s startup ecosystem.India’s startup ecosystem is now home to several second-time founders, who’ve been through the grind in the past, learned the hard lessons, and are now bouncing back with smarter plays.
From Deepinder Goyal moving into health-tech wearables, to Dunzo’s Mukund Jha returning to the startup arena with a vibe coding platform, the founders are back with big ambitions.
Here are some of the recent founders who are back at building again.
Deepinder Goyal
After co-founding Zomato in 2008 and scaling it into a multi-billion-dollar food-tech platform, Goyal stepped back from his role of CEO last month to focus on new ventures.
The 43-year old entrepreneur has launched a health-tech and wearable technology startup called Temple, which last week raised around $54 million in seed funding at a roughly $190 million valuation from founder peers, early Zomato backers and prominent investors.
The firm is building a high-performance wearable device to monitor advanced health metrics such as cerebral blood flow for elite athletes.
Mukund Jha
Jha co-founded Dunzo in 2014, a hyperlocal delivery and logistics startup that scaled across major Indian cities before its eventual shutdown in 2025 after financial and operational challenges.
In 2025, he co-founded AI startup Emergent with his twin brother Madhav Jha, an AI startup building a vibe-coding platform that allows users to use natural language to create applications without traditional coding.
Last month, the firm bagged $70 million in a Series B round led by Khosla Ventures and SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
Mukesh Bansal
The Indian entrepreneur is well known for co-founding e-commerce empire Myntra in 2007 (later acquired by Flipkart) and then founding fitness tech company Cult.fit.
In 2024, Bansal launched Nurix AI, which specialises in building custom AI agents for enterprises, focusing on solutions for call centers and outbound sales.
Bansal also co-founded Meraki Labs, a startup incubator that provides capital and early team support to early-stage startups across sectors including fintech and enterprise solutions.
Mayank Bidawatka
Bidawatka co-founded Koo in 2020, a multilingual microblogging platform positioned as a local alternative to global social networks.
After Koo wound its operations down in 2024, he launched a new venture called PicSee, a consumer tech startup, less than three months after the microblogging platform shut down.
The platform is an AI-powered photo-sharing app built on a ‘give to get’ model, where users receive photos of themselves from friends only after sharing their own.
Bhavish Aggarwal
The IIT Bombay alumnus co-founded Ola in 2010, scaling it into one of the largest ride-hailing networks, and later founded Ola Electric in 2017 to build electric two-wheelers and EV infrastructure, including large-scale manufacturing in Tamil Nadu.
More recently, he ventured into artificial intelligence with Krutrim, an AI company that quickly achieved unicorn status two years ago.
(This list is not exhaustive.)
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