Startup news, 1 October 2026

7 briefs

• MobiKwik’s Taku buys shares as insider confidence signal

  MobiKwik cofounder and CFO Upasana Taku has acquired 1.07 lakh shares of the company, a small but notable insider transaction in a stock that has seen limited insider activity in recent years. The pur

  Reported by inc42.com

• NetApp bets on Novus to fix enterprise AI’s data bottleneck

  NetApp CEO George Kurian has staked the company’s AI strategy on Novus, a new architecture designed to help enterprises move AI workloads from pilot to production. The pitch appears to center on data

  Reported by siliconangle.com

• India’s $25B deep-tech fund aims to close US-China gap

  India has set aside $25 billion to invest in deep-tech startups, a move that could reshape its position in semiconductors, AI, and space tech amid a widening gap with other major economies. The commit

  Reported by msn.com

• Maven Robotics eyes public markets after $100M Series A

  Maven Robotics emerged from stealth in September with a $100 million Series A, and reports suggest it may be positioning for an initial public offering. If confirmed, the move would mark one of the fa

  Reported by roboticsandautomationnews.com

• AI writing tool Sherpa claims major IP co-creation role

  Pocket Entertainment founder Rohan Nayak has stated that Sherpa, an AI-powered long-form fiction writing harness, played a key role in developing a valuable intellectual property. The disclosure arriv

  Reported by economictimes.indiatimes.com

• AWS embeds DuckDB in Aurora PostgreSQL for live-historical queries

  Amazon Web Services has quietly embedded the open-source DuckDB analytical engine inside Aurora PostgreSQL, letting applications query live transactions and historical Iceberg data lake records from a

  Reported by siliconangle.com

• Apollo launches AI suite to unify sales workflows

  Apollo has rolled out an AI-powered platform designed to pull sales workflows—data enrichment, outreach, and analytics—into a single interface. The launch targets what the company calls "tool sprawl,"

  Reported by siliconangle.com