Three years ago, Salil Srivastava ran the chemicals division at Zetwerk. Today, Scimplify, the specialty chemicals company he co-founded in 2023, has a reported annualised revenue run rate of about $200 million. It was reportedly valued at around $250 million in a round led by Hitachi Ventures last week.
Srivastava is one of a growing cohort of former Zetwerk executives who have built venture-backed companies in specialty chemicals, defence electronics and technical textiles. There are at least a dozen such companies. Together, they have raised more than $130 million. Their rise comes as Zetwerk prepares to list on the stock exchanges on Friday, October 23.
That rise points to something bigger than one company’s alumni network. Eight years after Zetwerk pioneered the managed manufacturing marketplace in India, its model has become a template. Manufacturing has also turned into one of the few corners of Indian venture capital where deal activity is climbing.
Consider the cohort. Sanlayan Technologies was founded in 2023 by former Zetwerk executives Abhijit Kothawale, Rohan Gala and Rahul Vamsidhar. It raised ₹186 crore in a Series A round in June 2025. Before that, it bought a majority stake in Dexcel Electronics, a 20-year-old embedded systems firm. A two-year-old startup now owns an incumbent nearly ten times its age.
Materials science firm Whizzo was founded in 2024 by Zetwerk alumnus Shrestha Kukreja. It raised a $15 million Series A round led by Fundamentum this year. Its valuation rose about 3.5 times in under a year. STCH is an AI-led fabric development company started in 2025 by former Zetwerk executives Narahari Payala and Aseem Chitkara. It raised $5.5 million in a round led by Omnivore this year.
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What binds them is a shared playbook: orchestrate factories rather than own them. Scimplify develops chemical processes in its own labs, then runs commercial production across a network of more than 500 partner plants. Whizzo works with over 120 small and mid-sized manufacturers and exports to more than 15 countries. STCH manufactures through partner factories in India and Bangladesh. Sanlayan builds by acquiring established defence MSMEs.
“When we met Zetwerk’s founders in 2019, Amrit and Srinath (Zetwerk co-founders) said they wanted to build the manufacturing ecosystem for the world. We hear ambition like that often, but rarely do we see such ambition paired with strategic thinking and operational substance,” said Bejul Somaia, partner at Lightspeed, which co-led Zetwerk’s Series B funding in 2019.
The numbers bear out the shift. Indian manufacturing startups have raised $1.92 billion across 127 deals so far in 2026, against $164 million across 31 deals in all of 2020, according to Venture Intelligence data.
That growth stands out against a tightening market. Indian tech companies raised $10.3 billion in the first nine months of 2026, up 7 per cent from a year earlier, according to data platform Tracxn. But the number of funding rounds fell 38 per cent to 1,134, and seed funding dropped 37 per cent to $698 million.
Deeptech, meanwhile, posted a record 2025, with $2.96 billion raised across 189 deals, according to the Indian Venture and Alternate Capital Association (IVCA).
Notably, Zetwerk’s own early backers are writing cheques again. Lightspeed, which co-led Zetwerk’s Series B in 2019, led Whizzo’s seed round. Accel, an early Zetwerk investor, is a shareholder in Scimplify. Kae Capital, which co-led Zetwerk’s 2018 seed round, invested in STCH.
The pattern has a precedent. A decade ago, Flipkart alumni fanned out to build companies such as PhonePe, Udaan and Cult.fit, a network the industry came to call the “Flipkart mafia”. In industrial technology, a similar alumni network is now forming around Zetwerk.
“Industrial technology in India is producing a new generation of founders who learnt the business on the shop floor, and Zetwerk has been one of the breakout companies in that shift,” said Arjun Rao, founding partner at early-stage deeptech fund Speciale Invest.
“Going to ₹15,000 crore-plus revenue in eight years in a category like manufacturing is rare. When we see ‘ex-Zetwerk’ on a founder’s profile, it usually means they have sat in a factory, chased a delayed shipment and still delivered on time,” said Rao, who has invested in advanced manufacturing companies such as EPlane, Unmannd and Cynlr.
Zetwerk’s own trajectory set the stage. The company was co-founded in 2018 by Amrit Acharya and Srinath Ramakkrushnan. The two are engineers from middle-class families who studied at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. That campus also gave rise to electric scooter maker Ather Energy and several others. In 2021, Zetwerk became India’s first manufacturing unicorn. When it raised its Series D round that year, Shailesh Lakhani, who at that time was managing director at Sequoia India and is now co-founder at Ambition Capital, said the company had defined a new category of managed marketplace, with no direct competitor in India or South Asia.
This month, Zetwerk took its own story to public markets. Its ₹5,012 crore IPO was subscribed 3.1 times. Demand was led by qualified institutional buyers, who bid for 4.71 times their portion. Ahead of the issue, Zetwerk raised ₹2,251 crore from 99 anchor investors, including Capital Group, BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. The company lists on the stock exchanges on Friday, at a valuation of up to ₹25,583 crore at the top of its price band.
Acharya saw this coming. In 2021, shortly after Zetwerk became a unicorn, he said in an interview that he would be “the happiest person” if a hundred other companies took on what Zetwerk was doing. He argued that each industrial vertical was a trillion-dollar market that could support its own specialist. Five years on, several of those specialists are being built by his former colleagues. And he has personally invested in them too.
To be sure, most of the alumni companies are still at an early stage. IVCA’s 2026 deeptech report flags a sharp drop in investor participation between seed and Series B rounds, a gap that could test how many of these companies reach scale.
For now, the frontrunner is pressing ahead. Scimplify is targeting $400 million in annualised revenue within a year. It plans to put $7.5 million of its new funding into expanding in the US, which already accounts for about 30 per cent of its business.