Hi, welcome to this week’s edition of Minimum Viable, where I scout early-stage startups for you. This week, we’re focusing on early-stage Indian startups.

Early-stage Indian startups this week

1. Plane

2. Clueso

3. Zepic

4. Nosh

5. OrbitAID

Plane

Plane is a one-stop open-source project management software built for teams, which is a strong competitor against Jira and Linear.

Plane was founded in November 2022 by brothers Vamsi Kurama and Vihar Kurama. Vamsi has previously been on the founding team of two other startups as a CTO and as a CEO. Vihar, on the other hand, has previously worked at AppSmith and is also a contributing member to the Python Software Foundation.

Plane has raised a seed funding of $4 million led by OSS Capital, and they recently launched a paid version of their self-hosted product.

Clueso

Clueso focuses on making studio-quality product videos with the power of AI. They also use generative AI to help companies create instructional videos and documentation for employee training and for their customers.

Founded in 2023 by IIT Madras alumnus Akash Anand, Prajwal Prakash, and Neel Balar, Clueso is backed by Y Combinator. Clueso has recently raised $1.4 million in seed funding led by f7 ventures.

Zepic

Zepic is a SaaS startup building a marketing automation platform to hyper-personalize customer engagement.

Zepic was co-founded in 2023 by an ex-Freshworks team: Naveen Venkat, Bharathi Kannan Ravikumar, Sunil Kumar, and Sreelesh Pillai. Naveen previously co-founded Zarget, which was acquired by Freshworks in 2017, and has product management experience from both Freshworks and Zoho.

Zepic has raised a pre-seed of $2.1 million from Neon Fund, along with angel investors working in senior roles at Apple, Chargebee, Freshworks, Microsoft, and Zoho

Nosh

Nosh offers an AI-enabled robot that can follow commands and prepare food automatically.

Founded in March 2018 by Yatin Varachhia - IISc alum, Sudeep Gupta - Georgia Tech alum, and Amit Kumar Gupta - ISB alum, Nosh plans to serve the economically well-to-do migrant population of metropolitan cities.

Nosh has raised $1 million in seed funding raised from BITS Spark, SuperMorpheus, and a few other angel investors.

OrbitAID

OrbitAID is working towards a holistic approach towards sustainable spacecraft operations, beginning with refueling, then expanding in other on-orbit servicing operations like repairs, upgrades, de-orbiting, and debris removal. OrbitAID also currently supply propellant tanker satellites to LEO, GEO, cis-Lunar, and interplanetary missions.

Founded in 2021 by Sakthikumar R & Nikhil Balasubramanian, Sakthikumar has several years of experience from the Indian Institute of Science along with a master’s degree in space engineering and rocketry from the Birla Institute of Technology. Nikhil, on the other hand, has a PhD in mechanical engineering from the Technical University of Munich.

OrbitAID recently raised around $500K in pre-seed funding led by Startup TN.