Here's your daily dose of Indian startup funding roundup and key business news for 3 September 2026. Cradlewise raises $12 million, Zerodha gets SEBI's nod for merchant banking, and Alpha Wave sells its INR 550 crore Pine Labs stake. Three funding rounds closed on 3 September 2026, spanning consumer baby tech, semiconductor metrology and edtech. 3one4 Capital, Bluehill VC and ABP Education were among the day's lead investors. The headline raise is Cradlewise's $12 million Series A round to expand its AI-first smart crib business. Away from funding, Zerodha received SEBI's approval to enter merchant banking, Alpha Wave sold almost its entire Pine Labs stake in a INR 550 crore block deal, Uber is set to lay off 200 to 250 employees in India, and D2C brand The Ayurveda Co shut down after overexpansion. Cradlewise raised $12 million in a Series A round led by 3one4 Capital and Prudent Investment Management, taking its total funding to $26 million. The funds will support growth, channel expansion, product R&D and geographic expansion. Founded in 2019 by Radhika Patil and Bharath Patil, Cradlewise is an AI-first consumer tech company that makes smart cribs designed to soothe babies and improve family sleep. Its AI-enabled cribs use sensors to track movement, sound and sleep state, predicting when a baby is likely to wake and intervening before it fully wakes, with models trained on more than 75 million hours of sleep data. Makr Microsystems raised INR 10.2 crore in a seed round led by Bluehill VC, with participation from Artha Venture Fund. The proceeds will go towards technology development, customer validation and commercialisation, with initial applications in advanced packaging, hybrid bonding and defect detection. Founded by Ashwin Lal, the Bengaluru-based startup is developing nanoscale 3D subsurface metrology technology that lets chipmakers see and measure hidden structures and defects beneath semiconductor surfaces without damaging the chip, combining acoustic atomic force microscopy, optical tomography and 3D data analytics. YoLearn.ai raised an undisclosed amount in a seed round led by ABP Education, the education arm of ABP Group. Along with the capital, ABP Education will support the startup with content, marketing and distribution, and its group companies Headword Publishing and KIPS Learning will convert their school books into AI tutors accessible through classroom textbooks. Founded in January 2025 by Kirti Prakash Mishra, YoLearn.ai is a Noida-based voice-first AI tutoring platform that lets students scan a code in a textbook and interact with an AI tutor in 22 Indian languages, offering step-by-step solutions, practice tests and score predictions aligned to CBSE, ICSE and state boards. Zerodha received SEBI's approval to operate as a merchant banker through its wholly owned subsidiary, Zerodha Corporate Advisors. The company said it expects to begin operations over the next few months, with an initial focus on equity IPOs by new-age b
