YourStory Lateral Sparks Quiz #242: 4 Startups to Know
28 Jul 2026
YourStory's weekly Lateral Sparks quiz—a recurring feature testing domain knowledge, business acumen, and lateral thinking—has reached its 242nd edition, and this installment turns the spotlight on four startups operating across battery recycling, voice AI, manufacturing automation, and fashion supply chains. The edition also nods to YourStory's Book Review section, which has now distilled takeaways from more than 355 titles on creativity and entrepreneurship.
Here's a rundown of the startups featured, and why founders across sectors might want to pay attention.
Metastable Materials: Recovering Critical Minerals from Spent Batteries
Founded by Shubham Vishvakarma and Manikumar Uppala, Metastable Materials extracts lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and aluminium from spent batteries using an underwater dismantling process designed to eliminate fire risk and toxic gas release. The company has drawn fundraising from Log9 Materials, Surge, Speciale Invest, Theia Ventures, and Climate9ers—though specific funding amounts were not disclosed.
The underwater dismantling approach is notable for safety reasons, but the report flags that regulatory or environmental compliance requirements around this and battery-material extraction more broadly aren't detailed in available facts—an area worth watching as the space scales.
Foodwize: Building Sustainability Behaviour from the Ground Up
Foodwize, founded by Srijata Sengupta and Priya Joshi, is a social enterprise focused on shaping consumer behaviour and cultivating sustainability leaders. Its initiatives include STHIRA, a youth innovation challenge tackling soil health in food systems, and Foodwize Ignite, a B2B arm helping chefs, hospitality professionals, and businesses embed sustainability into food practices.
The founding year for Foodwize was not specified in available reporting, nor was its current operational scale.
Shunya Labs: Voice AI That Runs Without the Cloud
Shunya Labs, founded by Ritu Mehrotra, Sourav Bandyopadhyay, and Abhishek Sharma, builds proprietary voice AI infrastructure at the CPU level, designed to handle multilingual, accented, and code-switched speech. The platform can process mixed-language conversations across roughly 55 Indian languages and runs on a CPU with or without internet connectivity.
That CPU-only design is a differentiator for connectivity-constrained markets, but it also raises a question flagged in the report: whether CPU-based processing can match the scaling or accuracy of cloud- or GPU-based voice AI systems as demand grows.
SwitchOn: AI-Powered Quality Inspection at Scale
SwitchOn, founded by Aniruddha Banerjee and Avra Banerjee, integrates AI into manufacturing machines to automate product quality inspection via computer vision. Since beginning its expansion in 2021, the company has grown to operate 170 production lines across 60 manufacturing facilities on four continents. Its client roster includes Unilever, Bosch, and Maruti Suzuki, and it has secured fundraising from IvyCap Ventures, SIG Tattva, and Trifecta Capital.
That client list is impressive, but it also concentrates revenue risk: a heavy reliance on a small number of large clients could expose SwitchOn to disruption if any single relationship shifts.
Groyyo: Speeding Up Fashion's Supply Chain
Groyyo, founded by Pratik Tiwari and Subin Mitra, is an AI-driven fashion supply chain platform connecting global fashion brands with apparel manufacturers. Its digital platform manages the full production lifecycle—design, trend forecasting, and manufacturing—and the company says it can compress production timelines from months to weeks. Groyyo recently raised funding from Cornerstone Ventures, though the amount wasn't disclosed.
As with many AI-driven platforms targeting traditional industries, Groyyo may face adoption friction from manufacturers accustomed to legacy processes—a common hurdle for vertical AI tools entering established supply chains.
Why Founders Should Care
For early-stage founders, this quiz edition offers more signal than its lighthearted format suggests. The involvement of a range of investors—Log9 Materials, Surge, IvyCap Ventures, SIG Tattva, Trifecta Capital, and Cornerstone Ventures among them—likely indicates continued investor appetite for manufacturing, sustainability, and AI-infrastructure plays, even though exact funding amounts aren't public.
SwitchOn's four-continent footprint suggests that AI-based manufacturing quality tools may plausibly scale internationally faster than some founders assume, provided they can land a handful of anchor enterprise clients. Similarly, Shunya Labs' offline-capable, multilingual approach could point to underserved demand in markets where internet connectivity or language diversity limits standard cloud-AI products—a pattern other founders building for emerging markets might reasonably weigh.
Foodwize's STHIRA challenge also hints at a broader opportunity: founders in sustainability or agri-tech niches could find value in youth-focused innovation programs as a talent pipeline, though how directly transferable that model is remains unclear given limited detail on program outcomes.
What's Missing
Several gaps limit how far these takeaways can be pushed. Funding amounts and valuations for Metastable Materials, SwitchOn, and Groyyo were not disclosed. Founding years for Foodwize, Shunya Labs, and Groyyo weren't specified, and current operational scale for Metastable Materials, Foodwize, and Shunya Labs remains unclear. It's also not evident how these four startups were specifically selected for this quiz edition, so readers should treat the feature as illustrative rather than a ranked or comprehensive list of sector leaders.