How Indian companies actually get built

A round closes. Within an hour, twenty outlets have published the same number, the same quote and the same investor list. Nobody has asked what the company tried first, which market it walked away from, or what the founder would do differently. The announcement gets covered. The company does not.

The Rising Story reports the part that gets skipped. Not a niche within Indian business — the whole of it, from a two-person team in Bhagalpur to a company on its Series C. What decides whether we write about you is whether there is something worth finding out, not the size of your last round.

What makes a Rising Story piece different

Every story carries real figures, a decision the founder made and regretted or defended, and an honest account of what is not working yet. A profile that reads like a press release has failed. Our full standards are set out in our editorial policy.

That standard applies the same way to everyone. A founder with a large round gets the same questions as one with none, which is the part most publications quietly stop doing once a company is big enough to have a communications team.

What we can be held to

Every funding figure we publish carries a link to where it came from. Not “sources say” — a link. If a number cannot be sourced, it does not get printed.

When we get something wrong, the correction is published on the story itself and listed on our corrections page. Nothing is quietly edited afterwards and left to look as though it never happened.

A byline here resolves to a real person with a real page — a reader can see who reported a story and everything else they have written.

Coverage is not for sale, and nothing on this site tracks a reader who has not agreed to it. If we ever run something paid for, it will say so at the top of the page — not in a line underneath it.

An archive that can be queried

Alongside the reporting we keep a structured record of the companies, founders and investors we write about — who founded what, which rounds closed, who led them, and where the company actually is.

So a question like which D2C companies raised a seed round last year, and who led them has an answer rather than a search. Indian business coverage is published and then effectively lost: findable for a week, gone for good after that. What is written down and connected will be worth more in five years than any single story in it.

Who is behind this

The Rising Story is edited by Ajit Kumar, and it is independent. That is what makes it possible to ask a well-funded company the same questions as a bootstrapped one.

Pitch us

Use the pitch form. It asks two things: the hardest thing that has happened to the company, and what is still broken. That is usually where the story is, and it is the same question whether you have raised nothing or fifty crore.

Every pitch is read by a person. You are welcome to write again when something changes — a company that was too early in March is often exactly right by September.

For anything else, including corrections, write to desk@therisingstory.com.