Inside S45’s Plan To Revamp Investment Banking, IPO Journeys With AI

India has seen an undeniable spree of IPOs in the past few years as the country’s capital markets mature. FY26 saw ₹1.65 Lakh Cr raised in mainboard IPOs and over ₹5,000 Cr through SME IPOs, as per data from National Stock Exchange’s monthly report for March 2026. 

With 99 companies going public until February, the year has seen both the highest-ever number of listings and capital raised through mainboard IPOs. And even while the SME IPO trend moderated slightly this fiscal compared to FY25, the average SME IPO size has grown to ₹49 Cr, nearly 4X of six years prior. 

Today, there are roughly 5,000-7,000 listed companies in India. As that number grows, the traditional investment banking model is more and more likely to become a bottleneck for the middle of the market. That’s where S45 wants to shake things up. 

Founded in early 2025 by Deepank Bhandari, Pankaj Harlalka and Aman Singh, S45 describes itself as an “AI-native investment bank for India”. The company was founded on a vision of addressing structural gaps in the current capital market system, taking on mandates ignored by the likes of JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, as well as domestic giants like Kotak Investment Banking, Motilal Oswal, and ICICI Securities. 

Essentially, S45 aims to expand access to growth capital and accelerate companies’ IPO journeys by automating manual workflows through the use of AI agents. Last year, it raised a seed funding round of $5 Mn from RTP Global in order to further its vision. 

“We are reimagining what investment banking looks like when software and AI sit at the centre of execution, and humans sit at the judgment layer,” Singh told Inc42 in a chat with the founders. 

What’s An AI-Native Investment Bank?

S45’s founders form a jigsaw puzzle of interlocking expertises, each bringing their own unique experiences to the table. 

Bhandari spent years in private equity and banking in London before returning to India. After a stint as part of Blinkit (then known as Grofers) that ended shortly before Zomato acquired the e-grocer in 2022, he and his brother got involved in a company that was utilising tech to generate supply chain efficiencies in the textile industry. Scaling the venture up to over ₹500 Cr revenue gave him a first-hand experience of the disruptive power of SMEs – if only they had access to the right capital. 

Singh, meanwhile, graduated from IIT-Delhi in 2022 and went on to found an AI-powered personal finance app SayF. While SayF raised some funding, he eventually exited and went on to work at Skyflow, a Silicon Valley-based AI cybersecurity platform. But upon connecting with Bhandari, his college senior by around 15 years, the two brainstormed the initial idea for S45. 

“When I met Deepank, the overlap was very natural. He had deep insight into how capital markets workflows actually function in the Indian mid-market, and I had seen how AI could fundamentally change the cost structure and operating model of complex services businesses,” Singh said. 

The last piece of the puzzle was completed by bringing in Harlalka – a veteran of the merchant banking space who had spent 20 years advising companies on IPOs, rights issues, takeovers, and other capital markets transactions. 

As leaders of a lean team of around 12 people, the trio’s roles reflect their respective backgrounds as well. While Singh heads the engineering and product side, Harlalka owns the deal pipeline and takes the final call on which companies S45 works with. Meanwhile, Bhandari heads the distribution and capital markets team. 

“Many founders and promoters have built meaningful businesses and reached a stage where the next phase of growth requires the right capital structure, stronger institutional processes, and access to public markets. Our promise is simple: we help companies understand whether they are ready for that journey, and if they are, we help them get there much faster and with far more structure than the traditional process allows,” Bhandari told us. 

Data Is The Edge

A traditional investment bank is structured as a hierarchy from analysts to associates to vice presidents and partners. The chain of work essentially requires a great deal of manual effort to collect information from various sources, organise it, and present it. S45 claims it has compressed that effort by developing a stack with three layers – data, intelligence, and workflow.

At the base layer, the system ingests structured and unstructured capital markets data, such as filings and disclosures, historical records, financial documents, etc. This is then processed by agents that extract information, build drafts, and validate outputs. The final layer is where the human enters the loop, reviewing and making edits as required to move the deal forward. 

S45’s edge over a typical investment bank starts right from the moment it screens a company as a potential customer. “If you give us a company’s audited financials and key documents, we can assess whether we want to work with them in roughly 90 minutes. Traditionally, that process could take around 10 days of a banker’s time. In our workflow, the system produces the first-pass analysis quickly, and then a banker reviews it and makes the final call. This significantly shortens the time required to decide whether to pursue the mandate,” said Singh. 

Cofounder Bhandari added that as opposed to a typical investment banking team which can evaluate three or four companies in a month, S45 is able to evaluate 40-50 companies in the same time frame. 

It’s a similar story when it comes to the offer document preparation. “A DRHP has six to seven sections and usually ranges from 550 to 1,200 pages. For the capital structure section, which is the history of every transaction that has happened since inception, our agent is able to do it in more or less a day, verified with the banker. That typically used to take weeks,” added Singh. 

This doesn’t just reduce the required headcount and effort for the workflow – it’s a model that fundamentally can’t be replicated by legacy organisations that haven’t built their teams around AI in the same way. 

It’s worth noting that S45 does not see itself as doing anything outside of the scope of current regulation. “We are not trying to bypass the system or position ourselves as being outside it. We are reimagining how the execution layer within that system gets built and run by making it far more efficient,” Bhandari clarified. 

S45’s Art of The Deal

In terms of its target market, S45 aims to work on both mainboard and SME IPOs in the ₹50-500 Cr range. “Larger traditional investment banks are structurally optimised for much larger transactions. Their business model fails if they make less than $1 Mn on a deal,” Singh claimed. 

Plus S45 claims to have a cost edge over investment bankers — up to 30% discount on what the competition charges. This is why the focus is on fundamentally high-growth companies that have been ignored by private equity and VCs, which can demonstrate growth in 3-4 years. 

This, Bhandari added, means that the ideal customer is someone with good cashflow but who needs smart capital to grow.

Since its pilot operations began eight months ago, S45 has facilitated the IPOs of 26 companies worth ₹40-70 Cr each – all on the SME board and cumulatively amounting to over ₹1,120 Cr of capital raised. These IPOs include Zappfresh parent DSM Fresh Foods Limited and Encompass Design India Limited, which operates consumer brands in the textiles and gourmet food spaces. 

Additionally, the company has also advised on some private capital placement transactions. “Before a company goes public, there is often a phase where it needs to become fully compliant, strengthen governance, and prepare itself for the market. During that phase, some companies also look at bridge rounds or pre-IPO placements. So private placements can be an important adjacent workflow within the same broader journey,” Singh noted. 

Besides IPOs, S45 is also looking at going more aggressive on mergers and acquisitions and plans to wrap up 1-2 big deals before the end of the year. 

45 Degree Trajectory

The company’s medium term focus is on primarily augmenting its tech team and building strong internal systems so that its AI platform can continue streamlining the execution layer and enable scale-up. 

“In the last 8-9 months of operation, we have done roughly $2 Mn in revenue. We also see a strong pipeline ahead for FY26-27 and predict revenue of around $10 Mn,” said Singh. 

What’s interesting is that in the long term, the company has no intention of removing the human angle completely from the workflow, but rather, freeing up bankers from repetitive tasks and enabling them to spend more time on making decisions where intuition and experience play a larger role. 

“A large part of investing still comes down to understanding the promoter, the business, and the industry in a way that requires direct human judgment. That is not something we think should be handed over entirely to technology,” said Harlalka. 

Within a sector that is known for gruelling work hours and entrenched hierarchies, S45’s vision is an indicator of a future where AI rewrites how value is created. Yet, the path to complete success is hardly written in stone. Whether the startup’s mission succeeds from here on will be determined when it is able to win widespread trust and acceptance from the investment ecosystem. 

[Edited by Nikhil Subramaniam]

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