Top 5 Startups on the Rise

The startup ecosystem keeps reinventing itself. This month we spotlight five companies from India, New York City, and Amsterdam that are pushing boundaries in cloud infrastructure, AI-powered storytelling, mental-health access, enterprise knowledge, and autonomous defense systems. 

Lucidity (India)  

Lucidity is infrastructure software that automates how enterprises use block storage across AWS, Azure, and GCP. It dynamically resizes volumes, right-sizes performance, and introduces one-click disk tiering (its “Lumen” engine) so ops teams stop over-provisioning and start reclaiming spend. The pitch is brutally practical: lower storage bills, fewer manual tickets, and guardrails that keep prod stable. Lucidity claims customers can cut storage costs by as much as ~70% while recovering “hundreds of human hours” per month.  

Why it matters: Most cloud estates are mis-tiered and over-allocated; closing that gap is one of the fastest ways to improve unit economics, without touching app code. 

Pocket FM (India)  

Pocket FM is building the category of bingeable audio series—long-form, episodic stories you consume like TV. Its new AI Creator Suite lets writers turn scripts into fully produced shows in a day, using trained voices and workflow tooling to compress what used to take weeks. That means more titles, faster iteration on narrative hooks, and a pipeline of IP that can travel across languages and formats.  

  Why it matters: Audio series sit at the sweet spot, lower production cost than video, higher retention than one-off podcasts. 

Headway (New York City)  

Headway fixes a bottleneck: finding therapists who take your insurance. Patients discover in-network clinicians and book care, while Headway handles credentialing and claims so providers spend more time in session and less in admin. It’s an operations layer for mental health that scales supply by making insurance economics work for clinicians, with recent funding aimed at expanding coverage lines.  

Why it matters: Demand outstrips supply; operations (not just marketplaces) unlock capacity. 

Glean (New York City presence)  

Glean is “work AI” for the enterprise: an assistant/agent layer + search that connects to all your SaaS tools and answers questions in natural language, grounded in permissions and governance. Think “What’s churn this quarter by segment?” or “Show me the latest spec” with traceable answers and source links. Its rapid growth and funding underscore how central governed retrieval + generation has become to real-world workflows.    

Why it matters: The “last mile” of AI at work isn’t models; it’s connecting to company knowledge safely, with explainability. 

Intelic (Amsterdam)  

Formerly Avalor AI, Intelic builds software that lets unmanned systems across air, land, and sea plan, coordinate, and execute missions through a single human-machine interface. It’s hardware-agnostic “multi-domain distributed mission autonomy,” designed to integrate drones/UGVs/USVs from different OEMs so operators can manage complex swarms coherently. Recent seed funding backs productization and deployments with European partners.  

Why it matters: Defense and civil protection increasingly rely on mixed fleets, interoperability + autonomy is the unlock.  

The pattern behind the picks 

These companies don’t just add features, they rewire systems: 

• Lucidity upgrades cloud storage from static allocation to automated, policy-driven efficiency.  

• Pocket FM compresses creative cycles and scales original IP with AI-assisted production.  

• Headway scales access to therapy by making insurance logistics invisible.  

• Glean turns siloed apps into a governed conversational interface for company knowledge.   

• Intelic orchestrates multi-domain unmanned systems through one autonomy stack.