M9Y AI Private Limited

A clear-eyed look at where they stood.

M9Y AI Private Limited builds enterprise automation software, and like most AI-native startups, its early costs sat in engineering and platform build rather than in anything a bank would lend against. The company needed non-dilutive capital to take the product to market without giving up equity at a seed-stage valuation it hadn’t yet earned. The Startup India Seed Fund Scheme (SISFS) was the natural route, but a SISFS application is not a formality: the incubator committee reviewing it wants a fund-utilisation plan that ties every rupee to a specific product or platform milestone, a market-sizing case that holds up under questioning, and financial projections that run several years out, not just to the next raise.

The harder part was fit. SISFS money comes with permitted-spend rules and eligibility conditions set by the scheme, and a proposal that reads well in isolation can still miss the mark if it isn’t built around those constraints from the start. M9Y AI needed the ask itself, not just the narrative around it, to match what the scheme was actually built to fund.

CapEasy structured the SISFS application around a fund-utilisation plan tied to product and platform milestones. Rather than presenting a lump-sum ask, the plan broke the funding into stages linked to specific development and go-to-market checkpoints, the structure a reviewing committee expects to see and can hold the startup to.

Alongside the utilisation plan, CapEasy built out the market-sizing work and the multi-year financial projections the application needed. For an AI-enterprise product, that meant grounding the market case in something more specific than category-level growth numbers, and carrying the projections far enough forward to show the seed cheque as a step in a plan rather than a one-off ask.

The proposal was then aligned to the scheme’s own eligibility and permitted-spend rules before it went in. SISFS funding is released against defined categories of spend and administered through a DPIIT-approved incubator; an application that treats those rules as a checklist item late in the process tends to come back with queries. Building the plan around them from the outset instead meant the application spoke the scheme’s language on the first pass.

The outcome

The startup secured a Startup India Seed Fund (SISFS) approval. A Seed Fund approval is the incubator committee’s sanction, not a disbursement in hand; the money is milestone-released, and actual disbursement still runs through the scheme’s own due-diligence and compliance checks. Under SISFS, the incubator can sanction a grant of up to Rs 20 lakh or convertible-debenture-linked funding of up to Rs 50 lakh, one route or the other, never both, and outcomes at that stage are never guaranteed in advance.

What made it work

The application held together because the utilisation plan, the market sizing, and the financial projections were built as one document, not stitched together from separate exercises after the fact. A committee reading a SISFS proposal is checking whether the ask, the roadmap, and the numbers actually agree with each other; when they don’t, that’s usually where the questions start. Matching the proposal to the scheme’s eligibility and spend rules before submission, rather than adjusting it after a query came back, is what let this one move through on its own terms.