Lachy Groom, one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched solo investors, decided to back Indian startup Pronto just 20 minutes into his first meeting with its 24-year-old founder.

The meeting, which took place in February through a mutual connection, led to Groom investing $20 million in Pronto as an extension of its Series B round, valuing the startup at $200 million after the investment — double its valuation just over two months earlier, as TechCrunch had previously reported. The deal came together within weeks, bringing the solo investor on board as the Bengaluru-based startup expands to meet growing demand for on-demand home services in India.

Groom said he was drawn to Pronto’s ambition to build what he called the world’s largest platform for organizing domestic labor, starting with India’s vast and largely unstructured workforce. “The work underneath that is genuinely hard, and most attempts in adjacent categories have struggled with the operational discipline,” he said, adding that Pronto founder Anjali Sardana (pictured above) and her team were operating “at a level I haven’t seen elsewhere in this space.”

Before founding Pronto in 2025, Sardana worked at Bain Capital and venture firm 8VC, where she gained early exposure to investing and high-growth startups. The startup connects households with workers for everyday tasks such as cleaning and basic home services.

The introduction was arranged through Paul Hudson, founder of Glade Brook Capital, who connected Groom and Sardana during her trip to San Francisco earlier this year. Glade Brook has backed startups founded by both: Pronto, which Sardana leads, and Physical Intelligence, where Groom is a co-founder. Hudson and Groom have also backed Indian quick-commerce startup Zepto.

Sardana said Groom’s investment approach is heavily founder-driven. “He indexes two things. One is the founder, and that’s 95% of it. If he loves the founder, then he will invest,” she told TechCrunch, adding that the rest comes down to the scale and potential of the business.

Groom’s bet comes as a clutch of startups in India race to build instant home services platforms, a category that is seeing rapid adoption among urban households as more consumers turn to on-demand help for everyday tasks.

The opportunity is significant. A recent Bank of America note, reviewed by TechCrunch, estimates the instant home services market in India could grow into a $15 billion to $18 billion industry by the end of the decade, as companies including Pronto, Snabbit, and Urban Company’s InstaHelp compete for share in the fast-growing category.

Competition is intensifying, with heavy capital inflows and aggressive pricing, particularly to attract first-time users. Bank of America estimates that Snabbit and Urban Company’s InstaHelp each account for about 40% of the market, while Pronto has around a 20% share, even as it scales rapidly. The category is expected to remain “burn-heavy” over the next two to three years.

Despite trailing larger rivals, Pronto has been scaling rapidly, growing from around 18,000 bookings a day to 26,000 in just over a month. The startup is focused on driving repeat usage, betting that turning occasional demand into frequent, habit-driven usage will be key to winning the category, with its top 10% of users accounting for about 40% of bookings.

This growth has also brought challenges, particularly in building out supply. Pronto has expanded its network of service workers to 6,500, up from 1,440 in January. But Sardana said demand continues to outpace supply, making forecasting and capacity management key challenges as the startup grows.

Marc Lore, the veteran e-commerce entrepreneur who sold his previous startups to Amazon and Walmart, has big plans to infuse AI into his current venture, Wonder.

The centerpiece of those plans is Wonder Create, an initiative that would let anyone — from food entrepreneurs to social media influencers — use AI to design and launch their own restaurant brand in under a minute. The virtual restaurant would then go live across Wonder’s growing network of tech-enabled kitchen locations, currently numbering 120 and expected to reach 400 next year.

Lore’s startup, a vertically integrated dining and delivery platform, has evolved from food trucks to fast casual restaurants with 10 to 20 seats. These are not normal restaurants, though; they are “programmable cooking platforms” capable of operating as 25 different types of restaurants based on cuisine, within their all-electric kitchens that are increasingly becoming robotic.

Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference this week, Lore said these kitchens have a 700-ingredient library. The “restaurants” they house actually consist of many different brands that operate from within these locations.

In addition to a staff of up to 12 people in these kitchens, cooking tech, like conveyors and robotic arms, are involved in the cooking process. The company also just bought Spice Robotics, a maker of an automatic bowl-making machine previously used by Sweetgreen. Next year, it plans to offer an “infinite sauce machine” that can make bout 80% of all the sauces found in recipes on the internet today.

Wonder Create was announced earlier this year as a way for anyone to use Wonder’s software to launch their own restaurant brand and recipes.

Lore offered more details as how this would work by leveraging AI technology, describing the plan as something like a “Shopify front-end with an AI prompt.”

“You type in what kind of restaurant you want to build. It builds the restaurant — AI does — in under a minute. It does the name, branding, description, pictures, pricing, health information, and all the recipes for your restaurant,” Lore explained during an interview at the WSJ event. The would-be restaurateur could then refine the prompt if changes were needed. When ready to go live, the restaurant would launch across all of Wonder’s locations.

The company currently has 120 of these “programmable cooking platforms” in operation, a number that’s expected to grow to 400 next year. As it adds robotics to the equation, the company won’t necessarily reduce headcount, Lore noted. Instead, it will increase the number of meals a kitchen can produce in a given period.

“We have about 7 million throughput capacity with 12 people,” he said. “We see a path to getting to 20 million throughput out of 2,500 square feet with just 12 people. The goal also is…I guess by 2035, to have 1,000 unique restaurants operating out of the 2,500 square feet,” Lore added.

The goal with these AI-created “restaurants” is to allow people to experiment with food in new ways. A restaurateur could test recipes to gauge customer reaction before adding dishes to his own brick-and-mortar locations, for example.

Lore sees other use cases for the platform, too, like letting influencers connect with their audience through their own “restaurant” brands without having to actually launch their own chains.

“It could be a mega-influencer, a micro-influencer — anyone that wants to monetize their following,” Lore said. “Or it could be a private trainer that wants to make specific bowls. It could be a not-for-profit. It could be Disney for [marketing] their new movie. Anybody can make a restaurant.”

Whether that many people actually want to is an open question. Ghost kitchens — a similar concept that promised to let brands sell food without owning a restaurant — had a rocky run in the early 2020s, with several high-profile operators scaling back or shutting down after struggling to build customer loyalty. Wonder’s added layer of automation and AI may address some of those pitfalls, but the model is still unproven at scale.

MrBeast Burger, a famous ghost kitchen experiments, vividly illustrated the challenge. The brand faced widespread complaints over inconsistent food quality — a consequence of relying on dozens of different contracted kitchens and staff. Wonder’s programmable, increasingly automated kitchens are designed to solve exactly that problem.

There are still limits to this idea, Lore admitted. Wonder’s team (including its robots) can’t do things like toss and stretch pizza dough or slice and roll sushi. Instead, Wonder’s focus is on simpler basics like burgers, chicken wings, fried chicken, and bowls.

The whole plan comes together with Lore’s other acquisitions — Grubhub for its 250 million-deliveries-per-year business and Blue Apron for its meal kit business. Now, Wonder is focused on buying restaurant brands, like New York City-based Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken, which it snapped up for $6.5 million in February.

“When you buy a brand — and you can buy a brand that has 10 locations, or even 50 locations — and then overnight put it in 1,000, there’s just an incredible arbitrage there,” Lore noted.

QuTwo, the Finnish AI lab founded by former AMD Silo AI CEO Peter Sarlin, is now valued at €325 million (approximately $380 million) after raising a €25 million angel round ($29 million). It’s a sign of enduring tailwinds for AI, quantum computing, and sovereign tech, especially for Europe-made companies.

QuTwo’s name is a nod to quantum computing, but it hasn’t gone all-in on quantum. Its core product, QuTwo OS, is an orchestration layer that directs tasks to classical, quantum or hybrid architectures — with the idea that enterprise use cases are often best served by “quantum-inspired” computing, which uses classical chips to simulate quantum behavior on more reliable hardware.

Enterprise AI will be QuTwo’s bread and butter. The company already secured some $23 million in committed revenue thanks to design partnerships with the likes of retail giant Zalando, for which it helped develop AI assistants. “AI is the North Star that we will continue to aim for. Quantum is just a new type of compute,” said Sarlin, who is adamant that QuTwo is an AI company.

Momentum has been building around Europe-based AI labs, and several of them have become overnight unicorns. Just last week, former DeepMind researcher David Silver secured $1.1 billion for his new endeavor, Ineffable Intelligence. QuTwo’s valuation and round size are somewhat modest in comparison but will let it pursue its roadmap under less pressure.

According to Sarlin, who serves as QuTwo’s executive chairman, this was a decision he also made for his previous company, Silo AI, which AMD acquired for $665 million in 2024. “I had a lot of investors who would have wanted to pour a lot of money into making Silo into Europe’s OpenAI, but I didn’t believe in that play,” he told TechCrunch.

The main difference is that QuTwo wants the freedom to think long term, with a five- to ten-year horizon. “We are on a mission to build the globally leading AI company for the next paradigm, given that Europe did not succeed in building the AI company for this era,” Sarlin said.

It’s not that Sarlin is bearish on European AI, of which he is a prolific backer. Nor is he necessarily critical of extra-large rounds — he volunteered that he is also an investor in Yann LeCun’s Ami Labs, which raised $1.03 billion, and in British-American venture Recursive Superintelligence, which is rumored to be following the same path. But he didn’t see a billion-dollar round as the right fit for QuTwo — nor VC money, at least for now.

Until recently, QuTwo was solely funded through Sarlin’s family office, PostScriptum, which also incubated NestAI, the other company where he serves as executive chairman. But whereas NestAI raised some $115 million in a funding round led by Finland’s sovereign fund and Nokia, QuTwo wasn’t seeking to raise external funding.

However, when the lab’s soft launch generated significant interest earlier this year, Sarlin decided he would say no to checks from VCs and strategic investors, but yes to an angel round in part due to the geopolitical moment Europe is currently navigating. 

With Europe increasingly looking to favor local alternatives to U.S. tech providers, there are tailwinds for AI made in Finland. But there is also investor appetite for a company that promises to facilitate more ambitious R&D initiatives in the fields where the region already has strong players, such as the automotive, life sciences and gaming sectors.

Conversely, Sarlin expects that QuTwo’s angel investors could open doors across Europe. There are definitely quite a few introductions he could request from this group, which includes Yuri Milner, Xavier Niel, Nico Rosberg, Dieter Schwarz and Niklas Zennström, and as well as many startup founders from Hugging Space, Legora, Miro, Skype, Supercell, Wolt, and more.

This will also support QuTwo’s growth. It recently expanded into Sweden, and has been hiring. According to Sarlin, some 50 quantum and AI scientists have joined the team, which includes two other second-time entrepreneurs: his former cofounder at Silo, Kaj-Mikael Björk; and Kuan Yen Tan, a cofounder at IQM, the Finnish quantum company that is set to go public.

QuTwo’s connection with IQM is also a reminder that the company believes we are about to enter the quantum era — it just can’t wait. “The question for repeat founders like [us] is how can we have even a larger impact. In the long term, it’s important for Europe that we build the AI company for the next paradigm out of Europe. But, in the short term, we can have a significant impact in driving ambitious R&D moon shots in Europe,” Sarlin said.