In the middle of India’s most active IPO cycle to date, as listing volumes surged and subscription figures dominated headlines, a quieter strain was building within the system. Deal flow had scaled rapidly. The institutional infrastructure supporting it had not. Behind each bell-ringing ceremony sat weeks of manual screening, thousands of pages of regulatory documentation, fragmented compliance teams and valuation discussions shaped as much by judgment as by data. For an industry that depends on precision and trust, investment banking has increasingly become an exercise in organised friction. As disclosure norms tightened and regulatory scrutiny intensified, the cost of manual error rose sharply, exposing the limits of human-only execution at scale.
It is this imbalance that S45 has set out to address. Positioning itself as India’s first AI-native investment bank, the venture-backed firm is attempting a structural redesign of how IPOs are executed. Not through incremental automation, but by rebuilding the operating system of public-market execution from first principles. At the core of this effort is a full stack of intelligent agents that evaluate companies, draft prospectuses, automate regulatory filings, and generate investor research at scale, with consistency, discipline and speed.
“Capital markets don’t need louder narratives; they need clearer ones,” says Deepank Bhandari, co-founder, S45. “We intend to make going public less intimidating and more transparent for founders, investors and the broader ecosystem. When readiness, valuation and risk are understood upfront, the IPO stops being a gamble and becomes a business decision. That is the brand we are building: credibility before scale.”
Replacing judgment with discipline: Every IPO begins long before a banker is formally appointed. The more fundamental question is whether a company is ready to operate as a public institution. Traditionally, this assessment unfolds over weeks of meetings and spreadsheet analysis, shaped as much by individual judgment as by structured data. S45 replaces this process with an algorithmic starting point.
By analysing public and proprietary data across financial history, sector dynamics and promoter backgrounds, S45 generates a comprehensive IPO readiness report in under 30 minutes. With an accuracy rate at 85-90 per cent (by the firm’s own estimate), the system delivers a structured assessment of governance maturity, regulatory eligibility and valuation realism.
The implication is significant. A founder in a Tier III city can input the name of her company and, within an hour, understand whether the business is suited for public markets and at what scale. The model is board-agnostic, bias-free and grounded in historical precedent rather than opinion.
This discipline has already reshaped S45’s own sourcing funnel. Of the 80 companies evaluated, 75 declined. “Earlier, it took 3-4 days to evaluate the financials of a company. Today, it takes 20 minutes,” says Aman Singh, co-founder, S45.
Where most IPOs break: If IPO readiness is the diagnosis, the Draft Red Herring Prospectus is the surgery. At 360-500 pages, the DRHP is the most complex and scrutinised document in Indian finance. Over the years, SEBI and the exchanges have steadily tightened disclosure standards, leaving little margin for error. The result has been predictable. Human mistakes have become both inevitable and costly. In the last two years alone, three out of four NSE applications were rejected, often on disclosure-related grounds. This is the pressure point S45 focuses on next.
Once the regulatory framework is established, S45’s AI agents draft up to 85 per cent of the prospectus with near-institutional precision, compressing a task that typically takes two and a half days into two and a half hours. Human bankers remain central to the process, not as manual drafters, but as reviewers, supervisors, and final decision-makers.
The same system extends to regulatory filings. Exchange submissions that currently require hours of checklist-driven uploads are designed to be completed in minutes. For Pankaj Harlalka, the banking veteran among S45’s founders, the importance of this shift lies less in speed than in capacity. “IPO execution today is constrained not by opportunity, but by bandwidth,” he says. “There are too few trained bankers and too many companies ready to scale. What S45 does is multiply institutional capability, faster diligence, fewer errors, stronger compliance and better pricing discipline. In public markets, technology is no longer optional. It is the only way to protect promoters and investors at scale.”
Closing the information gap: The most ambitious layer of S45’s work lies in research. In India, institutional investors operate with deep, structured sell-side analysis, while retail investors, who now account for a significant share of IPO subscriptions, rely largely on media commentary and fragmented opinion. This information asymmetry has persisted for decades. S45’s objective is to narrow it meaningfully.
For every DRHP filed, S45 generates a concise, unbiased research note that captures close to 85 per cent of an analyst’s core reasoning. Peer benchmarking, valuation logic, risk frameworks and historical comparables are distilled into a format stripped of narrative excess and promotional tone, without sacrificing analytical depth.
“We are not replacing analysts,” says Aman Singh. “We are capturing their thinking at scale.” For Singh, the distinction goes beyond automation. “Most firms bolt AI onto existing workflows. We built S45 as AI-native from day one. Our agents do not assist humans; they complete outcomes. Screening, drafting, benchmarking, execution. When machines can reliably handle the bulk of structured thinking, humans are free to focus on judgment. This is not automation. It is a new operating system for investment banking.” The ambition is to democratise access to institutional decision frameworks for retail investors, replacing opinion and hearsay with fact-driven analysis that makes public-market participation more informed and more equitable.
Designing for market cycles, not headlines: Even the name S45 reflects regulatory realism. Derived from the SME framework, it acknowledges the structural fact that SEBI requires three years of audited financials and that most companies are realistically ready to list only in their fourth or fifth year. “S45 comes in after step three,” the founders explain. “That is where value creation actually begins.”
This long-term orientation defines the firm’s valuation philosophy. At a time when founders are incentivised to chase headline pricing and short-term exits dominate the ecosystem, S45 advocates restraint. Its pricing engine produces transparent valuation bands anchored in historical outcomes, replacing negotiation theatre with data-backed conviction.
“Raising capital is not the endgame,” says Bhandari. “Enduring companies are built across cycles. We want promoters and investors to think in decades, not quarters.” That same long-term discipline naturally extends beyond IPOs. S45 is already preparing for the next phase of market evolution: mergers and acquisitions. With thousands of Indian companies in the $12-36 million revenue range, consolidation is inevitable. The same systems that assess readiness today are being extended to power tomorrow’s deal-making, applying the same discipline to scale, structure, and strategic fit.
Traction and scale The strategy is already translating into measurable traction. Backed by RTP Global with $5 million in funding, S45 operates with a lean team of 12 professionals, spanning engineers, investment bankers and distribution specialists. Since August 2025, the firm has onboarded almost one company per month, reflecting a deliberate, capacity-led approach to growth.
Financial momentum has followed. Revenue crossed $2 million in the last quarter, and management expects the year to close at approximately $6-6.2 million in revenue. Over the next two years, S45 is targeting $18-24 million in annual topline, driven by higher throughput rather than proportional headcount expansion.
Over a seven-to-eight-year horizon, the ambition is more structural than symbolic. S45 expects to be involved in 20-25 per cent of India’s IPOs, either as a lead advisor or as the underlying execution backbone, participating across as many as 3,000 listings as India’s public markets continue to deepen.
The hardest problem S45 faces is not technological. It is cultural. Investment banking is conservative by design, built on precedent, manual control and trust accumulated over decades. Convincing seasoned institutions to delegate execution to algorithms, even partially, will test the firm’s resolve. Yet, the underlying logic is difficult to refute. When AI absorbs executional burden, bankers are able to return to what matters most: judgment, stewardship, and accountability.
As India’s capital markets enter their next decade of expansion, S45’s wager is ambitious but well-timed. If even one in four IPOs eventually runs through its systems, the firm will not merely represent a fintech success story. It will have quietly rewritten how Indian investment banking operates, one prospectus, one filing, and one unbiased research report at a time.
In a market still shaped by paper processes and inherited precedent, S45 is betting that the future belongs to discipline, data, and design. And if it succeeds, the idea of an AI-native investment bank will be here to stay.