Foxhog Ventures Announced a ₹44 Crore Investment in an AI Startup. The Startup Says It Never Received a Single Rupee

On September 30, 2025, parts of the startup press reported that Foxhog Ventures had put ₹44.37 crore into an AI company called Assessli. The startup says no money ever arrived.

In a public notice, Assessli — registered as One Oath Educational Research and Technologies Private Limited — says binding documents were signed, including a shareholders' agreement and MGT-14 resolutions filed with the registry, but that Foxhog "failed to disburse any committed funds" and that "not a single rupee was received." It says it ran no public relations on the deal; the funding announcements were made, in its words, "solely by the other party." After more than ten months with no disbursement, its chief executive sent Foxhog a formal disassociation in February 2026, declaring the agreements null and void.

Assessli is not the only company to find a Foxhog funding announcement attached to money that never came.

Foxhog Ventures markets itself as the India arm of a US-India venture fund that has backed, by its own count, more than 140 companies. Its India entity's filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs describe something much smaller. Incorporated in January 2022 and since converted to a public limited company, Foxhog Ventures India Limited has exactly seven shareholders, the minimum a public company is allowed, all of them individuals, with no venture, institutional or foreign investor on the register; promoters hold 99.95%. Its paid-up capital is ₹15 lakh, about seventeen thousand dollars. In the year to March 2025, revenue fell 76% to ₹37.9 lakh and it posted a net loss of ₹41.2 lakh on a negative net worth.

Against those numbers sit the announcements. A claimed $63 million tie-up with GGV Capital in 2022, more than two hundred times the company's total assets. An $18.6 million cheque to an education startup. A $12.65 million seed round for a UK aviation venture. And the ₹44.37 crore for Assessli.

The announcements are consistent. So is what the named parties say when you ask them.

The deals the other side doesn't recognise

When Foxhog announced the $63 million GGV deal, the money never arrived; founder Tarun Poddar later told reporters the talks had "fallen through." GGV Capital's Asia business, now Granite Asia, was blunter. Per a detailed investigation by The Head and Tale in August 2025, it said it "has never made any investment in Foxhog Ventures or its affiliated entities."

Poddar has also linked himself to Sequoia India. Peak XV Partners, the firm Sequoia India became, said the opposite: "Any claims of an affiliation between Tarun Poddar and Peak XV Partners or (formerly) Sequoia India are completely false."

The other cheques have a similar shape. An announced $18.6 million investment in Amplify Dreams Academy was larger than Foxhog's entire stated corpus; Poddar said it was tranched over a decade, with roughly ₹70 lakh released so far. A 2023 investment in fantasy-gaming startup FanBall XI was, by his own account, called off. Posts promoting a $12.65 million seed cheque to JetConnect Aviation carried what The Head and Tale identified as fabricated Business Today and ET Now logos. The Assessli announcement, the startup says, came the same way: a press release it never authorised.

What the register shows

Foxhog does not file like an investor. Its principal business activity on the corporate register is recorded not as finance or investment, but as "activities of membership organisations." The data platform Tracxn, which catalogues startups and their funders, classifies Foxhog among alternative lenders — next to the likes of Manappuram and InCred — and records the firm itself as "unfunded," having raised no outside capital of its own.

The accounts are small and shrinking. Revenue was about ₹1.5 crore in FY23 and ₹1.55 crore in FY24, on which the company booked a net profit of ₹31,706. Then it dropped to ₹37.9 lakh in FY25 with that ₹41.2 lakh loss. Its current ratio, a basic test of whether a company can meet its near-term bills, was 0.01. An earlier investigation by The Head and Tale reported the company's auditor had noted that proper books of account were not maintained. Poddar's headline credential, a Stanford MBA, was on his own confirmation a nine-month online certificate.

Even the government post came down

In June 2025, Foxhog announced CSR commitments of ₹25 crore to IIT Roorkee and ₹17 crore to IIT Kanpur. The Press Information Bureau, the Indian government's official communications arm, put out a release. After The Head and Tale sent questions to the parties, IIT Roorkee took down its social-media posts and the PIB deleted its own.

The institutions named in the announcement stopped standing behind it.

The founders who went to the police

The pattern Assessli describes — paperwork, an announcement, then no money — recurs with smaller founders, some of whom have gone to the police. Sandeep Gudapati of Eviris Health says Foxhog charged him ₹4.5 lakh in "due-diligence fees," then rejected the funding citing forged documents he denies submitting; he filed a complaint at Delhi's Barakhamba Road station and, in a March 2025 email, called it "coordinated, organised fraud." (Foxhog refunded the fee the same day the allegation was made.) Hitesh Bang of HBang Hospitality filed an FIR in Hyderabad alleging cheating and forgery after a promised April 2025 investment never arrived, the money explained away as stuck in a banking "VOSTRO account." Both accounts are allegations; neither has been tested in court.

Foxhog's answer

Foxhog's position is that it is the victim, not the perpetrator. In a public advisory dated October 2025, the company said "unauthorized individuals have been contacting employees, clients, and business associates… falsely claiming affiliation with the organization for financial or other gains," and that it "has not authorized any third party to offer jobs, loans, investments, or partnership opportunities on its behalf." It has filed a defamation case against one outlet that covered the allegations, and criminal complaints against at least one of the founders accusing it. The advisory names no impersonator and cites no specific incident.

That defence has to carry a great deal. For the announcements to be sound and the firm merely unlucky, a set of unrelated parties would all have to be mistaken about their own records at once: a multi-billion-dollar venture firm, an Asian growth fund, two IITs, the government's press bureau, and the very startup Foxhog said it had funded, which says it never received a rupee.

The figures on its own statutory filings are not subject to that dispute. The company filed them itself.