UPES Runway, the startup incubator run by UPES, announced an investment of ₹25 lakh through equity participation in Reagvis Labs, a deep-tech startup building AI tools for digital trust, in New Delhi on September 7, 2026.
Why it matters: As generative AI makes convincing fakes — deepfake video, forged documents, synthetic identities — cheaper and easier to produce, the tools to detect them are becoming a distinct and increasingly necessary category of their own. This investment is a small check by startup-funding standards, but it’s a specific bet that digital-trust infrastructure, not just AI content generation, is where meaningful venture opportunity is emerging next.
Fast facts
- Investor: UPES Runway, the startup incubator at UPES, through its “The Pitch” program
- Startup: Reagvis Labs — deep-tech AI startup focused on digital trust and deepfake detection
- Investment: ₹25 lakh, via equity participation
- Founders: Dr. Sachin Chaudhary and Dr. Praful Hambarde, founded 2025
- What Reagvis Labs builds: deepfake detection, document forgery detection, digital identity verification, and digital content authentication, spanning image, video, and audio
- Program context: part of The Pitch 3.0, which plans to back 10 AI-led startups this year at roughly ₹25 lakh each, with room for larger checks in exceptional cases
Where Reagvis Labs came from
Reagvis Labs grew out of an academic collaboration between Dr. Sachin Chaudhary and Dr. Praful Hambarde during their PhD work in artificial intelligence and computer vision. According to the company, the founders built the startup after observing how generative AI was increasingly being misused to create deepfakes, forged documents, synthetic identities, and misleading digital content.
The company’s technology spans media manipulation detection, identity and content verification, and KYC (know-your-customer) processes across image, video, and audio formats — positioning it as infrastructure other companies and institutions could use to verify content and identity, rather than a consumer-facing product.
Dr. Sachin Chaudhary, Co-founder of Reagvis Labs, said the company was built on the belief that “trust must become a fundamental layer of the AI-powered digital world,” and that as generative technologies grow more capable, distinguishing authentic content from manipulated or synthetic content will matter increasingly for businesses, governments, and individuals alike. He said the UPES Runway investment would help the company strengthen its technology, accelerate development, and expand into a wider set of real-world applications.
Why UPES Runway is backing this specific problem
Rahul Nainwal, CEO of Runway Incubator and Dean of the School of Business at UPES, framed the investment around a shift he sees coming in AI more broadly. He said the next phase of AI innovation “will not only be about what artificial intelligence can create, but also about whether we can trust what it creates,” and described Reagvis Labs as working on a problem that will grow more important as synthetic content becomes more sophisticated and widespread.
Nainwal said The Pitch program’s goal is to identify AI-led ventures with real technical depth and practical applications, then give founders both capital and access to a broader startup and investor ecosystem.
The Pitch 3.0: a wider program than one investment
This investment is one part of a larger initiative. Through The Pitch 3.0, UPES Runway plans to support 10 innovators this year, with investments of roughly ₹25 lakh per startup and the potential for larger checks in exceptional cases, subject to evaluation and approval.
The program’s Delhi leg — recently concluded — drew more than 20 applications and brought seven shortlisted startups in front of investors, mentors, and UPES leadership. Those startups spanned a range of sectors: AI image recognition, fintech, edtech, disaster management, fleet technology, quantum computing, and deep tech. Three startups from that Delhi round were named in the announcement — Arthik AI, StoreLink, and Memintel — though it’s not fully clear from the available material whether Reagvis Labs was among the seven Delhi-shortlisted startups or evaluated through a separate track; this is worth confirming directly with UPES Runway before publication.
UPES Runway’s next stop for The Pitch is Bengaluru, continuing what the incubator describes as an effort to identify and invest in niche AI businesses across different regional startup markets.
The incubator behind the investment
Runway launched in 2021 and has, over roughly five years, incubated more than 200 startups, working in association with DST-TIBI, MeitY, Shell E4, MaXcel Accelerator, and Global University Systems. UPES itself was established under the UPES Act, 2003, passed by Uttarakhand’s state legislature, and describes itself as a top-ranked, UGC-recognised private university positioning itself as an “AI-first” institution connecting academic research with entrepreneurship and funding.
Zoom out
As deepfakes and synthetic media get harder to distinguish from the real thing, digital-trust and verification technology is shaping up to be one of the more durable investment categories to come out of the broader generative-AI boom — not as flashy as the content-generation tools themselves, but arguably more necessary as those same tools keep improving. A university-backed incubator writing a relatively small check into this space is a modest data point on its own, but it fits a pattern of institutional capital treating AI-verification infrastructure as a real category worth building out early.
