S45 on Tuesday announced the launch of the nation’s first AI-enabled investment banking platform, with the goal of replacing outdated manual workflows that have long disrupted IPO execution for capital market issuers.
The development demonstrates the gradual evolution of augmented investment banking, in which machine intelligence replaces human advice in decision-making.
While investor engagement in India has grown significantly in recent years, IPO execution is still largely dependent on fragmented communication and static spreadsheets.
S45 said its platform seeks to bridge this structural gap by introducing an integrated operating system designed to bring transparency and data-driven precision to the listing lifecycle.
“India’s capital markets have entered an era of unprecedented scale and maturity, yet the execution framework powering most IPOs remains anchored in high-friction, legacy practices that have not kept pace with this growth,” said Deepank Bhandari, co-founder of S45. “This disconnect often leaves even the strongest companies navigating the ‘black box’ of fragmented workflows and manual administrative hurdles during their most critical transitions.”
Bhandari said the company seeks to bridge that gap by delivering an institutional-grade infrastructure layer that empowers issuers with data-validated precision. He claims that by combining AI-driven governance and real-time demand data, the platform moves the industry beyond traditional forecasting and towards greater transparency and execution assurance.
A multi-disciplinary team led by Bhandari, Pankaj Harlalka, Aman Singh and Tushar Sharma established S45 to address structural inefficiencies in the capital markets implementation framework.
During its pilot phase, the platform was used for 26 IPOs in the aerospace, chemicals, healthcare and technology industries. The company’s proprietary data engineering stack looks at investor demand in real time, resulting in a total of Rs. 1,120.8 crore has been raised.
According to S45, orders on the platform recorded an average subscription of 168.4 times, with peak demand reaching 325 times. The platform has a total of Rs. 3,64,719 crore generated cumulative investor bids. Issuers have achieved an average listing gain of 43.1% with an average listing pop of 47.1% over the past 12 months.
The platform integrates functions including eligibility verification, version-controlled disclosure management, SEBI query lifecycle tracking and valuation models linked to live sector benchmarks. The company describes this approach as “precise banking”, which aims to move intermediaries and issuers away from estimation and towards improved value discovery and post-listing investor engagement.
As public market activity in India remains strong, S45 said it is positioning its AI-native stack as the core operating layer for the next generation of Indian issuers to achieve execution certainty and global governance standards.
The platform is designed to modernize the end-to-end IPO lifecycle, reducing the IPO readiness assessment to 30 minutes and bringing the time to prepare a draft red herring prospectus to an estimated seven days. By embedding AI-powered validation and regulatory process mapping, the system provides boards and chief financial officers with real-time visibility into the listing process, reducing regulatory friction.
S45 advises Indian companies with SME and main board IPOs, combining sector-specific banking knowledge with proprietary technology for IPO preparation, valuation intelligence and book-building optimization.
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