India: Corporate and Company Law

India’s startup definition has long been tied to two basic limits: the age of the business and its annual turnover. The test was easy to apply, but it did not always reflect the reality of ventures whose growth does not follow a conventional timeline. Deep tech businesses may spend years on scientific research, product testing and technology development before earning meaningful revenue. Cooperative enterprises may also build innovative and scalable solutions, even though their ownership structure differs from that of a company or an LLP. As India’s startup ecosystem became more diverse, the earlier framework began to leave some genuine innovators outside its scope.

A company, in the eyes of law, is a separate legal person. But unlike an individual, it cannot think, speak or act on its own. Every corporate decision is ultimately taken by people—directors...

In a recent decision in KKH Finvest Pvt. Ltd. vs. Ashiesh Shukla [2026 INSC 803], the Supreme Court of India ("Supreme Court"), held that a non-signatory shareholder could be treated as a "veritable party" to an arbitration agreement contained in a Memorandum of Settlement where his obligations under a separately executed Share Purchase Agreement formed an integral part of the underlying composite transaction and the surrounding circumstances demonstrated an intention to be bound by the settlement.