Daybreak
Daybreak is a daily business news podcast from The Ken, an Indian business journalism publication. Hosted by Snigdha Sharma and Rachel Varghese, it simplifies complex business stories into clear, powerful narratives. Each episode covers one significant business story from Monday to Friday, drawing on years of original reporting and analysis.
Episodes
A cancelled peptide party, and the questions it raised that Indian sellers still can't answer
India was about to have its first-ever peptide party with fifty guests, a mystery venue marketed only as "not a hospital," and a menu of collagen, glutathione, and copper peptides. Then the Karnataka Food Safety and Drug Administration started asking questions, and the party was cancelled overnight.On this episode, The Ken's Sudeshna Ray joins host Rachel Varghese to unpack the peptide cr
Why Indigo went budget and premium at once
For two decades, an Indian air ticket told you what kind of airline you were flying. Low-cost meant cheap and bare. Full-service meant meals and baggage folded into the fare. That line is now almost gone. Indigo's new Lite fare strips economy down to a cabin bag, even as its Stretch cabin and BluChips programme reach for the premium flyer Air India once owned. Passengers are uneasy but in
India's newest iPhone prices hurt the people selling them, buying them and even taxing them
Apple's newest iPhones landed in India with price hikes as high as 41%. And for the first time in years, there was no discount on older models to go along with it.The memes pretty much came immediately. From selling kidneys to choosing between buying a phone or an Alto, a Royal Enfield or a vacation. People also couldn't help but notice that Apple's first foldable, the iPhone Duo, costs a
7.8% growth. So why doesn't India feel richer?
In February this year, India announced a sweeping overhaul of how it calculates GDP, fixing a measurement system the IMF had flagged as outdated just last November. It includes a new base year, better price data, and a wider net to count the informal economy. The number seems to be getting closer to reality.But that raises a harder question. For a country that has built its global identit
Your kids might be looting your bank account in the guise of gaming
Kids all over India are spending real money inside mobile games. And most of the time, they slip by the notice of the adults, until the bill or bank alert eventually arrives. Most of them are using their grandparent's or some other relative's phone, where UPI pins are usually already saved, and they're not watching so closely. In fact, Delhi's cybercrime cell has seen a rise in "fraud" co
India's data law has HDFC Bank, Amazon, Paytm, and others shopping for consent
India’s new data protection law is reshaping how companies talk to customers on WhatsApp. Messages that once felt routine now carry legal weight and are tied to consent, security, and user rights. Since the Digital Personal Data Protection Act became operational, businesses have begun reworking how they collect and manage personal data. That shift has created a fast-growing market for com
This week in AI: activist robots, doom-laden researchers — so who's the good guy?
This week, a 27-year-old researcher quit Anthropic warning AI could "kill us all," and the company's own safety lead agreed. Meanwhile, OpenAI says it cracked a 200-year-old math problem — then got accused of muscling a rival's name off the credit. Also, the AI lab with a supposed conscience got caught building a watchlist of AI critics that files activism next to terrorism. And in Poland
India has more tourists than ever. So why is tourism in trouble?
India's foreign tourist arrivals slipped by about 8% from the year before to about 9 million in 2025, and a wave of recent reporting has finally made it a talking point. If you take out the business travellers and the diaspora visiting family, the number who came just to holiday in India may be closer to 3 million. And yet Indians have never travelled their own country more. Domestic trip
The Government sold Air India to escape its problems. The fix is to buy back in
In 1967, Air India paid Salvador Dalí for a custom ashtray with a live baby elephant, flown all the way to Spain. (Yes, really! Here's the proof.) That was the airline. Flush with money, just about 14 years into nationalisation. Today, it's asking its owners for $1.5 billion after its biggest loss ever, at more than 2 billion dollars.Privatisation was supposed to fix Air India. Three yea
Nykaa cracked fashion at last. Myntra sees no reason to panic
After years of struggling to grow, Nykaa Fashion has finally found its footing. The past year brought a real resurgence. For a long time, the platform bet on building its own private-label brands, even pushing hard into ethnic wear. It leaned on discounts and backed small, up-and-coming labels. None of it delivered the growth it was chasing. So Nykaa Fashion changed course. That new strat
Rapido broke the ride-hailing duopoly. Now it's coming for Zomato and Swiggy
For over a year, India's restaurant association couldn't get Swiggy to return its calls. Then Rapido launched a food delivery app that charges restaurants zero commission — and Swiggy sent fifteen people to Bengaluru for an urgent meeting within days.The restaurants have a real grievance. On Swiggy and Zomato, commissions, ads, and discounts can eat up nearly a third of every order. On Ra
India's call centres are using AI to make agents sound American
When you call an Indian call centre these days, the person answering might sound American — even if they've never left India. A new kind of AI can change an agent's accent in real time, mid-call, to sound more familiar to the customer. It's meant to build trust and cut hiring costs. But the same software that smooths out an accent often smooths away everything else too — laughter, tone, t
Meta's $18 billion child-safety settlement has India looking for the wrong answer
Last week, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle American lawsuits over how Instagram and Facebook treat children. The app will now be rebuilt around American teenagers, from a daily time limit to an overnight curfew. But none of it is coming to India, the single biggest market Meta has anywhere in the world.So every op-ed page has been asking the obvious question. If Meta can pr
India got cheap Ozempic. No one knows how to sell it
Ozempic went off-patent in India this year, and everyone from Novo Nordisk to Nestlé has rushed in expecting a billion-dollar market. Instead, growth has already stalled, and the reason isn't price. It's culture. While Hollywood joked about Ozempic on late-night TV and Serena Williams advertised a GLP-1 program for a tele-health platform at the Super Bowl, not a single Indian celebrity ha
A worker-owned Uber is India's fix for its ever-expanding gig workforce
Union Home and Cooperation Minister Amit Shah launched Bharat Taxi, a government-backed, driver-owned ride-hailing service built to take on private players like Ola and Uber. It runs as a cooperative so the drivers own it. And when it profits, they keep 80% of the money. Nearly 800,000 have already signed up. It is the government's boldest bid yet to pull gig workers out of a precarious m
The best savings product your bank offers is the one it advertises less
At least 44% of Indians have their money sitting in savings accounts. These accounts earn only about a fraction of what a fixed deposit pays. But even though FDs earn more, the payoff is that you have to lock away your money for longer, and pay a penalty if you break the account prematurely.But did you know there's a product built to solve this exactly? It's called a Flexi-FD, and it prom
The great Indian sugar trap: how a decade of surplus left India with nothing to spare
India is importing sugar for the first time in nearly a decade — a million tonnes, duty-free — to cool prices before the festive season. Four years ago, it exported a record 11 million tonnes.Retail prices are up around 40% from last year. In Odisha, a kilo crossed ₹67. The government has capped stocks, halted exports and ordered mills to declare their sales.Production came in about 11% b
Welcome to the 'brain gym': DIY neurotech is now in India, no prescription required
For decades, sending an electric current into the brain meant a hospital, a doctor, and a diagnosis. A Bengaluru startup called Mave Health wants to move it into your daily routine. Its Rs 30,000 headset uses tDCS, a low current to the prefrontal cortex, to ease stress before it builds. The technology is decades old and well-evidenced. What's new is who controls it. Mave sells directly to
Banks are being asked to become “cool” for Gen Z. Their problem isn't branding
India's finance minister wants public sector banks to get "cool" for Gen Z. With yoga vouchers, youth kiosks, awareness campaigns. But the numbers tell a different story. PSBs are losing young Indians as both depositors and borrowers, while, at the same time, fintech lenders capture 57% of India's small-ticket loan market. Some, even at interest rates as high as 600%. On this episode, hos
Ten minutes to your door, no minutes to clean
Tukaram Mundhe, Maharashtra's food-safety chief, has gone viral this month for shutting famous restaurants and even noticing Shah Rukh Khan over an ad . Earlier this month his inspectors inspected around a dozen dark-store belonging to Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart. He isn't alone. On 22 August, a separate regulator in Telangana raided the dark stores behind grocery apps in Hyderabad, shut
India trains more ethical hackers than anywhere else. It just can't give them a reason to stay
When Nisarga Adhikary found critical flaws in CBSE's exam portal, the board denied it. So he broke back in, filmed it, and left anime videos running on their servers.IIT Kanpur hired him the same week it launched India's first undergraduate cybersecurity degree — one that recruits through hackathons and sends students to work at government security agencies for two of the four years.India
India's $60 billion data-center bet, and the jobs it won't actually create
Every Indian state wants to be the country's data-centre capital. Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra. They're all handing out land, power, decades of tax breaks, all chasing the same promise: jobs.The Ken reporters Inderpal Singh and Mrunmayee Kulkarni ran the numbers on what the jobs actually cost. And the math does not hold up.On this episode of Daybreak, we go inside what's causing t
Why Tata 1mg thinks speed is the wrong bet in pharma
Tata 1mg just reported revenue of nearly 3,000 crore rupees for the last financial year, roughly ten times what it earned when Tata took control, and it is turning a profit while much of the sector bleeds cash. In an e-pharmacy market obsessed with 10-minute delivery and deep discounts, 1mg won by doing the opposite. It capped its discounts and built its own labs and supply chain, and it
India cracked the code on microdramas. It also cracked the timer
China's microdrama industry took nearly eight years — and real government money — to reach the point where regulators had to step in over AI-flooded, quality-degraded content. India's biggest platforms don't have eight years. They're building AI into production from day one, racing to scale catalogues before fatigue sets in. Host Rachel Varghese, gets into why JioHotstar, ShareChat, and K
The more AI can do your job, the safer it may be
India built its IT industry on millions of coders doing exactly the work generative AI now does in seconds. So everyone knew who would feel the pressure first. The data refuses to cooperate. A survey of 1,552 tech professionals by the app Blind last week found the engineers, the ones everyone expects AI to replace, are the least worried of anyone surveyed. And an ICRIER study of 651 firms
LLMs are the new pied pipers of the stock market
An HSBC survey found that 86% of affluent Indian investors are now using AI in their trading. That's the highest share of any country surveyed, above China, Singapore, and the US. Nearly half say AI tools are their primary source of investment ideas.Most of them are using the same two or three chatbots. And a growing body of academic research has found that when millions of investors ask
India banned Chinese drones. Army, CRPF, and BSF can’t stop using them
India has been talking about drones a lot lately, from Operation Sindoor to the government's $2 billion plan for combat drones. But long before that, in the forests of Chhattisgarh, security forces had already settled on the drone they trusted most. It is Chinese, made by a company called Da-Jiang Innovations, or DJI, and the government banned it years ago. So why do India's soldiers keep
Anthropic just made Claude-assisted content traceable. Not everyone is happy
Earlier this week, Anthropic began stamping an invisible watermark into the text and images Claude generates. The move came in order to comply with the EU AI Act but it will be switched on worldwide. It is the thing teachers, editors, and hiring managers had been demanding for years — a way to finally tell human work from machine. Within hours, many people who pay for Claude were in revol
Did your ticket to The Odyssey cost a bomb? Blame Hollywood's China problem
The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day just broke India's box office records back to back — and PVR Inox's stock jumped almost 20% in the process. It looks like proof that Indian audiences are finally back in theatres. But that's not all.The real story runs through just 34 IMAX screens, a decade-old trade deal that quietly expired, and a geopolitical rift thousands of miles away that h
Your money is already talking to AI
From platforms like Cred, Zerodha, and Groww integrating AI assistants, to Sebi-registered advisors now using AI to generate personalised investment recommendations, the shift is already underway.And with nearly 140 million investors and fewer than a thousand registered advisors to serve them, the math alone might make AI advice not just convenient, but necessary.Tune in.**This episode wa
Casual dining doesn't scale like fast food. Bharti is betting on Olive Garden anyway
On a hot Thursday evening in Delhi, people are queuing outside India's first Olive Garden. Some found it on Instagram. Others wandered over from the business park next door. Almost all have waited at least half an hour.Bharti Group wants 10 Olive Gardens in three years, and 125 total restaurants — more than double what it runs today. Indians are dining out more than ever, and serious mone
Where to invest Rs 1 lakh, Rs 10 lakh, Rs 1 crore
Six months on, the answer has shifted. A US-Israeli war against Iran hit an already fragile stock market. Gold cooled, silver crashed, and real estate stayed flat, pushing investors toward fixed income for want of better returns. So we put the same question to the same five experts, four Sebi-registered advisers and a private wealth manager. Their consensus on diversification holds, but t
How some RBI-licensed NBFCs charge 600% interest and stay legal
If you Google "paisa de do", dozens of near-identical websites appear. Some, offering cash in 15 minutes. The interest rate on some of these loans is 600% per annum and the lenders are RBI-licensed.One borrower started with a Rs 75,000 loan. Within five months, he was paying Rs 6 lakh a month across eight different loan apps just to stay afloat.The Ken's Mutasim Khan found 25 such NBFCs,
Zepto beat Instamart. It still couldn't beat the market
Zepto nearly doubled its revenue in a year, processes more orders than Swiggy Instamart, and has raised over 2.5 billion dollars from private investors. But when it filed to go public, India's largest mutual funds said they'd value it at less than half of what private investors had in it's last fundraise.The IPO is now delayed by two quarters. The cash reserves are falling. And six player
India's retirement crisis belongs to the young
For generations, Indian families have shared the financial responsibility of ageing. Parents invested in their children through education, weddings and first homes, often expecting that support to come full circle in later life. But the economics behind that arrangement are changing. India is ageing rapidly but also living longer. The number of people over 60 expected to more than double
India’s study-abroad lenders are forced to choose their plan B. It's India
Amit was a computer science student who used to have a loan, a plan, and a flight to Canada. But then the college his visa depended on was derecognised. And an NBFC called Credila ended up with a Rs 20 lakh problem.Amit's story is becoming an industry pattern. Canada has cut active student volume by over 50%. The US and UK are tightening too. Study-abroad applications are down 25 to 30%,
India solved the wrong oil problem first
India is the world's top sunflower oil buyer, and Black Sea attacks have sent it hunting across South America. Shipments from Russia and Ukraine are running weeks late, and prices are climbing.The substitutes are squeezed too. Indonesia is diverting more palm oil into biodiesel, and China's record soybean buying keeps the soy complex tight. A weak monsoon has thinned India's harvest. But
Assam's tech dreams run on water that drowns it every year
Assam is enduring some of its worst flooding in years, with the death toll inching to a hundred and lakhs affected. It is also happens to be the state that recently landed India's first chip assembly plant, a ₹27,000 crore Tata facility, and the centrepiece of Japan's growing push into the Northeast. The plant itself is light on water. But the deeper ecosystem Assam is chasing, chemicals
Why Indian pharma isn't scared of a 100% tariff (yet)
Last Tuesday, Trump announced 100% tariffs on generic medicines imported into the US. By Wednesday, Indian pharma stocks were already falling even though the tariff doesn't take effect for two years.Trump wants import companies to reshore their manufacturing to the US so that the country can secure life-saving medication in the event of global supply chain disruptions. India supplies near
Burger King India finally works but its stock still refuses to celebrate
Burger King India is one of the country's better-run quick-service chains. Gross margins are at record highs, restaurant-level profits have doubled, and the burger chain has posted five straight quarters of same-store-sales growth. So why does its stock sit close to where it listed six years ago? Part of the answer is Indonesia, where an old acquisition keeps bleeding cash. The rest is th
IT jobs are being remade. Accenture and TCS are the first dominoes to fall
When Accenture employees in Pune walked into their appraisal meetings in May, they expected the routine conversations. Instead, they found out things would be done differently this year. They did get their full salary hike. But not the way it was done up until now. Half went into the base salary. The other half arrived as a lump sum in June. On paper, nothing was lost. In practice, though
From Bengaluru to Mumbai to Pune, metro projects are colliding with India’s monsoons
In September 2022, Bengaluru's worst urban floods in recent memory swallowed the Outer Ring Road, including areas like Bellandur, Marathahalli, Mahadevapura, while the metro's Blue Line was under active construction through the same corridor.Three years later, the metro corporation still wasn't in the room when the city held its monsoon preparedness meeting. It was never invited.Weeks aft
Third Wave built a coffee brand. Now it's betting against it
No coffee chain in India is clearly profitable. Third Wave Coffee, which lost 110 crore rupees in FY24 with nearly 70% of its stores in the red, is trying to change that with cake. Its new sub-brand, Third Rush, has put around 200 dessert items on the menu, with plans for 50 cafes by year-end. CEO Rajat Luthra, former head of KFC India, has already pared the losses. The dessert margins cl
OpenAI's next product is a companion. Its own research says that's the problem
OpenAI's own research found that its heaviest users were also its loneliest and most emotionally dependent. The top 10% kept triggering classifiers built to detect unhealthy attachment.The response was to build a screenless AI companion designed to live in your home, learn your habits, access your emails, and get harder to let go of over time.Meta, meanwhile, is selling AI glasses with Ky
India's monopoly moment
From airports to cricket broadcasts, India’s family conglomerates keep turning up everywhere. According to the 2024 Barclays-Hurun report, one family’s wealth alone equals nearly one-tenth of everything India produces in a year. India is running a version of the economic playbook that South Korea and Indonesia once ran — protect your conglomerates and let them do the building.South Korea
AI gets its health advice from hospitals. Hospitals get it from AI. Neither is right
If you search "diabetes blood sugar level" on Google, the AI overview gives you a number. The number is wrong, the source is a hospital website, and the article on that website was written by AI.This is the loop: AI writes flawed medical content for hospital websites, AI search tools treat it as authoritative, and the final result is patients make health decisions based on it. An audit of
$15 billion in security deposits: India's tenants are their landlords' cheapest lenders
Tenants across India's six biggest metros have handed landlords Rs 1.26 trillion in security deposits, a new NoBroker study estimates. Around $15 billion of tenant money, refundable in name, sits in landlords' accounts earning interest for people it does not belong to. In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma ask what a deposit actually costs a renter, and arrives at a number: nearly a month'
Cred’s first profitable quarter comes with a trade-off. No, not Kunal Shah
Cred just reported its first profitable quarter. Meta invested 8,500 crore rupees. And Kunal Shah walked out the door.Eight years of questions about Cred's business model ended the moment it finally had answers. The design-first, exclusivity-obsessed fintech that rewarded creditworthy Indians with gold credit cards now makes most of its money from lending — the same way every other UPI ap
Indian broadcasters are pouring money into reality TV. Netflix's collapsing second seasons show why
Netflix built its empire on one idea: watch what you want, when you want, all at once. Now it's losing viewers to YouTube, struggling to bring audiences back for season two, and internally discussing always-on live channels and ad bundles you can't skip.Which is to say: it's considering becoming cable TV.The irony is that while Netflix is scrambling for answers in the US, India may alread
Adani made his billions from ports. His new bet is far from the shore
In October last year, a ship owned by Adani Ports slowed to less than one knot near Malta. It held that position for over seven days, directly above the cables linking Malta to Sicily. It was no accident. India's largest private port operator has quietly built a fleet of more than a hundred vessels across 12 countries. Their job is servicing the world's offshore energy infrastructure. The
Inside India’s 90-day countdown for CBSE schools to embrace AI
In April, India made AI education mandatory across 28,000 CBSE schools, giving them 90 days to comply. Most had already finalised their academic calendars for the year.Some schools were ready. Others scrambled. A few found that the harder problem wasn't the teachers — it was the students. At one Hyderabad school already using an AI learning tool, kids were From 2029, AI becomes a compulso
Miss a smartphone EMI, and your lender can now wirelessly strip the ‘smart’ out of it
Naresh drives for Rapido. When his phone died, so did his income — for seven days, until he could borrow enough to replace it.Until 2024, India's biggest consumer lenders had turned that exact vulnerability into a recovery tool. Miss an EMI, lose your phone. It worked so well that smartphone lending grew from 1% to nearly 40% of consumer borrowing in three years. Then the RBI banned it. L
For India's e-rickshaws, price decides what's safe and virality decides if anyone cares
Last week, the government ordered Apple and Google to pull at least three battery management system or BMS apps that were being used to switch off e-rickshaws mid-road. If you've been on Instagram, you've seen the videos. A prankster opens the app, taps a switch, and a passing e-rickshaw just dies.It works because the cheap lithium batteries these vehicles run on often ship from China wit
WhatsApp wants businesses to have a username. It hasn't said who's protected from fakes
WhatsApp just announced usernames for Indian users. Two days later, the Indian government told it to stop.The privacy case for usernames is real — phone numbers are permanent, linked to everything, and once shared, impossible to take back. But India already has 43,000 WhatsApp-related cybercrimes in a single quarter. And when TechCrunch tested the feature, handles like "rbi_verify," "indi
Optimist wants to reinvent the AC. Daikin and LG don’t need to
Your AC is running longer this year and the machines responsible may have been designed for a different climate entirely. Optimist, a two-year-old Gurugram startup, has built what it says is India's most energy-efficient residential AC. It is recalibrated for Indian humidity, sourced almost entirely from local suppliers, and engineered with components the industry has long considered too
The world's largest advertising agency made $20 billion last year. You've probably never heard of Accenture Song
In May, L'Oréal ended a 16-year agency relationship. The reason? Simply that a competitor was better prepared with better data and AI capabilities.This incident illustrates the shift that's happening in advertising right now. The agencies that bet on technology early are pulling ahead. The ones that are built on relationships are finding out how quickly those erode.Sitting unnoticed at th
Daybreak Friday: UPI blinks, Google faces a $4.7B fine, LIC to shoulder India's oil bill, and more
When a bill arrives, what do you pay it with? That's the question running underneath this week's Daybreak roundup. The government of India is answering it with slices of LIC and other PSUs, because the American war in Iran has kept oil expensive and the budget is straining. OYO's parent is answering it with money from public investors, most of which will go straight to its lenders. Google
Karnataka let gig workers ask their apps a question. Swiggy, Zomato took the whole law to court
Some of India's biggest consumer platforms, Swiggy, Zomato's parent Eternal, Zepto, Urban Company, and Meesho's logistics arm Valmo, have asked the Karnataka High Court to strike down the state's gig worker welfare law entirely.Their central argument is about money, a welfare fee they say duplicates a national contribution already required under the Code on Social Security. But the petiti
AI is eating your phone's memory and hiking up prices. No, festive sales can't save you either
Before every August, Indians who've been nursing a cracked screen or a lagging phone make the same calculation: wait for the festive season. The discounts will come. After all, they always do.This year, they might not.AI data centres are consuming more than 70% of high-end memory chip production. The same chips that go into your phone. Apple has already raised Mac and iPad prices. Budget
A royal family’s billion-dollar bet on Indian startups—without a winner
Lightrock arrived in India with nearly a billion dollars and royal backing — the Liechtenstein dynasty's centuries-old fortune funding bets on around 40 growth-stage startups.The firm moved fast, doubled down on existing investments more aggressively than most peers, and scaled hard during the zero-interest-rate boom. Then the cycle turned. Its portfolio — Waycool, Pharmeasy, Dunzo — ran
How many ‘bad’ schools make a good private equity investment?
K12 Techno Services has a very specific type of school it likes to find. They're old, debt-ridden, maybe run by an ageing owner with no succession plan. It moves in, rebrands it Orchids, adds a basketball court, and locks the deal in for 50 years. Ownership never changes hands. The management, though, does.The model is built for patience. It takes 12 years for a school to turn a profit. B
A new class of gig-workers in India are teaching robots to do the dishes
Take the Daybreak listener survey here.Meet Ranjan. He works at Deloitte by day and spends his evenings strapping a camera to his forehead, recording himself doing household chores by evening. He's a physical AI trainer, a part of a growing gig economy built around creating training data to teach humanoid robots human behaviour.Reporter Sakshi Sadashiv joins host Rachel Varghese to break
Why Instagram wants to be on your TV now
This week, Instagram expanded its TV app to Samsung Smart TVs, joining Amazon Fire and Google TV, and announced it is testing episodic series and live creator experiences for the big screen. The announcement is the latest move in an eight-year pattern — a platform that keeps giving creators more time, more formats, and now a larger screen. Instagram tried long-form video once before. It c
India's IT sector bet its future on AI access it doesn't actually control
On June 11th, TCS announced an exclusive partnership with Anthropic — 50,000 employees trained on Claude, early access to new models, a dedicated business unit. The next day, a US export control order cut off access to Anthropic's most advanced models for users worldwide, including the very partner that had just signed up for early access.India's IT sector has spent years building its AI
Google and Perplexity paid Jio and Airtel a fortune to reach Indian users. OpenAI paid nobody
India's telcos looked like the obvious gateway for AI companies chasing scale. With nearly 900 million subscribers between them, Jio and Airtel could put an AI product in front of more users faster than almost any other distribution channel in the world. So Google paid Jio and Perplexity paid Airtel. Both spent tens of thousands of rupees per user to make it work. One partnership is still
Why Mamaearth's 2022 bet on a little-known drone startup is paying off in unexpected places and for unexpected players
In 2022, Mamaearth's founder made two unusual logistics bets: one on a shipping aggregator and one on a small Delhi drone startup nobody had heard of. Now, four years later, those bets have converged into one of India's fastest-growing logistics categories.Drones are now flying blood samples to hospital labs in 10 minutes instead of four hours. They're cutting delivery costs for D2C brand
India built UPI for the economy. Gamblers built an economy on UPI
2026 was the first IPL season after India banned online real money gaming last year. The platforms were gone and the payment gateways were blocked. The government had made its position clear. The betting, however, did not stop. The Ken's Mrunmayee Kulkarni went looking for where it went and found it hiding inside something the government itself built. On platforms like 99 Exchange, gamble
When the monsoon fails, India's AI dreams fail with it
India's southwest monsoon is running 35% below normal. Mumbai's reservoirs are at 12% of capacity. And the rain that should have arrived by June 11th still hasn't. The same water and power systems that keep this economy running are now being asked to power India's AI future too — a $180 billion data centre bet that nobody is stress-testing against a failing monsoon and climate change. The
Zepto's DRHP underlines the inevitable cost at the heart of quick commerce
Zepto just filed its DRHP. It wants to open 1,900 new dark stores, on top of the 1,139 it already runs. Blinkit, the only profitable player in the sector, is racing to 3,000 stores by March 2027. Meanwhile, its adjusted EBITDA is just Rs. 37 crores — not a lot considering the billions that have been spent on getting it to profitability.The dark store is quick commerce's core bet — and its
Sovereign AI, American law
India is spending over 10,000 crore rupees building what it calls sovereign AI. The servers are going up in Mumba and the ministers are saying the word at every summit. There is just one problem: nobody has defined what sovereign actually means. And the chips powering all of it are American, subject to American law. A US subpoena can reach a data centre in Mumbai as easily as one in Seat
Why Amazon seems so calm about being awfully late to quick commerce
Amazon Now launched in September 2025. It was already two years behind Flipkart, and well behind Blinkit and Zepto. Nine months later, it's doing 450,000 to 500,000 orders a day, expanding to 100 cities, and a Blinkit executive is walking through Colaba market, stopping in front of an Amazon dark store in a location Blinkit's expansion head could only dream of.Amazon has something its riv
Can Adani do with apples what Mahindra did with grapes?
Adani started buying apples in Himachal Pradesh two decades ago. Not because it wanted to be in the fruit business — but because it wanted to own the cold chain that nobody else was building.Now the India-New Zealand free trade agreement is about to test Indian apple growers like never before. New Zealand yields 50 to 70 tonnes per hectare. Himachal Pradesh averages 7 to 8.Adani just expa
India's mango paradox
This week, Nepal sent Indian mango shipments back to the border after inspectors found excessive pesticide residues . A few weeks earlier, Japan had suspended all Indian mango imports after a biosecurity inspection failure at a treatment facility in Uttar Pradesh. Two bans in one season and this was before the war in Iran tripled freight costs and shut the Gulf route entirely. Mirza Ghali
Analysts say gas prices are about to crash. India still can't afford to celebrate
India just found natural gas off the Andaman coast. The energy minister called it "an ocean of energy opportunities." Considering India's energy vulnerabilities, this is a significant find, even if commercial production is a decade away.Because in the meantime, the war on Iran has doubled LNG prices, cut off Qatar (which supplied nearly half of India's imports) and pushed India into buyin
LIC has lost its throne to SIPs. It’s still the smartest investor in the room
Every month, millions of Indians pay their LIC premium without a second thought. What they don't realise is that money is quietly buying up India's most beaten-down stocks — the ones foreign investors are dumping, the ones mutual funds won't touch, the ones everyone else is running from.For decades, LIC was the only institution large enough to hold Indian markets together during a sell-of
NEET’s switch from pen-and-paper to computer: damned if you do, damned if you don’t
Two million students. One lakh twenty thousand seats. And a paper that leaked before anyone sat down to write it.This is the second NEET leak in two years. The National Testing Agency was created specifically to prevent this. A parliamentary panel had already warned, after last year's controversy, that the NTA was too dependent on private vendors and lacked the institutional capacity to r
Why Big Tech is tokenmaxxed out
Amazon built a leaderboard to track how much AI its engineers were using. Employees gamed it. Costs exploded. Last week, the leaderboard was gone.Uber burned through its entire annual AI budget in four months — after telling staff to use AI "as much as possible." Microsoft cancelled most of its Claude Code licences six months after rolling them out.Three companies, the same couple months,
Google is now Andhra Pradesh's first private electricity company. You'll be paying for that
Andhra Pradesh wants to be India's data centre capital. Google, Meta, and Reliance have all been promised space in Vizag. To make it work, the state did something it has never done before — handed Google its own electricity licence, letting it bypass the state grid entirely.The logic is straightforward. The consequences are not. When large consumers leave the grid, electricity gets more e
The AI gold rush is over. The emperors are cashing out
Anthropic raised $65 billion last week making it the largest funding round in AI history. It also filed for an IPO days later. So did OpenAI and SpaceX after its merger with xAI. Three of the most powerful AI companies in the world are heading to public markets in the same window. They're flush with capital but burning through more than they earn. Meanwhile, the startups that were suppose
Why Swiggy wants to stay out of the Flipkart-Amazon spending war
Swiggy CEO Sriharsha Majety told Bloomberg in an interview last week that his company would stay out of the spending war being waged by Amazon, Flipkart, and Reliance in India's quick commerce market. He invoked the Airtel-Jio price war as a precedent, argued that chasing market share through discounts only postpones the problem, and said Swiggy has Rs 15,000 crore in the bank to play the
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