Afleveringen
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For decades, the whole process of getting a loan approved was infamously painful and long winded. But now things have changed. Getting a loan is a whole lot faster than before. And that’s because of the disruptor to end all disruptors — artificial intelligence.
A bunch of companies have entered the scene with specalised AI tools to speed up different aspects of the loan-approval process. In fact, Indian AI startups have managed to raise nearly 750 million USD in 2024 and the banking and financial sector was one of the top drivers of this growth.
Now at first glance, it seems like a win-win for both the borrower and the bank. But there’s a catch. This surge has come with a lot of scrutiny from the RBI.
Tune in.
*This episode was first published on Jan 15, 2025
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Family offices—the ultra-rich who used to hand over their money to VCs and wish them well—are now wondering why they ever bothered. Why did they pay someone to do what they could do themselves, on their terms?
Their primary gripe? The funds are not returning money.
Of course, the so-called middlemen in this scenario aren't too pleased. After all, they are losing a substantial amount of business in the process.
But it all boils down to one thing – who’s running the money.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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At first glance, things seem to be really looking up for India’s very own budget-friendly hotel chain Oyo. It’s had some pretty big wins in the last few months.
So why then is its eventual IPO still the subject of such widespread speculation?
The Ken's Deputy Editor Seetharaman G put it quite well in the latest edition of his newsletter on the Indian stock market, ‘Long and Short’. He said – ‘few companies are as good as Oyo Hotels at not going public’.
Its listing has been a few years in the making. It first filed in 2021. Then again in 2023. And then it was just about to give the share sale another shot when its largest shareholder, Softbank, threw a spanner in the works.
Here's the thing — between the delayed IPO, top notch rivals, and demanding investors, things will only get harder for Oyo.
Tune in.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, send them to us as texts or voice notes on Daybreak’s WhatsApp at +918971108379.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Just two days after the Pahalgam terror attack, alarm bells went off inside India’s financial system. A stern message from an HDFC Bank executive summed up the mood: “They may come for us now.”
The national security tragedy triggered a sudden and sweeping crackdown on India’s digital payments ecosystem. Behind closed doors in Delhi, top officials from the Finance Ministry, Home Affairs, and the Reserve Bank of India launched a coordinated push to track suspicious merchant activity online like gambling, betting, drug trafficking. The idea was to follow the money all the way to its possible links with terror funding.
The fallout? Payment aggregators are scrambling, banks are under intense pressure, and merchant screening firms are suddenly flooded with work. Everyone’s rechecking everything.
But who's the collateral damage?
Tune in.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Zara and Tata’s retail arm, Trent, have been partners for 15 years. But that relationship might be coming to an end because Zara’s not pulling its weight anymore. Its share of Trent’s overall sales has dropped from 28% to just 10% in six years. Its rivals like H&M and Uniqlo have moved faster, reached more cities in a much shorter time span.
Meanwhile, Trent’s been busy. It used what it learned from Zara and built something better. Zudio, its budget fashion brand, just hit $1 billion in sales in FY25. It’s fast, affordable, and everywhere. Now, Trent’s planning to upgrade Westside into a premium brand to go head-to-head with Zara and H&M.
How Zara lost its edge and what did Trent get right?Tune in to find out.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, send them to us as texts or voice notes on Daybreak’s WhatsApp at +918971108379.
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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One clear sign that Angel One—India’s third-largest discount broker—is serious about reversing its fortunes is that it bought itself a front-row seat at India’s most expensive distraction: the Indian Premier League.
That’s ambitious. Especially for a company that just flunked its latest earnings test.
Between fiscal year 2020 and 2024, Angel One proudly nuked its full-service past—no more phone calls, no more reports, no more advisers—and became a pure-play discount broker. Just an app, an order button, and some notifications. When the markets were roaring, that was enough.
But now, not quite. Enter Plan B: be a super-app.
Tune in.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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In March this year, a software developer that goes by Pea Bee online published a blog rather ominously titled ‘Everyone knows all the apps on your phone’.
He found that several Indian app-based startups are flouting rules of Google Play—Android’s app store—to access people’s data. In particular, some apps use a workaround to scrutinise the names and usage patterns of other apps on people’s phones. In real time.Now, the fact that apps have a lot of your data may not be a surprise to you. We’ve been pretty cavalier about our data for some time now. Remember Digi Yatra?
But the scary thing is that Indian companies are equally nonchalant about the user data they collect. The result? Data-security breaches have been on the rise.
So what is a data conscious Indian customer to do?
Tune in.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, send them to us as texts or voice notes on Daybreak’s WhatsApp at +918971108379.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Physics Wallah’s brand new initiative, the PW Institute of Innovation, was pitched as an alternative to the tough IIT route that didn’t compromise on quality or career prospects. It even came with a scholarship, a residential campus in Bengaluru, and a shot at a good job after graduation. On paper, it looked like the perfect deal.However, students who signed up had to juggle a confusing mix of courses, keep up with a changing curriculum, and struggle through administrative chaos. Even basic things like internships, placement support, and faculty consistency didn’t materialise the way they were promised.
For a company known for making quality education affordable, this was a far cry from its coaching roots.
But Physics Wallah isn’t just running an institute anymore, it’s a company preparing for the stock market.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, send them to us as texts or voice notes on Daybreak’s WhatsApp at +918971108379.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Eyestem, a 14-member biotech startup from Bengaluru is turning heads in global pharma circles. With just $10 million and a modest 1,200 sq ft office, it has developed a promising cell therapy for dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD)—a condition that leads to blindness and has no cure. Early trial results are not only encouraging, they’re outperforming billion-dollar competitors in the West.
But this isn’t just about scientific innovation. It’s about doing more with less. Eyestem’s founders set out with a bold goal: to build a cutting-edge treatment that’s actually affordable, especially for Indian patients. Think world-class therapy in under $10,000. In the current world of cell and gene therapies, where treatments often cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and remain out of reach for most, it is next to impossible.
How did Eyestem achieve this and what does this means for the future of biotech in India?
Tune in.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, send them to us as texts or voice notes on Daybreak’s WhatsApp at +918971108379.
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Nagpur-based Counter Cyclical Investments doesn’t waste time with handholding. The six-year-old firm has a reputation for being quite cut and dry with its clients.
Consider some gems from the ‘who should invest with us’ long-list. “Those who won’t disturb us by calling us for reassurance everytime the market falls.” “We don’t have any provision for a relationship manager. Once you have taken an informed decision to invest in our PMS, please avoid calling us. Those who are looking for regular correspondence and active interaction, may please stay away.”
Now, if you think moneyed investors—the kind who have to put in at least Rs 50 lakh to be a part of Counter Cyclical—are put off by the insolence, you’re wrong. Counter Cyclical’s assets under management have shot up over 10X in the past three years, and its customer count has grown by leaps and bounds.
Why? The only scheme—a small-cap one —run by the six-year-old fund house is a chart-topper with five year annualised returns of, believe-it-or-not, 78%.
Tune in.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, send them to us as texts or voice notes on Daybreak’s WhatsApp at +918971108379.
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Four months ago, food delivery giant Zomato decided to run an experiment. If you are a regular patron of the app, you may have noticed a tab called ‘Quick’ appear, that promised 15-minute deliveries in a bunch of metropolitan cities like Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi NCR.
Now, the company’s founder and CEO made an interesting statement last year that explains why it would choose to try out this experiment. He was asked a question about how quick commerce has changed customer expectations around food delivery. And he said, quite simply – “Blinkit is fast, but that has made Zomato seem slow.”
He has a point. You may recall that Zomato subsidiary Blinkit launched its in-house 10-minute snack delivery service called Bistro last year, just one day after the very popular Zepto cafe was launched. Swiggy Instamart meanwhile, launched a similar service called Snacc.
In many ways, 2024 was the year 10-minute food delivery became the next frontier of quick commerce.
Naturally, the biggest food delivery giants in the country did not want to be left behind. So while Zomato launched Quick, Swiggy rolled out its own ultra-fast delivery service, Bolt.
But here’s where things get interesting. While announcing its Q4 results last week, Zomato announced that its four-month experiment was very quickly coming to an end. In a letter to shareholders, Deepinder Goyal explained that they just could not see a path to profitability without compromising on customer experience.
The Ken's COO and the host of Two by Two Praveen Gopal Krishnan explains what changed.
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories. -
Thanks to AI, economic disruptions, mass layoffs, and a bunch of other fun things, the 40-year career is no longer something you can take for granted. And that fundamentally changes the nature of our careers. No one embodies that change more than the Gen Z workforce.
Young employees are now seeking a job, not a career. They don't join organisations to retire from them. Instead they see them merely as a step along the way.
Which is why, the most rigid companies, known for being forts of loyalists, are loosening up to accommodate the needs of younger generations.Tune in.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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The world’s “most respected” test of school education—the Programme for International Student Assessment or PISA—began this March. 90 countries are on the list including China, Vietnam and some of the poorest nations in the world. But India? We’re sitting this one out. In fact, India hasn’t touched PISA in 16 years!
The last time it did, in 2009, India ranked 72nd out of 73 countries. Only Kyrgyzstan did worse. Ever since, the country has been quietly working behind the scenes to fix its education system through a slow and steady effort to modernise how students are tested. The government set up Parakh, an ambitious body under NCERT, to bring all of India’s 69 school boards on the same level and align with global standards.
But can a country as huge and diverse as India really move away from rote learning to a system that values real-world problem solving and critical thinking?
Tune in.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, send them to us as texts or voice notes on Daybreak’s WhatsApp at +918971108379.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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The Life insurance Corporation of India or LIC is now stepping into a sector where more than 860 million Indians or nearly 60% of the population still has no coverage. The insurer signalled its big move into health insurance in March this year with a major acquisition—49% of Manipal Cigna, a private health insurer, in a deal valued at over ₹3,500 crore.
And here’s where things get really interesting.
This is LIC we are talking about. It doesn’t need to chase quarterly returns or exist to make shareholders rich. It exists to do things, to fix things and show up when the government needs a nudge—or a battering ram. And in a country where trust, access, and affordability in healthcare are still broken concepts for most, a battering ram could be exactly what’s needed.
In this episode, we are look at LIC’s entry into health insurance and how the rest of the sector is bracing itself. Because if LIC gets this right, it won’t just be another player in the market. It could be the market.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, send them us as texts or voice notes on Daybreak’s WhatsApp at +918971108379.
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Ather Electric once pioneered the electric two wheeler segment. But now it has fallen behind its competition like Ola Electric and TVS Motor in terms of market share.
To make matters worse, its recent IPO saw a lukewarm response from investors. One thing is clear -- up until now, Ather’s focus has been on building superior products, loaded with features and a smooth user experience. But to take things to the next level, Ather will have to build a more compelling narrative.
How did it get here? What's next for the EV maker?
Tune in.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Earlier this month, India’s largest third party logistics company, Delhivery, acquired its biggest rival Ecom Express in a $165 million distress sale. The acquisition could not have come at a better time for both parties.
Things have been tough for Ecom for some time now. The company, in fact, called off its IPO plans just this February, about six months after filing the papers and ended up laying off hundreds of its employees.
Meanwhile, Delhivery has been soldiering some tough times too. By acquiring its floundering rival, Delhivery seems to be going all out to claw back some business. But is that enough?
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Mahindra’s new EVs the XEV 9e and BE6 were marketed as software wrapped in metal. They promised the future. Things like augmented reality heads up display, auto park assist, a triple screen dashboard, an in car camera, and a digital key based on near field communication.
But now, that long list of cutting edge features is proving to be a real bottleneck for the company. The Ken spoke to at least a dozen frustrated buyers of Mahindra’s new electric twins, who haven’t yet received their cars despite promised deliveries.
Why? Well, the reason apparently is a software update. Buyers have found that the digital keys they were handed at the showrooms just wouldn’t work. Touchscreens were freezing, Cameras were glitching. The list goes on.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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In January this year, Netradyne, the logistics AI startup, became India’s first unicorn of 2025 after it raised $90 million in series D funding.
You see, it did not take it long to realise that its sweet spot is the long-distance trucking segment. It serves over 3,000 customers across eight countries, including the likes of Amazon, Shell, Indian Oil and Greenline Mobility. And it all began with one rather primitive prototype. Of course, now it has morphed into a compact device with a built-in GPU, up to four cameras, and a disembodied voice alerting drivers not to crash the vehicle.
The Ken reporter Abhirami G found herself in the backseat of one of Netradyne’s test cars in Bengaluru's Whitefield neighbourhood. The driver of the car was a Netradyne employee. And as he weaved through the traffic, the company’s signature always-on surveillance cameras didn’t just watch his every move, but also apparently “understood” and “analysed”. As he drove, he was generating the precious training data that powers the company’s bread and butter. Apart from making roads safer, this whole system also doubles up as a driver’s best legal defence in times of trouble. The company’s executive Vice president of Engineering Teja Gudena said that on multiple occasions, it has saved drivers from liability by proving their innocence in accidents.
Apart from its new-found unicorn status, it reportedly managed to clock Rs 1,000 crore in revenue in 2023. It also currently has a stronghold in the US and other major global markets. Reaching all of these milestones within nine years is pretty remarkable. But despite all that success, Netradyne is now grappling with an existential crisis. Because now, driverless vehicles are no longer science fiction, they are a logistical inevitability. And that leaves Netradyne in a rather tricky spot.
Tune in.
This episode was first published on Feb 13, 2025
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories. -
In this episode we fill you in on three standout stories from the past week.
First, what ITC’s acquisition of 24 Mantra means for the larger organic food market;
Next, Musk’s latest attempt to save Tesla;
And finally, why Blusmart’s unravelling was an eventuality we all chose to ignore.
Check out the newsletter and podcast mentioned in this episode:
The latest edition of Trade Tricks
The Nutgraf: Blusmart and the dogs that didn’t bark -
On 9 April, as the world reeling from the tariff standoff between America and China, one Indian company quietly made history.
The stocks of InterGlobe Aviation, the parent company Indigo, India’s top budget airline, hit an all-time high. For a brief moment, Indigo wasn’t just India’s largest airline—it became the most valuable airline in the world. More than Delta even.
Back home though, meanwhile, a different story has been playing out. Thousands of Indian flyers have been complaining online about broken luggage, rude crew, overbooked flights. When cricket commentator Harsha Bhogle tweeted his frustration about Indigo’s service, more than a thousand people replied to his tweet with their own horror stories.
Has Indigo stopped caring about its passengers?
But why would it? It flies nearly 9 million people a month.
The clues, as it turns out, lie inside a grey building in Gurgaon that my colleague Rounak Kumar Gunjan visited recently.
This is Indigo's training centre called iFly where hundreds of young trainees, often barely in their twenties, are taught how to serve tea at 30,000 feet.
Tune inDaybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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