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 into trouble. New cheques dried up. Lightrock shifted from investor to caretaker, managing what it had rathe...
Apr 24, 2026•10 min•Ep. 735
You pick up an unknown number. A bubbly voice starts selling you a credit card. You hang up in seconds. Except now, that voice may not be human. AI voice agents are already live across banks, e-commerce and healthcare platforms in India, with startups in the space raising over Rs 280 crore. But behind that perfectly polite pitch is a more complex rollout — from pilots and script tuning to adapting across languages and dialects. So, what’s driving this sudden funding spree, and how are companies ...
Apr 22, 2026•23 min•Ep. 734
A study gave 16 experienced developers the best AI coding tools available. They predicted they'd be 24% faster. They felt 20% faster. They were actually 19% slower — and still didn't believe it when told. That gap between belief and reality is now being deployed at enterprise scale. TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and Cognizant have committed to over 50,000 AI coding licences each. Bugs per developer are up 50%. Code is reaching production without any human review. And the senior engineers who could catch ...
Apr 22, 2026•19 min•Ep. 733
Seventeen years ago, Reliance Industries made a promise that was supposed to change India's energy future. It didn't. Today, with a war raging in the Middle East, the Strait of Hormuz mostly closed, and Qatar — India's single largest gas supplier — unable to guarantee supplies, that broken promise has become a full-blown crisis. India finds itself caught between Trump, Tehran, and its own structural failures. The IEA calls it the worst energy crisis in history. For India, it may be the moment th...
Apr 20, 2026•14 min•Ep. 732
When your SIP bounces, your bank charges you Rs 500. The mutual fund that missed the investment? Charges you nothing. That gap is not an accident. In this piece, The Ken's Mutasim Khan traces how India's banks have quietly turned missed SIP debits into a revenue line — one that costs them roughly Rs 25 to process, and nets them hundreds of crores a month. The people paying most are first-time investors in smaller cities, often unaware the charge even happened. This is a read aloud of Mutasim's o...
Apr 19, 2026•17 min•Ep. 731
India's life expectancy has doubled since 1950. But 65% of deaths are still from diseases caught too late. Cent, the new startup from Practo's founder, thinks it has an answer: full-body AI scans that find risks before they become diagnoses. At Rs 20,000–30,000 a scan, it's already found critical findings in hundreds of patients — with zero false positives, it claims. But Cent doesn't diagnose. It doesn't refer. And it has no proprietary technology. So what exactly are you paying for — and what ...
Apr 17, 2026•12 min•Ep. 730
Anthropic has spent years building a reputation as the AI company that actually cares about safety. Then, in the span of two weeks, it leaked an unannounced model, exposed its own source code, and accidentally handed hackers a blueprint of its most widely-used product. The fix came in 24 hours. The blueprint can't be unlearned. And the companies that trusted Claude Code with their deepest systems are still running on publicly documented defences. If the most careful AI company couldn't prevent t...
Apr 15, 2026•17 min•Ep. 729
The Indian government approved a ₹41,534 crore fertiliser subsidy for the upcoming kharif season last week, a 12% increase from last year. The move comes as the Gulf War has severely disrupted India's fertiliser supply chains, with urea prices jumping 65% in just 40 days. India is the world's second largest fertiliser importer, and the Strait of Hormuz carries a significant share of both the finished fertilisers and the gas needed to make them domestically. The kharif season, which produces roug...
Apr 14, 2026•13 min•Ep. 728
India is building data centres at unprecedented speed to support cloud services, AI, and digital growth. At the same time, cities across the country are struggling with water shortages and repeated contamination of drinking-water supplies. A United Nations report describes this condition as water bankruptcy. It is the stage where water systems continue to function, but only by drawing down reserves that cannot recover fast enough. In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma looks at how India’s data ce...
Apr 13, 2026•13 min•Ep. 727
India's new undergraduate framework was supposed to fix a broken system — where only 8% of graduates land jobs that match their degrees. The fix? Give students hundreds of courses to choose from, blend formal education with vocational training, and make them more employable. But when every course carries the same two credits, students do the math quickly and the easier course wins. Now universities are scrambling, edtechs are stepping in to teach core curriculum, no one's quite sure who's in cha...
Apr 13, 2026•13 min•Ep. 726
At a fintech conference in February, Razorpay showed a demo. A user ordered food on Zomato by voice and paid — without opening a checkout page or a UPI app. No friction and no redirects. Just a job done end-from-end. The same week, OpenAI quietly rolled back its own in-chat shopping agent. Razorpay is calling this the biggest disruption to payments since UPI. But agentic commerce raises questions that a demo can't answer — around trust, fraud, consent, and who's liable when an AI spends your mon...
Apr 09, 2026•35 min•Ep. 725
A cartoon reposted. An account restricted. A takedown notice with no warning and no appeal. India's new IT rules give platforms three hours to remove flagged content — the shortest window anywhere in the world. But a draft amendment published last month could go even further, potentially treating anyone who posts about current affairs as a publisher. Without the protections that come with it. For millions of creators, anonymous users, and global tech platforms, the stakes just got harder to igno...
Apr 08, 2026•17 min•Ep. 724
India's civil aviation ministry issued two directives this March that pulled in opposite directions. First, it mandated full refunds for cancelled flights. Three days later, it removed all caps on airfares. The trigger for the second move: the US-Israeli war against Iran has sent jet fuel prices soaring, up nearly 60% in the US, and India is bracing for the impact. Airlines, already running on thin margins, are warning that fares will rise. For Indian flyers, the net result is this: cancellation...
Apr 08, 2026•13 min•Ep. 723
India wants to design its own semiconductor chips. To help, the government launched a scheme with money and tools for startups that do exactly that. But there's a catch — and it's keeping out the very people best placed to build this industry. The engineers who spent decades in Silicon Valley, built the chips inside your devices, and are now coming home. A regulator that's also a competitor. And a factory that was supposed to be for Indian startups — but probably won't be. Tune in. Daybreak is p...
Apr 06, 2026•15 min•Ep. 722
Imagine paying insurance premiums for years and then one day you actually need it. You're in a hospital, or someone you love is. And the insurer says: no. In the last financial year, Indian health insurers rejected claims worth ₹30,000 crore. Nearly one in eight claims were denied or left pending. And what's wild is how far back the problem starts. There are agents filling out forms incorrectly to earn a faster commission. Hospitals that know exactly what a surgery costs but keep the number vagu...
Apr 05, 2026•12 min•Ep. 721
Polymarket and Kalshi are two New York-founded prediction market platforms now valued in the billions. While both let users bet real money on elections and political events in real time, it is Polymarket — the larger, offshore, largely unregulated one — where someone made nearly a million dollars predicting US military strikes on Iran before they happened. Together, the two platforms processed over $44 billion in bets last year. In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma explores how two New York star...
Apr 02, 2026•20 min•Ep. 720
For a decade, digital advertising ran on one idea: get to the top of Google. Buy the keywords and earn the clicks. That was the game. But AI just changed the rules. ChatGPT and Gemini now have over a billion and a half users between them, growing at nearly 200% year on year. People have stopped searching for links. Instead,nthey're asking questions and expecting answers. And those answers mention three brands, maybe four. For the rest who don't make it to these answers, it's like they don't even...
Apr 01, 2026•11 min•Ep. 719
In 1965, Yoko Ono sat on a stage at Carnegie Hall and handed a pair of scissors to strangers. What they did next was entirely up to them. It was a performance about agency — and about what happens when you give an audience too much of it. Sixty years later, Sam Altman made a promise: OpenAI would treat adults like adults, and roll out an erotic mode for verified users. The market was there. Other players in the intimate AI companion space were raking in dollars. But after multiple delays, the Op...
Apr 01, 2026•18 min•Ep. 718
Semaglutide's patent just expired in India. The molecule behind Novo Nordisk's blockbuster obesity drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy, is now fair game for generic manufacturers. An 85 to 90% price drop is expected. Eli Lilly's Mounjaro had already been outselling Wegovy. For most companies, this would be the beginning of an exit. But Novo is doing the opposite. Why? Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclus...
Mar 31, 2026•10 min•Ep. 717
India's hospitals have been slow to adopt AI. Its government, however, has not. A new programme aims to train 50,000 doctors in artificial intelligence. And not just to use it, but to help build it. The argument is simple: engineers understand disease like an algorithm. Doctors know it's never that clean. So what happens when clinicians become co-builders? Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusiv...
Mar 29, 2026•12 min•Ep. 716
Bengaluru's water utility loses a third of everything it pumps. It owes Tokyo Rs 10,000 crore. It bleeds Rs 80 crore every month. Its answer to all of this was an app — GPS-tracked tankers, government-backed, 40% cheaper than the market. But nine months later the all the app has to show is 10,000 downloads and a 2.8 rating in a city of 14 million. So why are Bangalore's residents saying no to the state's efforts? Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscribe...
Mar 27, 2026•28 min•Ep. 715
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. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more...
Mar 25, 2026•9 min•Ep. 714
Seventy years ago, Homi Bhabha designed a three-stage nuclear plan built around one idea: that India's future was thorium, not uranium. The science was proven, the reactors were built, and by 1996, India had already demonstrated a thorium fuel cycle at an experimental reactor in Kalpakkam. What it never did was take it to commercial scale. In 2025, an eight-year-old American startup did exactly that — with a fuel designed specifically for Indian reactors, and a former chairman of India's Atomic ...
Mar 25, 2026•20 min•Ep. 713
India's telecom operators have spent decades controlling how signals reach customers indoors but that arrangement is now under serious pressure. A new breed of infrastructure companies, ones that do not own a spectrum and hold no licence, are taking control of how 5G reaches you inside airports, metro lines, malls, and office towers. The fight over who builds and who pays has drawn in regulators, sovereign wealth funds, and the Supreme Court. And it points to a much larger shift in who really ow...
Mar 23, 2026•11 min•Ep. 712
India's Northeast has always had money. Wealth managers are only now showing up to court it, and finding the welcome chillier than expected. Post-GST, a wave of newly banked business wealth is looking for a home. Sophisticated products like AIFs, PMS, bonds, are finding takers. But Northeastern millionaires play by different rules. They don't respond to cold calls. They don't trust outsiders easily. And they have little patience for managers who can't answer basic questions. So what does it actu...
Mar 22, 2026•12 min•Ep. 711
Last Friday, Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur hosted 150 founders at Razorpay's Koramangala headquarters — not to talk payments but to let them showcase what they'd built with OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent taking the world by storm. The same week, thousands were queuing outside Baidu and Tencent offices in China just to get the software installed. The open source agent AI platform is the same but the two approaches are quite different. China is deploying OpenClaw at a scale and speed no other co...
Mar 19, 2026•15 min•Ep. 710
The next time you pick up a strip of tablets at your neighbourhood pharmacy, consider this: the drug you just bought for Rs 170 may have left the factory for Rs 14. That's a markup of over a 1000%. And, it's completely legal. In this piece, The Ken's Mutasim Khan traces how India's drug pricing system works, and why the pharmacist, the doctor, and the manufacturer are all optimising for something, while the patient simply pays. This is a read aloud of Mutasim's original story, by Snigdha Sharma,...
Mar 18, 2026•17 min•Ep. 709
In 1955, a man from a small village in Kerala paid 500 rupees for passage on a crowded boat to Abu Dhabi. He told no one he was leaving. He wasn't the first, and he certainly wasn't the last. Over the decades, millions followed — and the money they sent back quietly rebuilt everything: houses, schools, entire towns. Today, remittances make up over a fifth of the state's economy. Which means when war broke out across the Middle East last month, Kerala isn't just watching from a distance. The hurt...
Mar 17, 2026•15 min•Ep. 708
India is drinking more — and spending more when it does. Between 2020 and 2025, alcohol consumption nearly doubled. Post-Covid, drinkers didn't just drink more; they upgraded. Four bottles where there used to be one. Home bars where there used to be none. Global brands that once ignored India are now flooding distributors with enquiry emails. But the opportunity comes wrapped in one of the most complicated regulatory systems in the world — 69 permits for a single brand in some states, margins so...
Mar 16, 2026•14 min•Ep. 707
Within days of the war in Iran, panic spread across India’s cooking-gas system. Millions rushed to book LPG refills. Restaurants shut kitchens. A temple in Delhi halted its community meals. The government invoked emergency powers and warned hoarders they could face seven years in jail. But the panic revealed a deeper question. India now has 33 crore households cooking on LPG — one of the largest cooking-gas networks in the world. Yet the country’s strategic underground reserves amount to less th...
Mar 15, 2026•11 min•Ep. 706
