FROM THE ARCHIVES (This episode was first published July 1, 2024)

The Economic Times reported yesterday that Zepto, the quick-commerce startup, is in talks to increase the size of its initial public offering to $800 million-$1 billion. Zepto earlier planned to raise $450 million through the issue.  Even when it entered the quick commerce scene for the first time in 2021, Zepto was a disruptor. Now, it is the third largest company in the market after Blinkit and Swiggy Instamart. Last year, it secured its biggest funding ever at a US$3.6 billion valuation, mainly from its existing investors.

Venture Intelligence, a data provider told The Ken that the US$660 million funding was the largest bet made by VCs in Indian startups in 2024. 

What did Zepto do to get all this attention from investors?

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Also listen to:

Daybreak: Why we date, marry, or breakup with Swiggy Instamart, Blinkit, Zepto & BigBasket

A dialogue from Munnabhai has become the ultimate source of inspiration for Acko, a digital general insurer. 

"When someone’s dying, do they necessarily have to fill out forms?"

 The Ken spoke to multiple Acko executives who said that this line is frequently repeated in meetings of its 21-month-old retail health insurance business. The inspiration seems to be working.  

Despite being new to the retail health insurance game,  the company was able to sell health insurance policies worth about Rs 51 crore in the segment. That’s 40 per cent more than Godigit, which is listed and had the advantage of being around longer. 

Most people who understand this space are  thrown off by the route it has gone down. You see, conventionally, the industry has depended heavily on agents and point of sale personnel to sell policies. But Acko has no interest in this approach. 

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A bunch of startups are not entering the booming Indian e-bus ecosystem and becoming overnight successes. Just take the case of EKA mobility. Before 2023, EKA was barely a company. It was more the R&D wing of Pinnacle Industries, which is a major manufacturer of seating and interiors for legacy automakers like Tata Motors and Ashok Leyland. 

But when the government launched the PM E-Drive subsidy back in September, everything changed for Eka Mobility. The five-year-old startup turned into a full-fledged EV manufacturer. Eka Mobility is one among many beneficiaries of the EV wave here in India. But naturally, it does not come without its challenges. 

Which is why, despite India’s e-bus ambitions slowly gaining momentum thanks to government funding, the private sector has barely put its foot on the pedal. 

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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.

Last week, Ola Electric’s shares saw a three-day slump after the Central Consumer Protection Authority asked the company for more documents for its investigation against it post receiving thousands of consumer complaints. But shares going up and down is regular stuff right? Not for Ola Electric. 

The company went public in August 2024 at a debut price of Rs 76 becoming the only startup that went public at a lower price. 

In his newsletter The Nutgraf, my colleague Praveen said it was a bold decision which paid off for Ola Electric. You see, when startups go for an IPO, it becomes clear that most of the value has already been extracted when it was private, leaving little for public investors. If it were shown to you as a graph, you’d see a sharp fall in growth post going public. That is the usual trend.

But Ola Electric dodged it thanks to its lower debut price. This is exactly what makes its falling share prices a matter of concern. And somewhere in the middle of all this is CEO Bhavish Aggarwal's public perception. 

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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.

A couple years ago, quick commerce platforms were the place to be for up and coming brands across the country. Just a little sliver of real estate on a rapid delivery app was enough to put them on the map.

But now, many of these brands are very quickly realising that success on a Blinkit or a Zepto is a double edged sword. With it comes high commissions, marketing fees, and the constant pressure to never run out of inventory.

Some brands have now had enough.

How did it get here? The Ken reporter Nuha Bubere explains.

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 Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!

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.

Hurun India began curating rich lists a decade ago. Now, it has moved up ahead of ranking giants like Bloomberg and Forbes with 17 lists so far. It has a Global 500 list, similar to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.

In fact, at this point, it's safe to say that it has replaced Forbes as the most trusted choice for bankers and wealth managers.  Hurun has managed to turn showing it off into a cultural trend despite the fact that wealth is often wrapped in secrecy in a country like India. So what’s really driving India’s obsession with ranking the richest? Hurun India has grown way beyond its original rich lists, creating rankings for just about everything you can think of—from self-made entrepreneurs to top art collectors. They even track billionaires by zodiac signs.

Today we look at Hurun India beyond just these lists— a closer look at the behind the scenes relationship it has with wealth-management firms, and how it keeps the ultra-rich happy.

*This episode was previously published on November 18, 2024

Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!

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.

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. 

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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.

On the 25th of November 2024, just five days before the placement drive began at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, a new role was suddenly added to the student’s placement portal. Tech giant Microsoft was looking for a bunch of promising silicon hardware engineers. 

This was the first time Microsoft was hiring for this particular role. And it wasn’t just looking at the top tier IITs like IIT Madras. Students at IIT-ISM Dhanbad in Jharkhand, saw the same exact thing happen. 

Why, you may ask? One word. Nvidia. Until now, companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google have been the most direct beneficiaries of the AI revolution. But the Nvidia monopoly in the AI chip market is preventing these tech companies from making as much money as possible. Microsoft wants to change that. 

That’s exactly where a team of freshly minted hardware engineers comes in. The company is hiring graduates who know hardware programming to test and design its own chips. 

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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.

2024 was the year of the 10-minute delivery. We think we didn't need it but the likes of Zepto, Swiggy Instamart, and Blinkit proved us wrong. While other companies were struggling to find funding, these quick-commerce companies were raising billions of dollars and reporting double-digit, sometimes even triple-digit annual growth rates.

In December, Zomato’s quick-commerce subsidiary, Blinkit made a strategic move in the rapidly growing quick food delivery market space. It launched ‘Bistro’, a platform that will deliver food and beverages within 10 minutes. Interestingly, this was just a day after its competitor Zepto introduced the Zepto Cafe. Swiggy too already has a 10-minute food delivery service called Bolt, and unlike the others, it is inside their original app.

Is this just another indulgence or has quick commerce reached a point where players are so paranoid that they’re trying to hold on to customers who think that a food delivery that takes 40 minutes is too slow?

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Also, listen to: Why we date, marry, or breakup with Swiggy Instamart, Blinkit, Zepto & BigBasket

Tell us what you thought of this episode. You can text us your feedback on 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.

Welcome to the big fat sustainable Indian wedding! 

Over the last few years, sustainability has become a big buzz word in the wedding industry. Multiple wedding planners told Daybreak that couples are now increasingly asking for more ‘sustainable’ alternatives while planning their big day — from offsetting the carbon footprint of the event, to setting up compost pits in the middle of their wedding venues. 

This growing environmental consciousness makes sense. You see, as beautiful and fairytale-esque the typical Indian wedding is known to be, it is also infamously wasteful. 

But here's the thing — while some couples may be thinking about ‘sustainability’ more than before, the numbers tell a whole different story. Indian weddings aren’t getting any smaller. They are bigger and more expensive than ever before. About Rs 6 lakh crore was spent on weddings in 2024. That’s a 40 per cent increase from the previous year. And that’s not all – data shows that one in every 100 of those weddings had a budget of over Rs 1 crore. 

So how does sustainability co-exist with the grandeur of the Indian wedding? And can it? Daybreak host Rahel Philipose speaks to Ashwin Malwade, founder of Greenmyna, a sustainable event planning company, and Anirudh Gupta, the co-founder of Climes, a climate tech company.

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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.

At the end of 2024, Indigo, India’s largest airline, was voted as the airline of the year by Centre for Aviation (CAPA) at the 2024 Global Aviation Awards for Excellence. And then just a couple of weeks later, the airline was in for a rude shock when a survey by a German consumer-rights group ranked it among the worst 10 airlines in the world. Indigo, of course, refuted the findings of the survey and cast doubts on the credibility of the agency that released it.

Monthly data from aviation regulator DGCA had scored Indigo high on punctuality and low on customer-complaint ratios, and it was a big deal “for an airline of its size and scale of operations”.

But you see, that is exactly where the problem lies—size and scale.

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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.

Correction: In the episode, the host said SpiceJet is not listed. That is factually incorrect. The error is regretted.