Daybreak

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 after that...

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 clear 50% a...

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 Kylie Jen...

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 came thr...

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 nearly...

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's rent, e...

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 app does....

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 already have...

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 busines...

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 compulsory boar...

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.  Lending...

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 with their...

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," "indiamodi,"...

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 expensive...

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 the top o...

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 spent ei...

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 petition goes...

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 Android...

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 tro...

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. But K12's...

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 down h...

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 called it...

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 pivot on...

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 standing...

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 brands trying...