Daybreak

Last week, Foxtale, an Indian D2C skincare company secured an $18 million funding in its series B round. Meanwhile, news also broke that the Deepika Padukone-led 82°E is planning to raise around $6 million from new and existing investors. Scores of new age skincare and beauty brands have cropped up since the pandemic and all of them harp on the science of skincare and their whole appeal is transpa...

There is something really concerning happening to India’s 200-million strong workforce. Nearly half of them, who are above the age of 45, have reached a point in their careers where they may have to retire much earlier than they planned. Against their will. In a nutshell, the usual career span that would last anything between 40 to 50 years even has been slashed by half almost….. to just 20 or 25...

Zomato, the food delivery giant is all set to infuse more than $35 million into Blinkit. But not too long ago, Blinkit, the grocery delivery platform that was formerly known as Grofers, was on the verge of dying. It was the first year of the pandemic and the demand for quick commerce was at its peak. Grofers wanted to join the bandwagon but it didnt have the money. A year later in June 2021, it go...

When 29-year-old Deepa delivered a healthy baby boy six months ago, she thought her health insurance would cover her hospital expenses. But unfortunately, it barely covered 1/3rd of the Rs 1 lakh bill. So she ended up using her corporate health insurance that offered a higher limit.  And this isn’t a one off. The Ken spoke to 13 women from six different cities who delivered babies in the last coup...

When e-commerce giant Flipkart acquired online travel aggregator (OTA) Cleartrip back in 2021, the hope was that it would be able to turn things around. Cleartrip had hit rock bottom. And in many ways the only way from there on was up.  But things haven’t quite played out as Flipkart and Cleartrip had hoped. One big reason is that Cleartrip under Flipkart may have veered too far away from what mak...

Last year,  Indians collectively drank nearly 600 million litres of energy drinks. This was almost 30X more than 2018. Among all the go to drinks in India, lately energy drinks have become super popular. People seem to clearly be attracted to their appeal as stimulants. And what’s crazy is that these drinks have become an alternative to chai at tea stalls for office goers. And even for daily wage...

Desi dating apps are vying for parental approval. And their strategy seems to be working. A couple months ago, Agrima Srivastava, a 29-year-old media professional from Lucknow, had an awkward conversation with her mother. She wanted to know if Agrima had ever heard of Indian dating apps, Aisle and Better Half. That was the first time Agrima had an open conversation with her mother about her love l...

It has been a tough couple of years for India’s Chartered accountants.  This was and to some extent still is one of the most sought after jobs in the country.  But lately, the amount of risk involved in their work has been amped up considerably.  And as a result, CAs have been resigning left, right and centre.  The reason this is happening is because the auditing industry has been undergoing a maj...

According to a survey by S&P, more than 75% of Indian adults do not understand basic financial concepts. The gap is 5% more when it comes to women. So the rise of financial influencers who simplify complex financial jargon and provide investment advice is not really surprising. But often, they underplay risks  and overplay returns, and try to ride the market waves. In fact, SEBI, the market ca...

Since 2021, Toyota and Maruti have been engaged in somewhat of a marriage of convenience.  The terms were pretty simple. Toyota would share its hybrid technology with Maruti Suzuki. In exchange, Toyota would get to re-enter the pocket-friendly segment.  So what this meant was that the non-premium Toyota cars sold were actually built by Maruti. And the fully hybrid cars sold under the Maruti label...

Credit card companies, in their rush to sell more and more cards use a whole gamut of attractive offers—the most popular one being free access to airport lounges. Thanks to this and the sharp rise in domestic air travellers, airport lounges saw of footfall of over 8 million people in 2022. What was once an exclusive service became a top-selling feature, even for non-premium cards issued by banks....

In today’s special Friday episode, The Ken’s Praveen Gopal Krishnan (aka PGK) joins hosts Snigdha and Rahel to talk about India’s complicated relationship with 10 minute delivery apps. They talk about how these apps are shaping our economy and society at large, and more importantly how we, as users, are shaping them. Why do we pick a particular app, what makes us switch to another one and what mak...

At the time of demonetisation, the country was desperately seeking an alternative to cash. And a payments regulator called NPCI or the National Payments Corporation of India, was our unexpected knight in shining armour.  The NPCI managed to launch UPI at just the right time. This was a revolutionary, once in a generation product that really put the NPCI on the map.  Over the years, UPI also became...

New-age D2C mattress brands like Wakefit and The Sleep Company have successfully made orthopaedic mattresses into a mass product. They are changing the landscape of the mattress market in India with their innovative science and tech based approach and clever marketing techniques.  Wakefit, for example, literally offers a “sleep internship" where all you have to do is "sleep for 9 hours everyday fo...

A couple months ago, Xiaomi released a new product – the SU7. This wasn’t a smartphone, or any other gadget that you would have otherwise associated with the Chinese company. The SU7 is actually Xiaomi’s first-ever Electric Vehicle.  Now, this is a major milestone for Xiaomi. It has become the first smartphone maker to successfully launch an EV. Funnily enough, this is something that many smartpho...

Indians have really been warming up to credit cards lately. More than a 100 million credit cards are in circulation in India as of now. And this rise has a lot to do with the benefits customers get: cash back deals and reward points that you can collect and redeem for anything from flight tickets to stays at fancy resorts. But between the two, cashbacks are a more straightforward method of making...

In this week's Daybreak Special episode, hosts Snigdha Sharma and Rahel Philipose speak to The Ken's Shivani Verma about her investigation into Pharmeasy's dubious business practices. The once IPO-bound company is under the scanner for its 'unethical' ways of upselling alternative medicines and supplements. Everyone – from Pharmeasy's own pharmacists, to the doctors who call behalf of the company...

Thanks to Swiggy and Blinkit, it’s gotten to a point where getting everything – from your groceries to a literal water cooler – delivered to your doorstep within minutes has become pretty routine. Something we expect.  But there is so much going on behind the scenes to make that delivery possible. Like one executive told The Ken, it’s a combination of solid logistics and precise inventory manageme...

If you were flying sometime last month, you may have noticed, staff from Digiyatra, the contactless, biometric entry system at airports, were repeating the same thing over and over again to passengers at the entrance: “The old app is discontinued, please download the new app.” Passengers were only given this information at the airport. None of them received any notifications or SMSes. Apart from i...

No other payment aggregator has been able to pull off what Phonepe has in less than a year.  Its nearly 50 per cent market share is obviously a huge draw for new merchants. And in the last couple years, its been able to onboard some pretty big names like Bharti Airtel and IRCTC.  But the bigger the client, the more ruthless their demands. At the end of the day, they are only loyal to the aggregato...

The lure of appearing on the popular reality show on national television is so strong that even startups that already have been funded by VCs and institutional investors want to get on Shark Tank. In fact, investors themselves are asking their founders to go on the show. Money or funding is not the goal for these startups. It's the marketing opportunity they want. But Sony, the producer of the Sha...

Contrary to its name, the US-based skincare brand 'The Ordinary' pulled off something pretty extraordinary when it was launched in 2016. From the beginning, it was all about transparency. It veered away from fancy packaging, instead opting for simple labels that list out all of the main ingredients, or 'actives', that were used to make the product. And just like that, the brand managed to demystif...

CP Plus, one of the most popular CCTV camera-makers in India, gets 80% of its supplies for its parent company, Aditya Infotech Ltd (AIL), from the Chinese security-equipment manufacturer Dahua Technology. Dahua and Hikvision, another Chinese surveillance-tech firm, are facing sanctions in the UK, US, Australia, and other countries, for their connection to the Chinese government. But in India growi...

A few days ago Meesho closed the first tranche of its $600 million funding round by securing $275 million. The e-commerce unicorn has impressed investors lately thanks to its sustainded operating growth and the reduction in its monthly burn rate. Over time, the platform has built a kind of dominance in India’s smaller cities and towns that become the envy of its competitors —all thanks to its supe...

You may be surprised by how often bank lockers are robbed. According to Finance Ministry data, close to Rs 200 crore has been stolen from locker facilities in the last three years alone.  This is pretty disconcerting, especially considering that for the longest time the bank locker has been considered the safest place to store your most precious valuables.  It also doesn’t help that every aspect o...