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Your daily Indian startup newsletter with daily news and funding updates, along with original deep dives!

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1/ India’s food delivery market has been a closed room for a decade: Zomato or Swiggy. The duopoly set the rules, charged 18-30% commission, and watched rivals (Uber Eats, Foodpanda) fail. Now, two underdogs are rewriting the physics.
November 25, 2025 at 11:07 AM
1/ India's EV race is split into two brutal lanes. Mass players (Ola, Ather) are chasing volume under ₹1.5 lakh. Ultraviolette is trying to build India's Tesla Roadster at ₹3.8-4.5 lakh. The gap between these lanes is a financial trap.
November 24, 2025 at 11:36 AM
1/ India’s strategic weakness is hidden in plain sight: We don’t control the minerals (Lithium, Rare Earths) that power modern tech. China dominates 90% of refining, controlling the global EV/electronics supply chain.
November 21, 2025 at 11:31 AM
1/ Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal's new obsession - brain blood flow and aging - has turned the startup world upside down. He’s betting $25M on his "Gravity Aging Hypothesis": that spending life upright accelerates aging by pulling blood away from the brain.
November 20, 2025 at 11:33 AM
1/ India’s EdTech sector has been an expensive graveyard (Byju's collapse, Unacademy's retreat). Now, PhysicsWallah's ₹3,480 Cr IPO - with 89% as fresh capital - is the first real signal that the model can work.
November 19, 2025 at 11:04 AM
1/ The concierge dream refuses to die in India. First it was Dunzo's chat-based human errands. Now, former Dunzo CEO Kabeer Biswas is pitching a new "personal AI concierge." The question: Is this just Dunzo with a prettier, cheaper prompt?
November 18, 2025 at 10:42 AM
1/ India's agritech dream just hit a painful reality check. BharatAgri, despite raising $14M, shut down. The founder's confession: "Unit economics looked fine, but overheads were too high." The transactions made money; the company didn't.
November 17, 2025 at 11:39 AM
1/ For years, digital gold was fintech’s perfect trick: buy "24K gold" for ₹1 on an app you open 10 times a day. By 2024, ₹15,000 crore had flowed into this parallel market, almost entirely unsupervised.
November 14, 2025 at 10:14 AM
1/ The old growth playbook in Indian e-commerce is broken. CAC is rising (₹1,500-₹2,000 for many categories), and attention is shrinking. Platforms are now transforming into media companies - asking content to do what ad budgets no longer can.
November 13, 2025 at 10:36 AM
1/ Unacademy's arc - from YouTube channel to SoftBank unicorn - is ending like a clearance sale. Its core biz is reportedly selling to upGrad for $300-$400M, a brutal 90% wipeout from its $3.44B peak.
November 12, 2025 at 10:57 AM
1/ India's IPO market is running a familiar script: The Pre-Listing Profit Mirage. Companies are showing a one-year profit surge just long enough to secure a successful exchange listing. Lenskart’s sub-issue-price debut is the latest casualty.
November 11, 2025 at 10:35 AM
1/ India's startup market is running on two parallel tracks. One is flush with private money for fast-scaling software (Lenskart IPO success). The other is slow, built on government cheques for high-risk DeepTech (chips, rockets).
November 10, 2025 at 10:40 AM
1/ Policybazaar's latest move is an earthquake in HealthTech. It’s moving from selling insurance to managing your health. PB Health is acquiring Fitterfly (prevention) and planning hospitals (delivery) backed by a fresh $218M round.
November 7, 2025 at 11:49 AM
1/ India built a world-class startup machine on imported oxygen. The funding winter proved that model's fragility. The new strategic question is simple: Can India fund India?
November 6, 2025 at 10:46 AM
1/ The humble browser is dead. Long live the Intelligent Assistant. The new generation of browsers (Arc, Opera Aria, Brave Leo) is transforming the web from a "search-and-click" model to a "chat-and-do" agent.
November 5, 2025 at 11:51 AM
1/ India's next big e-commerce policy isn't about domestic discounts. It’s about building an Export Firewall. The government is considering allowing foreign investors to hold inventory in India exclusively for shipping abroad.
November 4, 2025 at 9:38 AM
1/ India’s startup story has reached its spreadsheet moment. A brutal 11,223 shutdowns in 2025 - a 30% jump - marks the end of the "spending ahead of truth" era. This is a system-wide reset.
November 3, 2025 at 11:14 AM
1/ The fizz is gone at Bira 91. Once the poster child for premiumization, the company is in a full-blown structural crisis. FY24 losses (₹749 Cr) now exceed annual revenue (₹638 Cr). The auditor flagged a going-concern warning and ₹1,900 Cr+ in accumulated losses.
October 31, 2025 at 10:30 AM
1/ India's "funding winter" is a misnomer. It's really a dry powder paradox. Funds are stuffed with cash raised in prior years, but deployment is at its most cautious pace in a decade. Why? VCs are waiting for sane prices and clean unit economics.
October 30, 2025 at 11:07 AM
1/ Lenskart's IPO is a high-stakes test. It's listing at a projected ₹70,000 Cr valuation (P/E > 220x!) - testing whether Indian investors are ready to back Silicon Valley multiples again, despite the lessons from Paytm/Nykaa.
October 29, 2025 at 10:56 AM
1/ Stanza Living just raised $32M, but the headline is the down round. Valued at ~₹2,812 Cr, it's a stark reminder that investors are no longer betting on potential. They are asking: Show me the operational discipline.
October 28, 2025 at 9:49 AM
1/ For a decade, India's best founders won by selling speed (10-min delivery, instant payments). Now, Zomato's Deepinder Goyal is taking his own $25M to fund the opposite: Longevity research via Continue Research.
October 27, 2025 at 10:33 AM
1/ Zoho’s UPI move is not a side project; it's a strategic wedge. Payments themselves won't make money (zero MDR), but they're the cheapest on-ramp to the real prize: owning the transaction data of 7.5 lakh paying business customers.
October 24, 2025 at 12:13 PM
1/ India’s Deep-Tech dream is real, but painfully fragile. Startups like Silizium Circuits are designing first-of-its-kind 5G chips in Kochi, but have to send them abroad for fabrication. Brilliant design, no fabs. That is India's core imbalance.
October 23, 2025 at 12:35 PM
1/ India’s startup story is hitting an accountability era. The Ola Electric FIR, following an employee's death, turns "hustle culture" from a PR debate into a grave criminal and financial risk for the leadership.
October 22, 2025 at 11:12 AM