Daybreak

India's finance minister wants public sector banks to get "cool" for Gen Z. With yoga vouchers, youth kiosks, awareness campaigns. But the numbers tell a different story. PSBs are losing young Indians as both depositors and borrowers, while, at the same time, fintech lenders capture 57% of India's small-ticket loan market. Some, even at interest rates as high as 600%. On this episode, host Rachel Varghese asks why India's public banks misdiagnosed the problem, what it's actually costing young borrowers, and whether the tools to fix it, like cheaper credit, and faster underwriting, that already exist can be pointed in this demographic's direction.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.

Tukaram Mundhe, Maharashtra's food-safety chief, has gone viral this month for shutting famous restaurants and even noticing Shah Rukh Khan over an ad . Earlier this month his inspectors inspected around a dozen dark-store belonging to Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart. He isn't alone. On 22 August, a separate regulator in Telangana raided the dark stores behind grocery apps in Hyderabad, shutting four on the spot for expired stock and pests. Everyone's cheering the crackdown. But it can't fix what it found. To deliver in ten minutes, a dark store packs a supermarket's worth of stock into a residential space, moving so fast that the work of keeping food safe keeps losing out. That's what the model produces when it runs as designed. Quick commerce in India now runs on nearly 10 million orders a day. So why is there still no rule for the space your food waits in?Tune in.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.

When Nisarga Adhikary found critical flaws in CBSE's exam portal, the board denied it. So he broke back in, filmed it, and left anime videos running on their servers.IIT Kanpur hired him the same week it launched India's first undergraduate cybersecurity degree — one that recruits through hackathons and sends students to work at government security agencies for two of the four years.India produces a quarter of all researchers on global bug bounty platforms. The bounties come almost entirely from foreign companies. The RBI is now hiring cybersecurity talent on three-year contracts with no renewal path.California is still winning.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.

Every Indian state wants to be the country's data-centre capital. Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra. They're all handing out land, power, decades of tax breaks, all chasing the same promise: jobs.The Ken reporters Inderpal Singh and Mrunmayee Kulkarni ran the numbers on what the jobs actually cost. And the math does not hold up.On this episode of Daybreak, we go inside what's causing the data-centre boom. Why these buildings are designed to need almost no one, what states are actually betting on, and if the data-centre industry will see the same ecosystem build out as other sectors in India.Take The Great Rewiring survey hereDaybreak 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.

Tata 1mg just reported revenue of nearly 3,000 crore rupees for the last financial year, roughly ten times what it earned when Tata took control, and it is turning a profit while much of the sector bleeds cash. In an e-pharmacy market obsessed with 10-minute delivery and deep discounts, 1mg won by doing the opposite. It capped its discounts and built its own labs and supply chain, and it treats fast delivery as a minor add-on. In this episode, we unpack why patience beats blitzscaling in Indian healthcare and what 1mg means when it calls healthcare longitudinal.Take The Great Rewiring survey hereDaybreak 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.

China's microdrama industry took nearly eight years — and real government money — to reach the point where regulators had to step in over AI-flooded, quality-degraded content. India's biggest platforms don't have eight years. They're building AI into production from day one, racing to scale catalogues before fatigue sets in. Host Rachel Varghese, gets into why JioHotstar, ShareChat, and Kuku TV are pouring money into two-minute dramas, what a Chinese skincare brand's meteoric rise (and equally fast fall) reveals about the ceiling on this format, and whether India's shortcut to scale comes with a shortcut to burnout too.Tune in.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.

India built its IT industry on millions of coders doing exactly the work generative AI now does in seconds. So everyone knew who would feel the pressure first. The data refuses to cooperate. A survey of 1,552 tech professionals by the app Blind last week found the engineers, the ones everyone expects AI to replace, are the least worried of anyone surveyed. And an ICRIER study of 651 firms found the roles most exposed to AI, developers and analysts, are the ones firms want most. Why does demand for technical workers persist as AI takes on more of their work?Take The Great Rewiring survey hereDaybreak 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.

An HSBC survey found that 86% of affluent Indian investors are now using AI in their trading. That's the highest share of any country surveyed, above China, Singapore, and the US. Nearly half say AI tools are their primary source of investment ideas.Most of them are using the same two or three chatbots. And a growing body of academic research has found that when millions of investors ask the same models the same questions, they get the same answers — and pile into the same stocks at the same time.And it's already creating an effect in some markets that experts call "predictable, and less efficient".Tune in.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.

India has been talking about drones a lot lately, from Operation Sindoor to the government's $2 billion plan for combat drones. But long before that, in the forests of Chhattisgarh, security forces had already settled on the drone they trusted most. It is Chinese, made by a company called Da-Jiang Innovations, or DJI, and the government banned it years ago. So why do India's soldiers keep reaching for it?Based on investigation by Pratap Vikram Singh for The KenDaybreak 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.

Earlier this week, Anthropic began stamping an invisible watermark into the text and images Claude generates. The move came in order to comply with the EU AI Act but it will be switched on worldwide. It is the thing teachers, editors, and hiring managers had been demanding for years — a way to finally tell human work from machine. Within hours, many people who pay for Claude were in revolt, calling it a scarlet letter on their own work. But the mark barely does what either side thinks, right now. And the people it exposes are rarely the ones gaming the system. So why do we keep asking to know what's AI, only to step back when the answer might be us?Tune inDaybreak 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.

The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day just broke India's box office records back to back — and PVR Inox's stock jumped almost 20% in the process. It looks like proof that Indian audiences are finally back in theatres. But that's not all.The real story runs through just 34 IMAX screens, a decade-old trade deal that quietly expired, and a geopolitical rift thousands of miles away that has nothing to do with India at all. Today on Daybreak, we look at how a nationwide screen shortage — something that should have hurt business — became PVR Inox's most profitable weapon, why Hollywood needs India more than ever, and why your next movie ticket could go either way depending on where you live.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.

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.**This episode was first published on 26 March, 2026Daybreak 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 a hot Thursday evening in Delhi, people are queuing outside India's first Olive Garden. Some found it on Instagram. Others wandered over from the business park next door. Almost all have waited at least half an hour.Bharti Group wants 10 Olive Gardens in three years, and 125 total restaurants — more than double what it runs today. Indians are dining out more than ever, and serious money is following.But the most successful restaurants in India have deliberately stayed small. The ones that tried to scale mostly didn't. And Bharti's confidence rests entirely on a simple observation: that Indians are dining out more than they ever were.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.

Six months on, the answer has shifted. A US-Israeli war against Iran hit an already fragile stock market. Gold cooled, silver crashed, and real estate stayed flat, pushing investors toward fixed income for want of better returns. So we put the same question to the same five experts, four Sebi-registered advisers and a private wealth manager. Their consensus on diversification holds, but the reasons behind it have hardened.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.

If you Google "paisa de do", dozens of near-identical websites appear. Some, offering cash in 15 minutes. The interest rate on some of these loans is 600% per annum and the lenders are RBI-licensed.One borrower started with a Rs 75,000 loan. Within five months, he was paying Rs 6 lakh a month across eight different loan apps just to stay afloat.The Ken's Mutasim Khan found 25 such NBFCs, some reporting revenue growth of 3,000 times in a single year. In 2024, the RBI flagged 45% annual interest as predatory. These lenders charge more than ten times that. And nobody has stopped them yet.Tune in.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.

Zepto nearly doubled its revenue in a year, processes more orders than Swiggy Instamart, and has raised over 2.5 billion dollars from private investors. But when it filed to go public, India's largest mutual funds said they'd value it at less than half of what private investors had in it's last fundraise.The IPO is now delayed by two quarters. The cash reserves are falling. And six players are competing in a quick commerce market that analysts say can only sustain a few.Zepto's growth story has always worked in its favour but the public market is asking different questions.Read Suprita's stories here:Zepto wants Rs 8,100 crore—and investors to trust the numbers it won't discloseZepto to recruits from rivals: We give you ‘generational wealth', you give us long hoursDaybreak 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 generations, Indian families have shared the financial responsibility of ageing. Parents invested in their children through education, weddings and first homes, often expecting that support to come full circle in later life. But the economics behind that arrangement are changing. India is ageing rapidly but also living longer. The number of people over 60 expected to more than double by 2050 even as formal retirement coverage reaches only a fraction of the workforce. Meanwhile, it is taking longer for younger working Indians to become financially secure which in turn is affecting their savings. As these two trends collide, can India's oldest retirement model keep up?Tune in.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.

Amit was a computer science student who used to have a loan, a plan, and a flight to Canada. But then the college his visa depended on was derecognised. And an NBFC called Credila ended up with a Rs 20 lakh problem.Amit's story is becoming an industry pattern. Canada has cut active student volume by over 50%. The US and UK are tightening too. Study-abroad applications are down 25 to 30%, and the NBFCs that built their entire business on overseas education loans — with 80 to 92% of their books concentrated there — are quietly shelving IPO plans and pivoting to domestic lending.And the domestic market defaults at twenty times the rate. Tune in.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.

India is the world's top sunflower oil buyer, and Black Sea attacks have sent it hunting across South America. Shipments from Russia and Ukraine are running weeks late, and prices are climbing.The substitutes are squeezed too. Indonesia is diverting more palm oil into biodiesel, and China's record soybean buying keeps the soy complex tight. A weak monsoon has thinned India's harvest. But the country has two oil problems, the crude it burns for fuel and the cooking oil it imports for the kitchen. It threw its capital at the fuel one first, reaching 20% ethanol blending years ahead of target. But feeding those distilleries takes land, and some of that land is coming from oilseeds. So the fix for one oil may gradually worsen the other. Tune in.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.

Assam is enduring some of its worst flooding in years, with the death toll inching to a hundred and lakhs affected. It is also happens to be the state that recently landed India's first chip assembly plant, a ₹27,000 crore Tata facility, and the centrepiece of Japan's growing push into the Northeast. The plant itself is light on water. But the deeper ecosystem Assam is chasing, chemicals and the rest of the chip supply chain, is thirsty, and the state is highlighting its abundant water as the draw. The trouble is those same rivers flood it almost every year and despite rising spending, Assam still goes under.Tune in.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 Tuesday, Trump announced 100% tariffs on generic medicines imported into the US. By Wednesday, Indian pharma stocks were already falling even though the tariff doesn't take effect for two years.Trump wants import companies to reshore their manufacturing to the US so that the country can secure life-saving medication in the event of global supply chain disruptions. India supplies nearly 50% of all generic medicines consumed in America — birth control, antidepressants, hypertension treatments. The companies most exposed say shifting manufacturing to the US in two years isn't realistic. Building a viable generics ecosystem there takes at least five.But someone has to absorb the cost. And Indian companies have already said that moving is not a realistic plan — for now. Which means the ones picking up the bill are not the ones Trump thinks. Tune in.Take the Daybreak listener survey here.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.

Burger King India is one of the country's better-run quick-service chains. Gross margins are at record highs, restaurant-level profits have doubled, and the burger chain has posted five straight quarters of same-store-sales growth. So why does its stock sit close to where it listed six years ago? Part of the answer is Indonesia, where an old acquisition keeps bleeding cash. The rest is the new owner. A pharma family has taken control of Restaurant Brands Asia, pouring in far more money than its expansion needs, much of it debt backed by pledged shares. Tune in.*This episode is based on a story by Anirudh Somani who is also an investor in the companyDaybreak 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.

When Accenture employees in Pune walked into their appraisal meetings in May, they expected the routine conversations. Instead, they found out things would be done differently this year. They did get their full salary hike. But not the way it was done up until now. Half went into the base salary. The other half arrived as a lump sum in June. On paper, nothing was lost. In practice, though, every future raise now compounds on a smaller number. And that's what affects gratuity, loan eligibility, and long-term salary growth. Even TCS has done something similar with bonuses. Both are a consequence how the IT sector has been doing. It's market value has fallen by nearly Rs 9 lakh crore in five years. Which means, its likely the restructuring has only just begun.Tune in.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.

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 meeting, a hailstorm hit. Eight people died in an accident. The flooded areas sat directly above the upcoming Pink Line.Mumbai. Pune. Bengaluru. Same story, different cities. India is spending over Rs 2 lakh crore building metros that keep flooding the cities they're meant to fix. But the gap lies between the agencies building the city's infrastructure and the ones meant to take care of its drainage.Tune in.*Apply to become The Ken's Intermission Producer *Apply for an audio production internshipDaybreak 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.

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% and the chain badly needs the footfall. But customers walk into Third Wave for coffee not tres leches. Can desserts turn the business around without changing its identity? *Apply to become The Ken's Intermission Producer*Apply for an audio production internshipDaybreak 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.

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 Jenner's voice for an extra hundred dollars — and they sold out before the launch event ended.Both companies have documented the risks of AI dependency internally. Both are shipping anyway.Tune in.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.

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 through it, at enormous political and economic cost. Indonesia's economy contracted by 13% in a single year.India is somewhere earlier in that story. In this episode of Daybreak, host Snigdha Sharma asks which ending we are heading toward.**This episode was first published on 26 May, 2026Daybreak 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.

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 500 articles across Apollo, Max, Fortis, Medanta, and Artemis found incorrect drug recommendations, outdated protocols, and Western benchmarks applied to Indian patients.Nobody is legally responsible. Nobody is fixing it.Tune in.Listen to the Zero Shot episode here.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.

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, every year. The same tenant who pays 2 months' deposit in Mumbai is asked for 10 in Bengaluru, and in Delhi NCR, about 4 in 10 never got their full deposit back. Renting was meant to be a phase. But with home ownership drifting out of reach, tenants may be extending this loan for decades.Tune in.Recommendations:It sucks to be a tenant in Bengaluru right now*Take The Ken's audit hereDaybreak 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.

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.Shah left for WhatsApp. Meta needed someone who could monetise a billion Indian users without making regulators nervous. What that means for both companies is the more interesting question.Scripted by Snigdha Sharma based on the report by Suprita Anupam.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.

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 one. A reality show that airs almost every night at 8pm just cracked Netflix's global top 10. The format that streaming was supposed to kill is doing just fine. And Netflix is finally realising why.Tune in.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.

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 business grew 134% in a single year. Ports made Adani rich. But there are only so many ports you can build. What the conglomerate does next may depend on waters far from any dock. Tune in.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.

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 board exam subject and the government is betting that deadline will change everything.Tune in.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.

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 collapsed by 80%. Delinquencies rose. Rejection rates hit 50%.Now the tool is coming back. This time with guardrails. The question is whether they're enough.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.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, 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 Bluetooth wide open, no password at all. The flaw was documented publicly years ago and nothing happened until it went viral. The batteries are still exposed. In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma asks what really governs safety in India's informal economy.Tune in.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.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.

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," and "ambanijio" were still available for anyone who gets there first.WhatsApp has until tomorrow to explain itself to MeitY. And even if the deadline keeps getting extended, the problem isn't going away.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.

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 to bother with. But 70% of AC sales in India happen offline, shelf space belongs to brands with decades of dealer relationships, and Optimist is nowhere on the floor yet. How long can a better product afford to wait? 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.

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 of this reshuffled industry is Accenture Song. It's the world's largest advertising agency that doesn't really call itself one. It made 20 billion dollars last year. And it's barely visible in India. And that lack of visibility? That's by design.Tune in.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.

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 eight years arguing it shouldn't have to answer at all, until Europe's top court settled the matter this week. And then there's UPI, which has never sent anyone a bill in its life. Its June numbers just hinted at why that might not last forever.Tune in.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.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.

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 further, also targeting a clause that lets workers ask platforms how their pay and ratings get decided.A welfare fee is due July 5 regardless of how the case unfolds, and other states building similar laws are watching closely to see what survives. The platforms call the clause a threat to trade secrets. The law calls it a question a worker is allowed to ask. Which one is it?Tune in.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.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.

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 phones in India are up 30 to 40% since January. And the shortage isn't expected to ease until 2027.Tune in.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.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.

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 rather than building what came next. A royal wager on Indian tech, still waiting for a payoff.Tune in.*This episode was originally published on 24th April 2026.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.

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 cap table is full of private equity firms running on 10-year fund cycles, and they need a way out.So what happens when a business built for the long game has to keep moving fast?Tune in.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.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.

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 how this supply chain works: from gig workers in Delhi, to the firms like Tesla and Nvidia that eventually buy their footage from the companies that vet, annotate and package it for sale. And why this feels like a pattern India has been in before.*Read Sakshi's original story here.

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 IGTV, and shut it down three years later.So if short-form video was supposed to be the future, why does Instagram keep making it longer?Tune in. 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 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 the assumption that access to frontier models would stay open. That assumption just cracked. And while India accelerates its own sovereign AI mission, analysts say that alone won't be enough to fix what just happened.So what would?Tune in.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.

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 but the other collapsed before its time was up. And OpenAI — the company with the largest AI user base in India — skipped the telco route entirely. What does OpenAI know about this model that the others are still learning?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.

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 to escape marketplace commissions. They're even moving parcels between dark stores for Zepto.But the economics only work in certain places. And India's regulations weren't built with any of this in mind.Tune in.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.

2026 was the first IPL season after India banned online real money gaming last year. The platforms were gone and the payment gateways were blocked. The government had made its position clear. The betting, however, did not stop. The Ken's Mrunmayee Kulkarni went looking for where it went and found it hiding inside something the government itself built. On platforms like 99 Exchange, gamblers deposit and withdraw money directly through UPI, gambler to gambler, with no mule network and no victim to file a complaint. But the ED's tools were designed for a system that leaves a trail. This one doesn't.In this episode, Mrunmayee joins host Snigdha Sharma to walk through how the money actually moves, and why the enforcement machinery has no good answer for it yet.Tune in.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.

India's southwest monsoon is running 35% below normal. Mumbai's reservoirs are at 12% of capacity. And the rain that should have arrived by June 11th still hasn't. The same water and power systems that keep this economy running are now being asked to power India's AI future too — a $180 billion data centre bet that nobody is stress-testing against a failing monsoon and climate change. The groundwater is already over-extracted. The grid hit an all-time demand record in May. And the choice about who gets water first when there isn't enough has already been written into law in some states. But almost nobody wants to say it out loud. Tune in.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.

Zepto just filed its DRHP. It wants to open 1,900 new dark stores, on top of the 1,139 it already runs. Blinkit, the only profitable player in the sector, is racing to 3,000 stores by March 2027. Meanwhile, its adjusted EBITDA is just Rs. 37 crores — not a lot considering the billions that have been spent on getting it to profitability.The dark store is quick commerce's core bet — and its biggest fixed cost. Rents are rising, FMCG prices are up, and user growth at Zepto actually declined between December and March despite spending over Rs 1,300 crore on advertising.The model is scaling. But will the economics ever catch up?Tune in.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.