Polymarket and Kalshi are two New York-founded prediction market platforms now valued in the billions. While both let users bet real money on elections and political events in real time, it is Polymarket — the larger, offshore, largely unregulated one — where someone made nearly a million dollars predicting US military strikes on Iran before they happened. Together, the two platforms processed over $44 billion in bets last year.

In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma explores how two New York startups turned opinion into a tradeable asset — and what happens when the people placing the biggest bets already know the answer.

India banned online money gaming last year. These platforms are taking bets on our elections anyway.

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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.

For a decade, digital advertising ran on one idea: get to the top of Google. Buy the keywords and earn the clicks. That was the game.

But AI just changed the rules.

ChatGPT and Gemini now have over a billion and a half users between them, growing at nearly 200% year on year. People have stopped searching for links. Instead,nthey're asking questions and expecting answers. And those answers mention three brands, maybe four. For the rest who don't make it to these answers, it's like they don't even exist.

What will those brands do?

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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.

In 1965, Yoko Ono sat on a stage at Carnegie Hall and handed a pair of scissors to strangers. What they did next was entirely up to them.
It was a performance about agency — and about what happens when you give an audience too much of it.

Sixty years later, Sam Altman made a promise: OpenAI would treat adults like adults, and roll out an erotic mode for verified users.

The market was there. Other players in the intimate AI companion space were raking in dollars.

But after multiple delays, the Open AI plan was eventually shelved.

So, why is a company known for burning cash, saying no to a revenue making avenue it already considered?

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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.

Semaglutide's patent just expired in India. The molecule behind Novo Nordisk's blockbuster obesity drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy, is now fair game for generic manufacturers. An 85 to 90% price drop is expected.

Eli Lilly's Mounjaro had already been outselling Wegovy.

For most companies, this would be the beginning of an exit. But Novo is doing the opposite. Why?

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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.

India's hospitals have been slow to adopt AI.

Its government, however, has not.

A new programme aims to train 50,000 doctors in artificial intelligence. And not just to use it, but to help build it.
The argument is simple: engineers understand disease like an algorithm. Doctors know it's never that clean.

So what happens when clinicians become co-builders?

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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.

Bengaluru's water utility loses a third of everything it pumps. It owes Tokyo Rs 10,000 crore. It bleeds Rs 80 crore every month.

Its answer to all of this was an app — GPS-tracked tankers, government-backed, 40% cheaper than the market.

But nine months later the all the app has to show is 10,000 downloads and a 2.8 rating in a city of 14 million. So why are Bangalore's residents saying no to the state's efforts?

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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.

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.

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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.

Seventy years ago, Homi Bhabha designed a three-stage nuclear plan built around one idea: that India's future was thorium, not uranium. The science was proven, the reactors were built, and by 1996, India had already demonstrated a thorium fuel cycle at an experimental reactor in Kalpakkam.

What it never did was take it to commercial scale. In 2025, an eight-year-old American startup did exactly that — with a fuel designed specifically for Indian reactors, and a former chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission on its board of advisors. So what happened in between?

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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.

India's telecom operators have spent decades controlling how signals reach customers indoors but that arrangement is now under serious pressure.

A new breed of infrastructure companies, ones that do not own a spectrum and hold no licence, are taking control of how 5G reaches you inside airports, metro lines, malls, and office towers. The fight over who builds and who pays has drawn in regulators, sovereign wealth funds, and the Supreme Court.

And it points to a much larger shift in who really owns the network.

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India's Northeast has always had money. Wealth managers are only now showing up to court it, and finding the welcome chillier than expected.

Post-GST, a wave of newly banked business wealth is looking for a home. Sophisticated products like AIFs, PMS, bonds, are finding takers.

But Northeastern millionaires play by different rules.
They don't respond to cold calls. They don't trust outsiders easily. And they have little patience for managers who can't answer basic questions.

So what does it actually take to win a client here — and why are so many wealth managers still getting it wrong?

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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.