Daybreak

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.

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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.

You pick up an unknown number. A bubbly voice starts selling you a credit card. You hang up in seconds. 

Except now, that voice may not be human.

AI voice agents are already live across banks, e-commerce and healthcare platforms in India, with startups in the space raising over Rs 280 crore. But behind that perfectly polite pitch is a more complex rollout — from pilots and script tuning to adapting across languages and dialects.

So, what’s driving this sudden funding spree, and how are companies actually deploying these AI callers in India?

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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.

A study gave 16 experienced developers the best AI coding tools available.

They predicted they'd be 24% faster. They felt 20% faster. They were actually 19% slower — and still didn't believe it when told.

That gap between belief and reality is now being deployed at enterprise scale.

TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and Cognizant have committed to over 50,000 AI coding licences each. Bugs per developer are up 50%. Code is reaching production without any human review.

And the senior engineers who could catch the mistakes are buried too deep in the flood to look up.

Is India's IT sector selling a productivity story it hasn't actually earned yet?

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*With inputs from Mrunmayee Kulkarni. Read her piece here: Engineers gag as Amazon, TCS, and Cognizant ram ‘mandatory AI’ into everyday work

Read the NYT article: The Big Bang: A.I. Has Created a Code Overload

Read Luciano Nooijen's blog post: Why I stopped using AI code editors

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.

Seventeen years ago, Reliance Industries made a promise that was supposed to change India's energy future.

It didn't.

Today, with a war raging in the Middle East, the Strait of Hormuz mostly closed, and Qatar — India's single largest gas supplier — unable to guarantee supplies, that broken promise has become a full-blown crisis. India finds itself caught between Trump, Tehran, and its own structural failures. The IEA calls it the worst energy crisis in history.
 
For India, it may be the moment that finally forces a reckoning.

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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.

When your SIP bounces, your bank charges you Rs 500. The mutual fund that missed the investment? Charges you nothing. That gap is not an accident.

In this piece, The Ken's Mutasim Khan traces how India's banks have quietly turned missed SIP debits into a revenue line — one that costs them roughly Rs 25 to process, and nets them hundreds of crores a month. The people paying most are first-time investors in smaller cities, often unaware the charge even happened.

This is a read aloud of Mutasim's original story, by Snigdha Sharma, on Daybreak.

📖 Read the full story on The Ken: Your missed SIP could be making banks tens of crores every month

India's life expectancy has doubled since 1950. But 65% of deaths are still from diseases caught too late.

Cent, the new startup from Practo's founder, thinks it has an answer: full-body AI scans that find risks before they become diagnoses.

At Rs 20,000–30,000 a scan, it's already found critical findings in hundreds of patients — with zero false positives, it claims.

But Cent doesn't diagnose. It doesn't refer. And it has no proprietary technology.

So what exactly are you paying for — and what happens after it finds something?

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.

Anthropic has spent years building a reputation as the AI company that actually cares about safety.

Then, in the span of two weeks, it leaked an unannounced model, exposed its own source code, and accidentally handed hackers a blueprint of its most widely-used product. The fix came in 24 hours. The blueprint can't be unlearned.

And the companies that trusted Claude Code with their deepest systems are still running on publicly documented defences.

If the most careful AI company couldn't prevent this, what does that mean for everyone else?

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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.

The Indian government approved a ₹41,534 crore fertiliser subsidy for the upcoming kharif season last week, a 12% increase from last year. The move comes as the Gulf War has severely disrupted India's fertiliser supply chains, with urea prices jumping 65% in just 40 days.

India is the world's second largest fertiliser importer, and the Strait of Hormuz carries a significant share of both the finished fertilisers and the gas needed to make them domestically. The kharif season, which produces roughly 100 million tonnes of rice, begins in June.

In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma looks at India's fertiliser subsidy policy and what its really doing for farmers during this crisis.

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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 is building data centres at unprecedented speed to support cloud services, AI, and digital growth. At the same time, cities across the country are struggling with water shortages and repeated contamination of drinking-water supplies.

A United Nations report describes this condition as water bankruptcy. It is the stage where water systems continue to function, but only by drawing down reserves that cannot recover fast enough.

In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma looks at how India’s data centre push fits into that reality, drawing lessons from cities abroad where similar tensions have already surfaced.

So as India builds for a digital future, the question is simple: who decides how much water that future can afford?

**This episode was originally published on 22 Jan, 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.

India's new undergraduate framework was supposed to fix a broken system — where only 8% of graduates land jobs that match their degrees.

The fix? Give students hundreds of courses to choose from, blend formal education with vocational training, and make them more employable. But when every course carries the same two credits, students do the math quickly and the easier course wins.

Now universities are scrambling, edtechs are stepping in to teach core curriculum, no one's quite sure who's in charge and it's not really clear if this reform is fixing employability yet.

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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.