Two by Two (Private)

There are two ways to tell the quick commerce story in India.

The first, and the more conventional way this narrative exists is that quick-commerce is a three-way race between Blinkit, which has pulled ahead with 2,200 dark stores and a roughly half-market share lead, Zepto, which has packed 21 stores per city in a metro saturation play, and Instamart, which sits squeezed in the middle. Every metric the category tracks was built around the assumption that this will be contested on the same set of metrics i.e. dark stores, per-store profitability, density, contribution margin, AOV, etc.

But there’s a second narrative that’s unfolding.

Amazon has walked into quick-commerce, with its latest offering–Amazon Now.

And unlike everyone, it has a singular weapon that none of the others has.

On the Q1 2026 earnings call, Andy Jassy spoke less about dark stores, delivery times, or city counts. Instead, he specifically cited one number—Prime members tripling their shopping frequency once they start using Amazon Now, with orders growing 25% month over month. Essentially, Amazon is fighting the quick-commerce battle with a different set of numbers, which measures something different from what the rest of the category measures. Amazon owns something that the others don’t, i.e., the consumers themselves, who are locked into it through a subscription product, Prime.

This unlocks possibilities for a new kind of flywheel to emerge.

In this episode, Praveen sits down with Vishal Gahlaut (chief business officer, Hopscotch; ex-Myntra) and Aditya Suresh (head of India Equity Research, Macquarie Capital) to work through whether Prime is the asset that finally lets Amazon do in quick commerce what it couldn’t do in e-commerce, payments, or groceries—or whether the category has already moved past where Amazon thinks it is.

They discuss stuff like:

The shift from Manish Tiwary’s tenure to Samir Kumar’s “Prime as the path to profitability” mandate, and what it reveals about how Amazon Now is being built internally

The supply-side convergence math—five players targeting roughly 1,000–1,200 dark stores each within six months, sitting on the same points on the map—and what happens to unit economics when everyone arrives at the same density at the same time

The single metric Aditya is watching at Blinkit to know whether Amazon’s pressure is actually working.

Predictions for 2030, which are split into three different ways across the table.

References:

Inside Samir Kumar’s plan to bring order to Amazon India’s chaos

These days it’s fashionable to have an AI story, no matter what you do. 

But in December 2024, Bajaj Finance took it a few steps further. Instead of calling itself "a lender investing in AI," it started to describe itself as a "FinAI company" - a category of one, which it committed to in a five-year plan to FY29. 

Eighteen months in, no other Indian lender is putting AI on their slides the way Bajaj Finance is. Here are some of them : 31 million voice interactions converted into data last quarter. 27 autonomous agents live, 118 more planned. 600,000 loans on a single Diwali day, up from a pre-AI ceiling of 100,000. 

And next Diwali, they're aiming for a million.

A few years ago, the obvious answer to who would win Indian finance's AI era was the digital natives — PhonePe, CRED, the cloud-born fintechs with no call centres and zero baggage. Instead, the company that started financing two-wheelers and still runs one of India's largest outbound calling operations is out in front. The thing that looked like Bajaj's archaic legacy is turning out to be its moat.

What else did Bajaj Finance have that got it here? 

And how long before the others get there too?

Praveen is joined by Seetharaman G, Deputy Editor at The Ken, who just spent 5.5 hours on Bajaj's history for Intermission, The Ken’s new longform video podcast — and Vasuta Agarwal, Chief Revenue Officer at Gnani.ai, which provides Voice AI to enterprises.

The episode works through four pieces of Bajaj's edge: the data it built around its consumer-durables network, the incentive of being a publicly listed NBFC without access to cheap deposits, the leverage of buying from a voice AI market with dozens of competing vendors, and the DNA that may not be replicable i.e the willingness to fight for every inch, sustained under one CEO since 2007.

References: 

Intermission Ep 2 on Bajaj Finance : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhgvdo9rb0w

Bajaj Finance is the AI bar-raiser, not Indian fintechs:

https://the-ken.com/kaching/bajaj-finance-is-the-ai-bar-raiser-not-indian-fintechs/

In 2017, four ex-Flipkart engineers made a bet that looked seemingly ridiculous at the time. They decided to build a company that let anyone buy mutual funds directly, with no commissions or hidden fees. And then on top of it, they built it as a clean app that made it easy and simple for anyone to start investing.

Nobody thought it would work.

Well, it worked.

Nine years later, Groww is India's largest stockbroker by active clients, its most profitable consumer fintech, and the first major Y Combinator portfolio company in India to go public. ₹1,824 crore net profit in FY25. 83% organic customer acquisition. 81% of users outside the top six metros. A DAU/MAU ratio of 56% which is the kind of number you'd expect from a social media app. It even paid ₹1,340 crore in taxes to move its holding company back from Delaware to India, then listed on Indian public markets at an IPO subscribed 17 times over.

Every decision looked risky at the time and obvious in retrospect.

But Groww in 2026 is not Groww in 2017. The company that built trust by doing one thing exceptionally well is now building lending, wealth management, insurance, and its own AMC. The revenue line that powered its profitability i.e F&O is under regulatory pressure. And every other large consumer platform in India from PhonePe, Dhan, Dream11, Jio Financial are rushing towards the stock broking industry, arriving late to the party Groww built.

Praveen sits down with Anand Kalyanaraman, finance editor of The Ken who has tracked Groww since its earliest days, and Avinash Luthria, founder of Fiduciaries and one of eight SEBI-registered investment advisors who charges only an hourly fee. Praveen comes in with a strong prior — that Groww is one of the most consequential Indian companies of the last decade. His guests are here to disagree and add context to his claim. Anand comes in with the perspective of whether the valuation is justified, and Avinash on whether the business models and incentives that brokerage companies have so far can help them go ahead.

And the question everyone discusses: can the company that won by being simple stay trusted while becoming everything?

Additional reading:

https://the-ken.com/podcasts/first-principles/lalit-keshre-groww/

https://the-ken.com/story/growws-ipo-pitch-we-are-more-than-a-discount-broker-investors-really-show-us/

https://the-ken.com/story/get-a-loan-buy-more-stock-groww-and-angel-ones-latest-pitch-to-investors/

The old way to grow as a product designer meant doing the grunt work (button variants, banner sizes, edges cases) until your instincts calibrated.

In the new world, AI does the grunt work, faster and cheaper than any junior designer ever could.

And the numbers reveal this crisis : UX job postings fell 73% between 2022 and 2023. Less than 5% of tech companies hire entry-level design talent.

Rapid changes are afoot and we need some reorientation

So, Praveen met Jay Datta—founder of Designup, Southeast Asia’s largest design conference, and 25 years in design at Deutsche Bank, Adobe, Flipkart, and Makemytrip—and Shreyas Satish, founder of Ownpath, who has spent years trying to rebuild the apprenticeship model from outside the system to discuss that question to answer a big question: how does a 22-year-old build judgement now? 

Eighteen months ago, Hyrox did not exist in India. Last month, 8,200 people paid Rs 9,000 each to do a sled push at the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre. Attendees described the event as a “carnival”, and for several weeks, everyone was talking and proudly sharing their Hyrox timings.

If you’re wondering what on earth is going on, well, this episode is for you.

Fitness as an event isn’t new in India. Every wave of participative fitness in India solved something the previous one couldn’t. Marathons gave the urban professional class a finish line and an identity. Crossfit gave them a tribe and a daily ritual. Both peaked, both retreated, both ended up circling the same thin, affluent cohort in Bengaluru and Mumbai. Now Hyrox has arrived, and in one season blown past anything either of those formats built in India. The question is whether Hyrox is the next iteration of the same product, or something fundamentally different.

Then there’s the business side of it. Hyrox is a premium commercial format, with revenue lines through event tickets, a global licensing model, a PUMA deal, and a middleman at every layer between the participant and the finish line. That commercial stack sits on top of a culture that markets itself on community and participation. Does that accelerate the fitness ecosystem or does it extract from it?

And to find out that answer, Praveen Gopal Krishnan sits with two guests:

Prasanna Akela is the cofounder of Belong, a personal training studio in Bengaluru. Before Belong, Prasanna was an early growth leader at companies like CRED, Apple, and Uber India. He’s also competed at the national level in ultimate frisbee and has trained extensively in endurance and strength. He brings the operator’s view: what does someone building a fitness business in India actually see when a global format like Hyrox walks in?

“I’ve not seen this culture of people at scale wanting to get better. Everybody does their first Hyrox. Nobody’s like, how do I do my second Hyrox better than my first one.”

Dilip Kumar leads investments at Rainmatter*, Zerodha’s health and fitness fund, which has deployed over Rs 250 crore across dozens of investments in health and fitness—including Hyrox India, Ironman, and Devil Circuit. He’s also a serious endurance athlete with a 2:55 marathon personal best and a finisher at the Boston Marathon. He has publicly called Hyrox as India’s “2008 IPL moment” for fitness. He came to this conversation with a declared interest and a clear conviction.

“99% of the people are not intrinsically motivated. The invention of all these events kind of expanded that category — and that’s where we started investing.”

Prasanna is building inside the wave and Dilip is investing and betting on it. Both of them are also participants. They competed in last month’s Hyrox event at Bengaluru. The episode tries to find out how long the wave is going to last—and what might happen after that.

*Zerodha’s perennial fund Rainmatter Capital is an investor in The Ken.

This episode was hosted and produced by Praveen Gopal Krishnan. Rajiv C N, our resident technical producer did the audio production.

“There is no pride in this. Kya karoon (what can I do), I’m just a delivery boy.”

Every time someone raises the topic of gig economy in India, the conversation follows the same script. Side A: this is exploitation. Side B: but employment. And then everyone moves on, nothing changes, and 12 million people keep showing up every morning to deliver your groceries.

This episode tries to push past that script. Sid Pai, co-founder of Bengaluru-based consulting firm UK & Co., joins Praveen and Rahel to go through a new report—India’s Gig Economy: The Promise and the Paradox—based on conversations with 1,355 gig workers across Karnataka. The numbers are granular in ways you don’t usually see: working hours, screen time, savings rates, and one metric borrowed from product management that turns out to be damning. You can guess which one.

The question they start with i.e. “what breaks first if things continue this way?” doesn’t have a clean answer. The more unsettling finding might be that 95% of gig workers report being satisfied with their income even when 52% of them have zero savings. Understanding why that contradiction exists, and what it’s actually holding together, is what this episode is really about.

You can see the report here.

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This episode was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.

If you liked this episode, share it with your friends, family and colleagues. And if you have thoughts on the discussion, write to us at [email protected].

What happened to the company that once understood India better than anyone else? 

For decades Hindustan Unilever has dominated kitchen pantries and bathroom cabinets across the country: Surf Excel in the laundry, Brooke Bond in the kitchen, Clinic Plus in the bathroom.  It was the undisputed gold standard of brand building in this country. 

Well, until it wasn’t. 

Case in point: a couple of weeks ago, a journalist shared a chart from an HSBC report on social media.The chart listed some of HUL's biggest brands — Ponds, Lux, Rin, Lifebuoy, Kissan, Surf, Glow & Lovely, Vim, Bru — and showed where each of them stood ten years ago versus today.

Turns out, most of them have barely grown, if at all. Something has shifted at the company that was once India's consumption barometer. The brands that generate genuine excitement today aren't HUL brands. More often than not, they are scrappy D2C upstarts that, on paper, shouldn't stand a chance against a behemoth like HUL.

In the latest episode of Two By Two, we try to answer one simple question: Are HUL's best days behind it?

Two By Two hosts Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rahel Philipose are joined by Seetharaman G, Deputy Editor at The Ken and Sandeep Nair, co-founder of marketing consultancy firm, David and Who. Both of them see this story play out in opposite ways. And that's where it gets interesting. 

Tune in.

Read more:
- Is HUL still the envy of the FMCG world?

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This episode was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.

If you liked this episode, share it with your friends, family and colleagues. And if you have thoughts on the discussion, write to us at [email protected].

"Of course BHIM is giving crazy cashbacks. That's where I pay my bills."

That's not a BHIM fan but a product head at a competing UPI app.

After demonetisation hit in 2016, India desperately needed a way to go cashless overnight. UPI existed but barely anyone was using it. Banks were dragging their feet and private players were too small and too few. So, NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India) built an entire payments app in weeks and put the Prime Minister behind it. BHIM clocked 10 million downloads in just 10 days. 

But just as quietly, NPCI put it to sleep and the private players took the bait.

Fast forward to today, PhonePe and Google Pay between them own over 80% of all UPI transactions. Two American-backed companies are winning on the very road NPCI laid, while the architect has 0.8% market share on its own railway.

So BHIM is back. With MS Dhoni as brand ambassador, cashbacks flying left, right and centre and a stated goal of hitting 5% market share. 
But can a government app out-app the giants it created? And why is it back and why now?

Rahel Philipose and Praveen Gopal Krishnan sit down with Arundhati Ramanathan, deputy editor at The Ken who wrote the original BHIM story in 2017, and Abhishek Madan, co-founder of Alt Inc and former VP of product at Paytm, to find out.

Read more:

- The unlikely story of BHIM, the upsetter of plans by Arundhati Ramanathan (25 January 2017)

- NPCI resurrects its own UPI payments app dreams with Bhim by Arundhati Ramanathan (19 March 2026)

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This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.

If you liked this episode, share it with your friends, family and colleagues. And if you have thoughts on the discussion, write to us at [email protected].

"This is our Frankenstein. We made it. And now it's left the room." 

A cricketer said this about the IPL and our guest, Sharda Ugra, India's most respected cricket journalist with thirty years of covering the game, brought it to our studio. And honestly, we couldn't think of a better way to open this episode.

Last week, RCB and Rajasthan Royals sold for nearly $3 billion combined. With private equity in the building, it looks like the IPL has never looked bigger, richer or more untouchable. But something is off.

The broadcaster paid $6 billion for rights and is bleeding $2 billion. On the other hand, the media rights that fund 80% of every franchise's revenue are projected to flatline and the most perfect advertiser IPL ever had, real money gaming, just got banned.

So we did what any sensible person would do and called Sharda.

In what was honestly one of the most electric studio sessions we've had on Two by Two, Sharda brought 18 years of institutional memory while Praveen Gopal Krishnan brought the business lens and Rahel Philipose asked every question you'd want to ask if you had Sharda across from you for 90 minutes.

The IPL cannot fail. But can it figure out how to succeed? That's what this episode is really about.

Read more:

- Sharda's 2008 India Today piece titled 'Changing the rules'.

- Sumit Chakraborty's piece in The Ken titled 'What private equity sees in IPL...'.
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This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.

If you liked this episode, share it with your friends, family and colleagues. And if you have thoughts on the discussion, write to us at [email protected].

Last week, Rapido launched Ownly, its zero commission food delivery app and went straight for Swiggy and Zomato's throat.

This is the same company that dismantled the Uber-Ola duopoly with just a simpler model, cheaper rides, and a very different idea of what India actually needs.

Their weapon this time is zero commission. They're betting on restaurants that are fed up, customers who want cheaper food, and a rider fleet that's already in place.

So we got Kunal Khattar, the investor who backed Rapido from day one and made 88x on that bet to break down whether lightning can strike twice. We also have Gautam Balijepalli, who runs one of the largest cloud kitchen operations in India and tells us what it looks like from the restaurant side.

Along with our guests, Rahel Philipose and Praveen Gopal Krishnan discuss, can Rapido steal a bite from Swiggy and Zomato? Or is food delivery a completely different beast?
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This episode of Two by Two was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mix and mastered by Rajiv CN.

If you liked this episode, please share it with your friends and family who would be interested in listening to the episode. And if you have more thoughts on the discussion, we’d love to hear your arguments as well. You can write to us at [email protected].