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Future of Work Shaped by AI and AutomationQuantum Computing Breakthroughs Bring Commercial Use CloserExplaining The 15-Minute Saree: Quick Commerce's Unlikely Fashion HeroGreen Hydrogen Gold Rush: How Reliance and ReNew Are Betting $30 Billion on India's Next Energy ExportThe Fastest $100M in SaaS HistorySilicon Sovereignty: How India's First Chip Fab Is Rewriting Global Supply Chains (And Breaking Taiwan's Monopoly)Future of Work Shaped by AI and AutomationQuantum Computing Breakthroughs Bring Commercial Use CloserExplaining The 15-Minute Saree: Quick Commerce's Unlikely Fashion HeroGreen Hydrogen Gold Rush: How Reliance and ReNew Are Betting $30 Billion on India's Next Energy ExportThe Fastest $100M in SaaS HistorySilicon Sovereignty: How India's First Chip Fab Is Rewriting Global Supply Chains (And Breaking Taiwan's Monopoly)

Beyond Chips: How ₹2,000 Crore in Fresh Deep Tech Funds Is Betting on India's Quantum, Semicon and Space Future

Future Tech

Beyond Chips: How ₹2,000 Crore in Fresh Deep Tech Funds Is Betting on India's Quantum, Semicon and Space Future

In February 2026, IIT-Madras launched a ₹600 crore deep tech venture capital fund with Unicorn India Ventures — designed to back IP‑led startups in semiconductors, quantum computing, robotics, spacetech and defencetech. Weeks later, Celesta Capital announced plans for a ₹2,000 crore India‑focused deep tech fund. Chiratae Ventures committed $10 million for five deep tech startups through its Sonic DeepTech program. Under the National Quantum Mission, the government is actively supporting quantum startups in computing, communication, sensing and materials. The patient capital is flowing. The revolution is deep.

Revathy Pandian

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Future Tech

Stripe and PayPal Just Bet on India's Xflow. Here's Why Cross‑Border B2B Payments Is the Next $70 Billion Frontier

Stripe and PayPal do not co‑invest. The two global payments titans have spent two decades competing for merchants, consumers and mindshare. They rarely appear on the same term sheet. In February 2026, they did. Bengaluru‑based Xflow announced a $16.6 million Series A round led by General Catalyst, with participation from existing investors Square Peg, Stripe, Lightspeed, Moore Capital — and PayPal Ventures joining as a new investor. The all‑equity round valued the startup at $85 million post‑investment, bringing its total funding to more than $32 million. With this, Xflow became the first Indian fintech backed by both Stripe and PayPal Ventures — the world's two largest payments infrastructure platforms. Why did two bitter rivals write cheques to the same startup? Because cross‑border B2B payments are a $59 trillion global market that remains stuck in the era of fax machines and manual bank transfers. And India, with its booming exports, SaaS economy and global capability centres (GCCs), is ground zero for fixing it.

06 Jun 2026

Future Tech

From Hyderabad to Orbit: How Skyroot Became India's First Spacetech Unicorn — And Why $44 Billion Is Just Liftoff

Excerpt: In May 2026, Hyderabad‑based Skyroot Aerospace crossed the billion‑dollar mark after locking in $60 million in fresh funding led by Sherpalo Ventures and GIC. The startup, preparing for the maiden launch of its Vikram‑1 orbital rocket, became India's first space‑tech unicorn — but it will not be the last. With India's space economy estimated at $8.4 billion and projected to grow to $44 billion by 2033, a new space race is underway.

05 Jun 2026

Future Tech

Explaining The 15-Minute Saree: Quick Commerce's Unlikely Fashion Hero

On a Friday evening in Delhi, a groom's sister scrambled for a last-minute wedding saree—her order arrived in 14 minutes. That impulsive tap now fuels India's fastest-growing fashion segment. With 8-10% of all quick-commerce orders now being apparel, TIGI chronicles how sarees, kurtis, and blouses became the unexpected heroes of India's instant delivery obsession.

03 Jun 2026

Future Tech

The UPI Express: How India’s Payment Rail Became Faster Than Visa (And What America Can Learn)

This month in Paris, a tourist from Mumbai paid for a croissant by scanning a QR code with their phone—no chip, no signature, no foreign transaction fee. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, many Americans are still waiting for 3-5 business days for a check to clear. India’s UPI isn’t just a faster way to pay; it’s a public infrastructure revolution that has overtaken Visa in daily transactions. Here’s what the world can learn from the world’s most successful payment rail.

03 Jun 2026

Future Tech

The Agritech Unicorn Harvest: Four Indian Startups Just Crossed the Billion‑Dollar Mark—And Technology Is Finally Reaching the Farm

For decades, the Indian agricultural economy has been defined by a single, stubborn paradox. It employs more than 40 percent of the country's workforce, sustains the livelihoods of approximately 150 million households, and generates a gross value added of over ₹50 lakh crore annually. And yet, the technology that has transformed every other sector of the Indian economy—the digital platforms, the data analytics, the supply‑chain automation—has barely touched the farm. The farmer who buys inputs at the local mandi, who depends on the monsoon, who sells his harvest to a middleman at a price he cannot control, is participating in an economy that has remained largely unchanged for a century. The venture capitalists who poured billions into food‑delivery apps and quick‑commerce platforms showed almost no interest in the agricultural supply chain that fed those platforms. The agritech sector was treated as a niche—too small, too difficult, too dependent on the monsoon and the Minimum Support Price to be worth the attention of serious investors.

30 May 2026

Future Tech

The 30,000‑Drone Army: After Years of Regulatory Paralysis, Delivery Drones Are Finally Taking Over Indian Skies—And the Logistics Industry Will Never Be the Same

In the summer of 2022, a hexacopter carrying a small package of medicines lifted off from a government hospital in the Vikarabad district of Telangana and flew approximately 15 kilometres to a primary health centre in a remote village that was inaccessible by road during the monsoon. The flight, conducted under a special exemption from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, was a proof‑of‑concept: a demonstration that an unmanned aerial vehicle could deliver essential medical supplies to a population that was cut off from the conventional logistics network. The drone was operated by a Bengaluru‑based startup called Skye Air Mobility. The flight took 18 minutes. The same delivery by road would have taken four hours. The proof of concept was, by any measure, a success. And then, for three years, nothing happened. The regulatory framework that would allow such flights to scale did not exist. The startups that had developed the technology waited, their drones grounded, their investors impatient, their potential customers—the hospitals, the e‑commerce platforms, the food‑delivery companies—frustrated by the gap between what was technically possible and what was legally permissible.

30 May 2026

Future Tech

The ₹300 Crore Bonfire: How a Once‑Promising Bollywood Mini‑Studio Burned Through a Fortune in 18 Months—And What Its Collapse Reveals About the Industry's Broken Economics

The studio had been founded by a successful talent manager who had spent two decades building relationships with the biggest stars in Bollywood, and who had convinced a consortium of high‑net‑worth investors—industrialists, real‑estate developers, a Gulf‑based family office—to back his vision of a new kind of film company: lean, talent‑first, data‑driven, built for the streaming era. The initial capital commitment was ₹300 crore. The slate, announced at a glamorous launch event at a five‑star hotel, included six films—a mix of star‑driven event movies, mid‑budget content‑driven dramas, and a web series for a major streaming platform. The talent manager, now the studio's CEO, told the assembled journalists that his company would be profitable within two years and would challenge the dominance of the legacy studios that had, in his view, grown complacent and inefficient.

30 May 2026

Future Tech

The Pan‑Indian Dubbing Economy: How a ₹3 Crore Malayalam Film Earned ₹120 Crore in Hindi—And Why Every Studio Is Now Building a Dubbing Division

In the winter of 2025, a Malayalam‑language survival thriller called Manjummel Boys was released in Kerala to strong reviews and a respectable ₹35 crore theatrical run. The film—about a group of friends trapped in a cave—was culturally specific, linguistically rooted, and designed primarily for a Malayalam‑speaking audience. Its producers had budgeted approximately ₹3 crore for the Hindi dubbed version, which they assumed would generate modest returns on the satellite and streaming after‑markets. They were wrong. The Hindi dubbed version, released simultaneously with the original, earned ₹120 crore at the North Indian box office—nearly four times the film’s domestic Malayalam gross. The dubbed version accounted for 63 percent of the film’s total all‑India revenue. The producers, who had treated the Hindi dub as an afterthought, are now building an in‑house dubbing division. The Malayalam film that was never supposed to travel has become the most profitable dubbed release in Indian cinema history—and the industry is scrambling to replicate its success.

30 May 2026

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