Results (751 found)

StartupsMay 30, 2026

The Great Fintech Consolidation: Three M&A Deals in One Week—The Era of 100 Indian Fintech Unicorns Is Over. The Era of 20 Giants Has Begun.

Sometime in the third week of May 2026, three deals were signed in three different boardrooms that, taken together, will reshape the Indian financial‑technology landscape more profoundly than any single regulatory intervention or market shift of the past decade. On Monday, the digital‑lending platform KreditBee was acquired by a consortium led by Axis Bank and the private‑equity firm ChrysCapital for approximately $1.4 billion. On Wednesday, the insurtech startup Policybazaar, which had been publicly listed since 2021, announced a merger with its long‑time rival Coverfox, creating the largest digital‑insurance distribution platform in India with a combined valuation of approximately $3.8 billion. On Friday, the wealth‑management platform Scripbox was acquired by the mutual‑fund giant HDFC Asset Management for approximately $420 million, bringing the startup's decade‑long independent journey to an end.

MagazineMay 30, 2026

The Nostalgia Goldmine: How a 1995 Salman Khan Film Just Earned ₹85 Crore in a Re‑Release—And Why Old Blockbusters Are Suddenly Out‑Earning New Ones

On a Friday evening three weeks ago, a 31‑year‑old film opened in 1,200 theatres across India. It had no marketing campaign beyond a single Instagram post from its lead actor. It had no new visual effects, no remastered soundtrack, no added scenes. It was the same film that had released in 1995—the same grainy print, the same dated special effects, the same dialogue that a generation of Indians had memorised on VHS tapes and DVD players. The film was Karan Arjun. By Sunday night, it had earned ₹28 crore net at the domestic box office—a figure that exceeded the opening‑weekend collections of all but two new Hindi releases that month. By the end of its second week, it had crossed ₹85 crore, and the trade analysts who had once dismissed the re‑release trend as a pandemic‑era curiosity were scrambling to revise their models.

TechMay 30, 2026

The ₹5,000 Crore Battery Swap: How Sun Mobility Built a 600‑Station Network, Changed the Way India Charges Its EVs—and Became a Unicorn While Nobody Was Looking

In the autumn of 2022, a tiny electric three‑wheeler pulled into a brightly coloured station on the outskirts of Bengaluru, its battery pack nearly depleted after a morning of ferrying passengers. The driver, who had been operating an electric auto‑rickshaw for approximately six months, did not plug the vehicle into a charger and wait. He removed the drained battery, lifted a fully charged replacement from a locker, slid it into the vehicle, and was back on the road in under two minutes. The station was operated by Sun Mobility, a Bengaluru‑based startup that had been founded five years earlier by Chetan Maini—the man who had built India's first electric car, the Reva—and Uday Khemka, a vice‑chairman of the SUN Group. The company's proposition was simple: electric‑vehicle batteries should be swapped, not charged. The swap should take less time than filling a tank of petrol. And the battery should be owned by the company, not by the driver, reducing the upfront cost of the vehicle and eliminating the single largest barrier to EV adoption in India.

TechMay 30, 2026

The Machines Are Taking the Background: Bollywood's First AI‑Generated Extras Spark a Union Crisis That Could Reshape Film Production Forever

On a Monday morning three weeks ago, a junior artist named Rajesh Kumar arrived at a film set in Film City for a day's work as a background extra. He was one of 200 extras hired for a crowd sequence in a major Bollywood production. When he reached the holding area, he found 50 of his colleagues—not the 200 he had expected. The remaining 150 faces that would populate the crowd had been generated by an AI model, trained on a library of licensed images, and composited into the scene in post‑production. The extras who had been hired were not there to be filmed. They were there to provide motion‑capture data—to walk, to gesture, to react—so that the AI could map their movements onto the generated faces. The film's budget for background extras had been reduced by 75 percent.

StartupsMay 30, 2026

The 547‑Million‑Subscriber Monopoly: One Year After the JioHotstar Merger, the Numbers Are In—and Netflix and Amazon Should Be Terrified

On May 29, 2025, the merger of Jio Cinema and Disney+ Hotstar created the largest streaming platform in the history of Indian media. A year later, the numbers are in, and they are staggering: 547 million monthly active users—more than Netflix and Amazon Prime Video combined, globally. A content budget of ₹38,000 crore, larger than the entire production spend of the Indian film industry. An IPL digital‑rights deal worth ₹23,758 crore that was once ridiculed as economically irrational and is now being studied as a masterstroke of ecosystem strategy. And a market share that has left Netflix—which has struggled to cross 10 million subscribers in India—and Amazon—which has stopped reporting its India numbers entirely—scrambling to find a response.

TechMay 30, 2026

The Girl Who Doesn't Exist: How Kyra—and a Dozen Other AI‑Generated Avatars—Are Quietly Stealing Brand Deals from Real Influencers, and Why Marketers Prefer the Fake Ones

Kyra is 22 years old. She has 2.7 million followers on Instagram, a further 1.2 million on YouTube, and an engagement rate that consistently outperforms her human peers by a factor of three. She posts from a sun‑drenched apartment in Bandra that does not exist, wears clothes from a walk‑in wardrobe that was never constructed, and shares life updates—breakups, travels, new hobbies—that never happened. In February 2026, she signed an exclusive brand‑ambassador deal with a major Indian skincare company for ₹1.2 crore. The company’s marketing head, when asked whether it mattered that Kyra is entirely computer‑generated, replied with a question of his own: “She’s never late to a shoot, never gets into a controversy, and her engagement rate is triple our last human ambassador’s. Why would we go back?”

MagazineMay 29, 2026

The Star Wars of North Madras

Sometime in the spring of 2025, a conversation took place in a production office on the outskirts of Chennai that, in retrospect, will be remembered as the moment the Tamil film industry’s most ambitious intellectual‑property project pivoted from a trilogy into a cinematic universe. The conversation was between Vetrimaaran, the director who had been developing the Vada Chennai saga for more than a decade, and the leadership of DhanuProductions, the studio that owned the franchise. The subject was the casting of a single role—the antagonist who would drive the second and third instalments of the trilogy, the rival gang leader whose decades‑long conflict with Dhanush’s Anbu would be the engine of the franchise’s narrative arc. The name they discussed, according to two people familiar with the meeting, was Silambarasan T. R.—Simbu, the actor whose career had been transformed by the success of Maanaadu (2021) and Vendhu Thanindhathu Kaadu (2022), and whose star power, combined with Dhanush’s, would create a two‑hero dynamic that the Tamil film industry had not seen since the era of Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan.

MagazineMay 29, 2026

The ₹500 Crore Wedding: How Bollywood's Marriage Industrial Complex Became India's Most Lucrative Unregulated Economy

On a December evening in 2025, a Bollywood actor who had appeared in two moderately successful films that year married his longtime partner at a heritage palace in Rajasthan. The wedding was attended by approximately 400 guests, lasted three days, and featured performances by two of the most famous playback singers in the country. The bride's lehenga, designed by a leading couturier, cost approximately ₹75 lakh. The groom's sherwani, by a different designer, cost ₹35 lakh. The floral arrangements, imported from the Netherlands and Thailand, cost ₹2 crore. The catering, by a celebrity chef, cost ₹3 crore.

MagazineMay 29, 2026

The 60‑Second Empire: How India's Microdrama Gold Rush Is Creating a New Generation of Celebrity Entrepreneurs—And Reshaping the Economics of Entertainment Itself

Sometime in the spring of 2025, a 23‑year‑old from Indore with no film training, no industry connections, and no budget beyond a smartphone and a ring light uploaded a 90‑second video to a platform called Jio Tadka. The video—a melodramatic confrontation between a young woman and her mother‑in‑law, performed in Hindi with a plot twist that would make a television writer blush—was watched 4.7 million times in its first 48 hours. The platform paid her ₹18,000 for the performance, a fraction of what a single day's shooting on a television serial would earn. She uploaded another video the following day. And the day after that. Within six months, she was earning ₹3 lakh a month, supporting her entire family, and fielding calls from talent agencies that had once ignored her existence.

MagazineMay 29, 2026

The Sneaker War: How Hrithik Roshan, Tiger Shroff, and Virat Kohli Turned Indian Athleisure Into a ₹500 Crore Battleground—And Why the Real Winner Isn't a Bollywood Star

In 2013, a Bollywood star launched an athleisure brand with a simple proposition: Indian men who went to the gym deserved clothes that looked as good as they felt. The star was Hrithik Roshan. The brand was HRX. And the launch, which consisted of a modest collection of T‑shirts, track pants, and training shoes sold through a single e‑commerce partnership, was so low‑key that most of the fashion industry barely noticed it. Thirteen years later, HRX is a ₹300 crore brand sold through more than 200 exclusive outlets and every major e‑commerce platform in the country. It has expanded into footwear, accessories, and a growing range of fitness equipment. It has spawned a half‑dozen competitors, each launched by a celebrity who saw what Hrithik had built and decided they wanted a piece of it. And it has become the anchor of a celebrity‑athleisure market that is now conservatively estimated at over ₹500 crore—a market that barely existed a decade ago, and that is now one of the most competitive segments in the Indian consumer economy.