The latest trending stories from the Startups desk.
The global cryptocurrency market is witnessing another major rally as institutional investors pour billions into digital assets, signaling a powerful shift in how cryptocurrencies are viewed within traditional finance.
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.
Kusha Kapila launched her shapewear brand Underneat in April 2025. Within eight months, it clocked ₹150 crore in annual recurring revenue, turned EBITDA positive, and raised $6 million in pre‑Series A funding. She is not alone. From Rhea Chakraborty building a ₹40 crore clothing empire to Parul Gulati expanding from hair extensions to a Goa hostel, Indian content creators are leading a quiet D2C revolution. This article tracks how influencers are using their parasocial capital to build real businesses, the economics of creator-led brands, and why venture capitalists are now hunting for creators, not just founders.
The video begins the same way every day. A small boy, barely five years old, stands before a phone camera in a modest kitchen in Sector 66A. Behind him, his mother gestures silently toward a pan of vegetables. The boy watches her hands, then turns to the camera with the steady confidence of a child who has been doing this his entire life. "Yeh toh roti hai," he says, pointing. "Ye toh aloo-gobhi hai." His father stands beside him, smiling, as the boy continues through the day's menu: dal, chole, rice, sometimes poori, sometimes a sweet. The video is simple. The boy is Sukhmehar Singh. And he is the voice of his parents, Vanshpreet Singh and Anmol Kaur, both deaf and mute since birth, who run a vegetarian tiffin service called Quietly Delicious that has captured the hearts of thousands.
Sometime in the past week, in a wood-panelled conference room in Oslo, a young engineer from Kochi stood before a gathering of Norwegian maritime executives and Indian government officials and described a machine that most of the people in the room had never seen. The machine was an underwater remotely operated vehicle—a robot designed to descend into the darkness of harbours, dams, and offshore platforms, where human divers cannot go, and inspect the critical infrastructure that the global economy depends on but almost never sees. It could operate at depths that would crush a diver. It could navigate in zero-visibility conditions using sonar and AI-powered computer vision. It could relay high-definition video, sonar imagery, and structural diagnostics to a control station on the surface. And it had been designed, built, and tested not in Norway—the world leader in subsea engineering—but in Kerala, at a startup called EyeROV Technologies, founded by alumni of IIT Madras and backed by the Kerala Startup Mission.
Sometime in the next several weeks, a Swedish private equity firm with €269 billion in assets will begin raising a fund that represents something Europe has never attempted before: a concerted, state-backed effort to stop the continent's most valuable technology companies from being systematically acquired by American and Chinese buyers before they reach scale. The Scaleup Europe Fund, a €5 billion vehicle that will target late-stage companies in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, space technology, clean energy, and biotechnology, is the most ambitious government intervention in European venture capital since the creation of the European Investment Fund in 1994. It is also an admission of failure.
When Fryderyk Wiatrowski and Peter Albert met inside Meta's AI division, they had no intention of starting a company. They were engineers, not entrepreneurs. Their evenings were spent tinkering — building small AI agents that could handle the repetitive parts of knowledge work that nobody enjoys. Writing reports. Pulling data from scattered systems. Setting up dashboards. The kind of tasks that fill calendars and drain energy without producing anything anyone would call meaningful.
Some numbers are too large to feel. The human mind can grasp a hundred, a thousand, perhaps a million with effort. Beyond that, figures blur into abstraction. So when the four largest technology companies on Earth — Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta — disclose, in a single earnings week in late April, that their combined capital expenditures will reach approximately $725 billion in 2026, the number floats past comprehension. It is roughly the GDP of Switzerland and Sweden combined. It represents a 77 percent increase over last year's record $410 billion. It is, by any historical measure, the largest concentrated infrastructure buildout in the history of private industry — larger than the railroad boom, larger than the interstate highway system, larger than the original buildout of the internet itself in real terms.
On May 30, 2024, a rocket lifted off from India's Satish Dhawan Space Centre that did not look like any rocket India had launched before. It was just 6.2 meters tall — modest by orbital standards, almost delicate — and it rode a column of flame produced by an engine that had been printed in a single piece. Not assembled from hundreds of components. Not welded, bolted, or fastened. Printed. In Inconel alloy. In roughly 72 hours.