Daybreak

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• $15 billion in security deposits: India's tenants are their landlords' cheapest lenders 17.07.2026 11Min.

  Tenants across India's six biggest metros have handed landlords Rs 1.26 trillion in security deposits, a new NoBroker study estimates. Around $15 billion of tenant money, refundable in name, sits in landlords' accounts earning interest for people it does not belong to. In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma ask what a deposit actually costs a renter, and arrives at a number: nearly a month's rent, every year. The same tenant who pays 2 months' deposit in Mumbai is asked for 10 in Bengaluru, and in Delhi NCR, about 4 in 10 never got their full deposit back. Renting was meant to be a phase. But with home ownership drifting out of reach, tenants may be extending this loan for decades.Tune in.Recommendations:It sucks to be a tenant in Bengaluru right now*Take The Ken's audit hereDaybreak 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.
• Cred’s first profitable quarter comes with a trade-off. No, not Kunal Shah 16.07.2026 10Min.

  Cred just reported its first profitable quarter. Meta invested 8,500 crore rupees. And Kunal Shah walked out the door.Eight years of questions about Cred's business model ended the moment it finally had answers. The design-first, exclusivity-obsessed fintech that rewarded creditworthy Indians with gold credit cards now makes most of its money from lending — the same way every other UPI app does.Shah left for WhatsApp. Meta needed someone who could monetise a billion Indian users without making regulators nervous. What that means for both companies is the more interesting question.Scripted by Snigdha Sharma based on the report by Suprita Anupam.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.
• Indian broadcasters are pouring money into reality TV. Netflix's collapsing second seasons show why 15.07.2026 15Min.

  Netflix built its empire on one idea: watch what you want, when you want, all at once. Now it's losing viewers to YouTube, struggling to bring audiences back for season two, and internally discussing always-on live channels and ad bundles you can't skip.Which is to say: it's considering becoming cable TV.The irony is that while Netflix is scrambling for answers in the US, India may already have one. A reality show that airs almost every night at 8pm just cracked Netflix's global top 10. The format that streaming was supposed to kill is doing just fine. And Netflix is finally realising why.Tune in.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.
• Adani made his billions from ports. His new bet is far from the shore 14.07.2026 9Min.

  In October last year, a ship owned by Adani Ports slowed to less than one knot near Malta. It held that position for over seven days, directly above the cables linking Malta to Sicily. It was no accident. India's largest private port operator has quietly built a fleet of more than a hundred vessels across 12 countries. Their job is servicing the world's offshore energy infrastructure. The business grew 134% in a single year. Ports made Adani rich. But there are only so many ports you can build. What the conglomerate does next may depend on waters far from any dock. Tune in.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.
• Inside India’s 90-day countdown for CBSE schools to embrace AI 13.07.2026 11Min.

  In April, India made AI education mandatory across 28,000 CBSE schools, giving them 90 days to comply. Most had already finalised their academic calendars for the year.Some schools were ready. Others scrambled. A few found that the harder problem wasn't the teachers — it was the students. At one Hyderabad school already using an AI learning tool, kids were From 2029, AI becomes a compulsory board exam subject and the government is betting that deadline will change everything.Tune in.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.
• Miss a smartphone EMI, and your lender can now wirelessly strip the ‘smart’ out of it 10.07.2026 24Min.

  Naresh drives for Rapido. When his phone died, so did his income — for seven days, until he could borrow enough to replace it.Until 2024, India's biggest consumer lenders had turned that exact vulnerability into a recovery tool. Miss an EMI, lose your phone. It worked so well that smartphone lending grew from 1% to nearly 40% of consumer borrowing in three years. Then the RBI banned it. Lending collapsed by 80%. Delinquencies rose. Rejection rates hit 50%.Now the tool is coming back. This time with guardrails. The question is whether they're enough.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.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.
• For India's e-rickshaws, price decides what's safe and virality decides if anyone cares 09.07.2026 11Min.

  Last week, the government ordered Apple and Google to pull at least three battery management system or BMS apps that were being used to switch off e-rickshaws mid-road. If you've been on Instagram, you've seen the videos. A prankster opens the app, taps a switch, and a passing e-rickshaw just dies.It works because the cheap lithium batteries these vehicles run on often ship from China with their Bluetooth wide open, no password at all. The flaw was documented publicly years ago and nothing happened until it went viral. The batteries are still exposed. In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma asks what really governs safety in India's informal economy.Tune in.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.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.
• WhatsApp wants businesses to have a username. It hasn't said who's protected from fakes 08.07.2026 16Min.

  WhatsApp just announced usernames for Indian users. Two days later, the Indian government told it to stop.The privacy case for usernames is real — phone numbers are permanent, linked to everything, and once shared, impossible to take back. But India already has 43,000 WhatsApp-related cybercrimes in a single quarter. And when TechCrunch tested the feature, handles like "rbi_verify," "indiamodi," and "ambanijio" were still available for anyone who gets there first.WhatsApp has until tomorrow to explain itself to MeitY. And even if the deadline keeps getting extended, the problem isn't going away.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.
• Optimist wants to reinvent the AC. Daikin and LG don’t need to 07.07.2026 10Min.

  Your AC is running longer this year and the machines responsible may have been designed for a different climate entirely. Optimist, a two-year-old Gurugram startup, has built what it says is India's most energy-efficient residential AC. It is recalibrated for Indian humidity, sourced almost entirely from local suppliers, and engineered with components the industry has long considered too expensive to bother with. But 70% of AC sales in India happen offline, shelf space belongs to brands with decades of dealer relationships, and Optimist is nowhere on the floor yet. How long can a better product afford to wait? 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 world's largest advertising agency made $20 billion last year. You've probably never heard of Accenture Song 06.07.2026 18Min.

  In May, L'Oréal ended a 16-year agency relationship. The reason? Simply that a competitor was better prepared with better data and AI capabilities.This incident illustrates the shift that's happening in advertising right now. The agencies that bet on technology early are pulling ahead. The ones that are built on relationships are finding out how quickly those erode.Sitting unnoticed at the top of this reshuffled industry is Accenture Song. It's the world's largest advertising agency that doesn't really call itself one. It made 20 billion dollars last year. And it's barely visible in India. And that lack of visibility? That's by design.Tune in.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.
• Daybreak Friday: UPI blinks, Google faces a $4.7B fine, LIC to shoulder India's oil bill, and more 03.07.2026 10Min.

  When a bill arrives, what do you pay it with? That's the question running underneath this week's Daybreak roundup. The government of India is answering it with slices of LIC and other PSUs, because the American war in Iran has kept oil expensive and the budget is straining. OYO's parent is answering it with money from public investors, most of which will go straight to its lenders. Google spent eight years arguing it shouldn't have to answer at all, until Europe's top court settled the matter this week. And then there's UPI, which has never sent anyone a bill in its life. Its June numbers just hinted at why that might not last forever.Tune in.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.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.
• Karnataka let gig workers ask their apps a question. Swiggy, Zomato took the whole law to court 02.07.2026 10Min.

  Some of India's biggest consumer platforms, Swiggy, Zomato's parent Eternal, Zepto, Urban Company, and Meesho's logistics arm Valmo, have asked the Karnataka High Court to strike down the state's gig worker welfare law entirely.Their central argument is about money, a welfare fee they say duplicates a national contribution already required under the Code on Social Security. But the petition goes further, also targeting a clause that lets workers ask platforms how their pay and ratings get decided.A welfare fee is due July 5 regardless of how the case unfolds, and other states building similar laws are watching closely to see what survives. The platforms call the clause a threat to trade secrets. The law calls it a question a worker is allowed to ask. Which one is it?Tune in.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.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.
• AI is eating your phone's memory and hiking up prices. No, festive sales can't save you either 01.07.2026 15Min.

  Before every August, Indians who've been nursing a cracked screen or a lagging phone make the same calculation: wait for the festive season. The discounts will come. After all, they always do.This year, they might not.AI data centres are consuming more than 70% of high-end memory chip production. The same chips that go into your phone. Apple has already raised Mac and iPad prices. Budget Android phones in India are up 30 to 40% since January. And the shortage isn't expected to ease until 2027.Tune in.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.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 royal family’s billion-dollar bet on Indian startups—without a winner 30.06.2026 9Min.

  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.Tune in.*This episode was originally published on 24th April 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.
• How many ‘bad’ schools make a good private equity investment? 29.06.2026 13Min.

  K12 Techno Services has a very specific type of school it likes to find. They're old, debt-ridden, maybe run by an ageing owner with no succession plan. It moves in, rebrands it Orchids, adds a basketball court, and locks the deal in for 50 years. Ownership never changes hands. The management, though, does.The model is built for patience. It takes 12 years for a school to turn a profit. But K12's cap table is full of private equity firms running on 10-year fund cycles, and they need a way out.So what happens when a business built for the long game has to keep moving fast?Tune in.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.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 new class of gig-workers in India are teaching robots to do the dishes 26.06.2026 28Min.

  Take the Daybreak listener survey here.Meet Ranjan. He works at Deloitte by day and spends his evenings strapping a camera to his forehead, recording himself doing household chores by evening. He's a physical AI trainer, a part of a growing gig economy built around creating training data to teach humanoid robots human behaviour.Reporter Sakshi Sadashiv joins host Rachel Varghese to break down how this supply chain works: from gig workers in Delhi, to the firms like Tesla and Nvidia that eventually buy their footage from the companies that vet, annotate and package it for sale. And why this feels like a pattern India has been in before.*Read Sakshi's original story here.
• Why Instagram wants to be on your TV now 25.06.2026 11Min.

  This week, Instagram expanded its TV app to Samsung Smart TVs, joining Amazon Fire and Google TV, and announced it is testing episodic series and live creator experiences for the big screen. The announcement is the latest move in an eight-year pattern — a platform that keeps giving creators more time, more formats, and now a larger screen. Instagram tried long-form video once before. It called it IGTV, and shut it down three years later.So if short-form video was supposed to be the future, why does Instagram keep making it longer?Tune in. 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 IT sector bet its future on AI access it doesn't actually control 24.06.2026 13Min.

  On June 11th, TCS announced an exclusive partnership with Anthropic — 50,000 employees trained on Claude, early access to new models, a dedicated business unit. The next day, a US export control order cut off access to Anthropic's most advanced models for users worldwide, including the very partner that had just signed up for early access.India's IT sector has spent years building its AI pivot on the assumption that access to frontier models would stay open. That assumption just cracked. And while India accelerates its own sovereign AI mission, analysts say that alone won't be enough to fix what just happened.So what would?Tune in.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.
• Google and Perplexity paid Jio and Airtel a fortune to reach Indian users. OpenAI paid nobody 23.06.2026 9Min.

  India's telcos looked like the obvious gateway for AI companies chasing scale. With nearly 900 million subscribers between them, Jio and Airtel could put an AI product in front of more users faster than almost any other distribution channel in the world. So Google paid Jio and Perplexity paid Airtel. Both spent tens of thousands of rupees per user to make it work. One partnership is still standing but the other collapsed before its time was up. And OpenAI — the company with the largest AI user base in India — skipped the telco route entirely. What does OpenAI know about this model that the others are still learning?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.
• Why Mamaearth's 2022 bet on a little-known drone startup is paying off in unexpected places and for unexpected players 22.06.2026 18Min.

  In 2022, Mamaearth's founder made two unusual logistics bets: one on a shipping aggregator and one on a small Delhi drone startup nobody had heard of. Now, four years later, those bets have converged into one of India's fastest-growing logistics categories.Drones are now flying blood samples to hospital labs in 10 minutes instead of four hours. They're cutting delivery costs for D2C brands trying to escape marketplace commissions. They're even moving parcels between dark stores for Zepto.But the economics only work in certain places. And India's regulations weren't built with any of this in mind.Tune in.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.