Business stories
Deals, strategy and the companies behind the headlines
Business
Unacademy sold for 94% less than what it was once worth. Its CEO said so himself
India's edtech firm Unacademy has officially been acquired by rival upGrad in an all-stock deal closing at just over $200 million (₹19.55 billion), roughly 94% below Unacademy's peak private valuation of $3.44 billion in 2021. Unacademy had raised nearly $880 million across 13 funding rounds from SoftBank, Tiger Global, and General Atlantic. Co-founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal didn't dress it up: "We raised at a peak, but sold at a fraction of that." No layoffs are planned for Unacademy's roughly 1,000 employees. The deal closes a five-year arc for one of India's most-funded startups, and it began with the opposite problem entirely.
3 September 2026 · 3 min read
Business
Sachin Bansal ran his fintech alone for eight years before taking anyone's money
Navi, the Bengaluru fintech founded by Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal, raised $100 million from Prosus at a roughly $1.3 billion valuation, its first institutional funding round in eight years of operation, TechCrunch reported on August 19, 2026. Bansal had personally bankrolled Navi since founding it in 2018. The company's UPI app processed 947 million transactions worth about ₹483 billion (~$5.05 billion) in July 2026 alone, and its lending arm carries roughly ₹130 billion (~$1.4 billion) in assets. Navi is now preparing an IPO targeting about $2 billion, after abandoning an earlier attempt in 2023.
29 August 2026 · 3 min read
Business
Walmart beat every number that matters and still had its worst day in four years
On August 20, 2026, Walmart's stock fell about 9%, its worst single-day drop in more than four years, despite beating earnings estimates with adjusted profit of $0.81 a share on revenue of $187.94 billion, up 6% year over year. The reason: US comparable sales grew just 2.6%, the weakest pace since 2020, as CEO John Furner admitted "customers tell us they're still feeling some pressure." Part of the profit beat came from a one-time $2.9 billion tariff refund. Underneath a good quarter sat a warning about the American shopper that the headline numbers almost hid.
25 August 2026 · 4 min read
Business
A 27-year-old high school dropout just raised $1 billion to mass-produce nuclear reactors for AI
Valar Atomics, a three-year-old nuclear startup founded by 27-year-old Isaiah Taylor, closed a $1 billion Series B led by Sequoia Capital in early August 2026, plus a $200 million credit facility, pushing its total announced financing past $1.2 billion. The company builds small, factory-made, helium-cooled reactors designed to run around the clock, and has already demonstrated one powering an Nvidia Blackwell AI system. The bet is simple: AI data centers are expected to double their roughly 40 gigawatts of electricity use by 2030, and the power grid isn't close to ready. Taylor dropped out of high school at 16.
23 August 2026 · 3 min read
Business
OpenAI burning $14 billion a year is racing to go public before 'Anthropic' goes first
OpenAI is preparing to list on public markets at a valuation above $1 trillion, possibly as early as this fall, despite projecting a loss of roughly $14 billion for 2026. Its rival Anthropic just posted its first positive operating income and is reportedly targeting an IPO valuation of $2 trillion or more. A year ago, Anthropic's revenue run rate was a fraction of OpenAI's. Now Anthropic's annualized revenue has hit $65 billion, and the reason one company is profitable while the other burns billions has almost nothing to do with which AI is smarter.
19 August 2026 · 4 min read
Business
A startup worth $1.3 billion in May is worth over $7 billion in August, and Stripe is buying it
Stripe has agreed to buy OpenRouter, a startup that lets companies route AI requests across more than 400 different models, for over $7 billion, Bloomberg reported on August 16, 2026. OpenRouter raised a $113 million round in May 2026 at a $1.3 billion valuation. Three months later, Stripe's reported price is more than five times that. The startup says it has 8 million global users. Its own CEO, Alex Atallah, once described OpenRouter as "the equivalent of Stripe for AI." Now the actual Stripe is simply buying that comparison outright.
18 August 2026 · 3 min read
Business
Wispr just raised $280 million selling something your phone already does for free
On August 17, 2026, Wispr announced a $280 million Series B at $2 billion valuation, led by Menlo Ventures, taking its total raised to $361 million. Its product, Flow, is a dictation app. Your phone already has one, built in, free. Wispr's own founder, Tanay Kothari, describes the company's first three years as building "a brain-computer interface our own team didn't want to use." The thing that survived that failure was not the hardware. It was the unglamorous software layer that cleaned up the output, and it is now worth $2 billion. The number Wispr actually optimizes explains why.
18 August 2026 · 4 min read
Business
China is selling more cars abroad than ever while losing money on the ones it sells at home
Chinese automaker Chery exported 202,533 vehicles in July 2026 alone, the first time any Chinese carmaker has crossed 200,000 exports in a single month. Meanwhile, China's domestic car sales fell for a tenth consecutive month, down 21.1% year-on-year. The industry's average profit margin has collapsed to just 2.9% in early 2026, down from an already thin 4.1% in 2025. BYD's own filings show a 28.1% gross margin on cars sold overseas, versus just 17.2% at home. Chinese factories can now build 25 million vehicles a year, roughly equal to all projected global demand combined. The cars aren't better abroad. The math just works out differently.
13 August 2026 · 4 min read
Business
SpaceX made 92% more money this quarter and its stock crashed anyway
SpaceX reported its first earnings as a public company on August 4, 2026: revenue of $7.8 billion, up 92% year over year and well above the $6.8 billion analysts expected. Its stock fell more than 8% anyway, closing around $114.53, down 15% from its IPO price and 49% from its June 16 peak, erasing over $1 trillion in market value. The reason: quarterly capital spending hit $18.3 billion, roughly six times what it was a year ago, with $15.8 billion tied to Elon Musk's AI ambitions, and the AI unit alone lost $1.2 billion. A rocket company just got graded like an AI company, and it failed the test.
6 August 2026 · 4 min read
Business
Google just ran out of free cash for the first time in a decade, on purpose
Alphabet reported blowout Q2 2026 results on July 22, revenue up 24% to $119.8 billion and Google Cloud up 82% to $24.8 billion, yet its stock fell 7%. The reason: Alphabet raised its full year AI infrastructure spending guidance to $195 to $205 billion, up from $180 to $190 billion, and its free cash flow turned negative, -$5.9 billion, for the first time in roughly a decade. A company famous for generating cash is now spending faster than it earns, on a bet it insists is already paying off.
4 August 2026 · 4 min read
Business
Urban Company just chose to lose money on purpose. Investors are okay with this
Urban Company, India's listed home services marketplace, reported a consolidated net loss of Rs 92 crore for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, reversing a Rs 7 crore profit a year earlier, even as revenue grew 44% to Rs 528 crore. The entire swing traces back to InstaHelp, its 15 minute instant services vertical, which lost Rs 346 for every order it earned Rs 29 on. Strip that one bet out, and the core business was still solidly profitable. This wasn't a startup running out of runway. It was a profitable company choosing to bleed.
3 August 2026 · 4 min read
Business
Zepto's revenue doubled and its IPO valuation still got cut nearly in half
Zepto, India's quick-commerce delivery startup, is heading toward an August 2026 stock market listing at a valuation of roughly $3.5 to $4 billion, down from the $7 billion it commanded just nine months ago. That's despite revenue more than doubling to ₹22,624 crore in the year ending March 2026. The IPO's fresh-issue size is now being cut by 20%, to $650 to 700 million, a change big enough that India's securities regulator requires Zepto to refile its prospectus before it can even set a price.
30 July 2026 · 4 min read
Business
Flipkart announces it's plan to enter food delivery market
Flipkart Group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy confirmed that Flipkart will enter food delivery, piloting first in Bengaluru within weeks, built on the government-backed ONDC network so it can plug into an existing restaurant and logistics network rather than build one from scratch. Flipkart hasn't delivered a single order yet. Its rivals' stocks already have moved. Swiggy shares fell by 7% and Zomato's dropped nearly 3%.
27 July 2026 · 4 min read
Business
Bira 91 tried to get IPO-ready and the paperwork ended up destroying the company
Bira 91 founder Ankur Jain stepped down this week, surrendering his family's 17.8 percent stake in parent company B9 Beverages to settle a two-year fight with lenders. It is a dramatic fall for a brand that once defined India's craft beer boom, with revenue that topped $100 million at its peak. The strange part is what actually triggered the collapse. It wasn't a rival, a recession or bad beer. In 2024, the company renamed itself purely to satisfy IPO paperwork rules, and the new name has collapsed the industry overnight.
24 July 2026 · 4 min read
Business
Spain lifted the World Cup but the biggest winner never kicked a ball
Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in extra time on Sunday to win the 2026 World Cup, with Ferran Torres scoring in the 106th minute and a tearful Lionel Messi, now 39, denied a farewell title. But the scoreboard hides the real result. FIFA is set to bank record revenue of more than 8 billion dollars, up 56 percent from Qatar 2022, and Fox reportedly made 250 million dollars just from ads during water breaks. The most-watched match in history was also the most monetised. Here is where all that money actually went.
22 July 2026 · 3 min read
Business
Apple just agreed to give iPhones two different brains just for China
For nearly two years, a new iPhone in Shanghai was missing the one feature Apple advertised everywhere else: its AI. Last week, China's internet regulator finally approved Apple Intelligence, but only after Apple agreed to swap out its AI's brain for one built by Alibaba, hosted inside China and compliant with Chinese content rules. Apple gets to compete again in a market that just grew 28%. The price: the same phone now thinks differently depending on where you bought it. And every government in the world was watching.
20 July 2026 · 4 min read
Business
Analysts said Zomato would go broke. It won by owning the least glamorous thing in tech
Few years ago, market analysts said that a cash-burning food delivery app 'ZOMATO' with no path to profit, destined to slowly bleed to death. Today it sits near record highs, comfortably profitable, with revenue past ₹55,000 crore. The turnaround did not come from smarter software or a cleverer app. It came from the exact opposite: mastering the messy, low-margin, deeply unglamorous business of physically moving things from A to B. Here is the quiet trick that flipped a money pit into a machine rivals cannot copy.
11 July 2026 · 4 min read
Business
The ₹6,650 crore IPO where nobody is selling a single share
Oyo's parent company Prism wants to sell shares to the public for the first time via IPO. It wants to raise ₹6,650 crore. But here is the odd part. Big investors like SoftBank and Microsoft are not selling even one of their own shares. And 75% of the new money will go to paying off old loans, not growing the business. One simple table in the paperwork explains everything and it's dicey.
3 July 2026 · 4 min read
Business
India's biggest oil city is quietly becoming its AI capital
Jamnagar is known as India's oil city, home to one of the world's largest refineries. Now Reliance is building a giant data center campus there, and Meta is leasing a slice of it. The bigger idea is simple but ambitious: India does not want to stay a customer of AI, buying intelligence built elsewhere. It wants to own the physical machinery that makes AI possible, the way it once fought to stop depending on imported oil. Why a refinery town, and what India is really trying to escape, is the story underneath.
26 June 2026 · 4 min read
Business
Meta just paid $900 million to hire one man, not to buy a company
Meta just put $900 million into CRED, the Indian fintech, for a 20% stake, but took no board seat and no access to its data. That is a strange way to invest, because it was not really an investment. The money was the price of hiring one person: CRED's founder Kunal Shah, who now runs WhatsApp for the world. It is a new playbook Big Tech is using to grab talent without tripping antitrust laws, and the reason Meta wanted this man says a lot about what WhatsApp still cannot do.
23 June 2026 · 4 min read
Business
India was almost level with the world on chips in 1987. Then the factory caught fire
In 1987, India was nearly level with the world in making computer chips. A fire at its main lab changed that, and the country fell decades behind. Every comeback attempt since has collapsed, to the point where Indians stopped believing the headlines. This time the factories are genuinely being built. The question worth sitting with is what is finally different now, when every earlier attempt turned to dust.
22 June 2026 · 4 min read
Business
SpaceX is the largest IPO ever. But is the hype bigger than the business?
On June 12, SpaceX pulled off the biggest IPO in history. It raised $75 billion, closed worth over $2 trillion, and made Elon Musk the first person ever worth a trillion dollars. The headlines called it a rocket triumph. But SpaceX's own filings say 93 percent of its future is AI, not space. Investors did not buy a rocket company. They bought a bet on Musk. Whether that bet is genius or madness comes down to a single number.
14 June 2026 · 4 min read
Business
In 2016, one man gave away free internet to a billion people. It was never about the internet
When Reliance launched Jio with free calls and nearly free data, a dozen Indian telecom companies existed. Within three years, half were bankrupt or swallowed. Jio now has over 500 million subscribers. But the cheap data was never the product. The subscribers were. Now Reliance is running the exact same play with artificial intelligence: give it away for free, capture everyone, then own the infrastructure underneath.
12 June 2026 · 5 min read
Business
One strategy has quietly made more billionaires than almost any other
Most People Have Never Heard of It. There is a single business strategy, used across phones, soap, cars, hotels, and fashion, that has built some of the largest fortunes on earth. The companies that use it do not compete with rivals. They create rivals, launch them into the same market, and let them fight each other while every rupee from every side flows back to the same owner. You have almost certainly bought from both sides today without knowing it.
11 June 2026 · 4 min read
Business
Two Cricket Teams Just Sold for $3.4 Billion in One Day. The Buyers Have Never Watched Much Cricket
On a single day in March, two IPL franchises changed hands for over a billion and a half dollars each, the first time any Indian cricket team crossed a billion. The buyers were not cricket lovers. They were American billionaires and a Wall Street giant, paying roughly 20 times what these teams earn. The last people who made bets like this on sports either became extraordinarily rich, or learned the most expensive lesson in entertainment.
8 June 2026 · 4 min read
Business
For 50 Years, No One Could Touch Asian Paints. Then a Richer Giant Walked In
Asian Paints was the company investors called unbreakable. For decades, it held nearly 60 percent of the Indian paint market, not by making better paint, but by building a delivery system no rival could copy. Then in 2024, a giant with far deeper pockets quietly entered the fight. Analysts expected it to grab 1 to 2 percent of the market. In one year, it took almost 7, and Asian Paints lost a third of its value.
7 June 2026 · 4 min read
Business
FIFA wanted $100 million from India. It settled for less than half
With the World Cup just days away, FIFA still had no broadcaster in India, the last big market on earth without a deal. It had asked for a fortune, then kept cutting. The biggest player walked. Sony never bid. Finally a wounded Zee Entertainment said yes, for less than half the opening price. A country that has never once played in a men's World Cup nearly missed watching this one. Here is why the math never worked.
5 June 2026 · 4 min read