Podcast
Daybreak
Hosted by The Ken · EN
Business news is complex and overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be. Every day of the week, from Monday to Friday, Daybreak tells one business story that’s significant, simple and powerful.
Hosted from The Ken’s newsroom by Snigdha Sharma and Rachel Varghese, Daybreak relies on years of original reporting and analysis by some of India’s most experienced and talented business journalists.
104episodes
Episodes
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AI is eating your phone's memory and hiking up prices. No, festive sales can't save you either
3d ago00:15:02Tap to summarizeBefore 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.
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A royal family’s billion-dollar bet on Indian startups—without a winner
4d ago00:09:46Tap to summarizeLightrock 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.
Transcribe →How many ‘bad’ schools make a good private equity investment?
5d ago00:13:34Tap to summarizeK12 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.
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A new class of gig-workers in India are teaching robots to do the dishes
1w ago00:28:29Tap to summarizeTake 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.
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Why Instagram wants to be on your TV now
1w ago00:11:02Tap to summarizeThis 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.
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India's IT sector bet its future on AI access it doesn't actually control
1w ago00:13:17Tap to summarizeOn 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.
Transcribe →Google and Perplexity paid Jio and Airtel a fortune to reach Indian users. OpenAI paid nobody
2w ago00:09:00Tap to summarizeIndia'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.
Transcribe →Why Mamaearth's 2022 bet on a little-known drone startup is paying off in unexpected places and for unexpected players
2w ago00:18:11Tap to summarizeIn 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.
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India built UPI for the economy. Gamblers built an economy on UPI
2w ago00:20:14Tap to summarize2026 was the first IPL season after India banned online real money gaming last year. The platforms were gone and the payment gateways were blocked. The government had made its position clear. The betting, however, did not stop. The Ken's Mrunmayee Kulkarni went looking for where it went and found it hiding inside something the government itself built. On platforms like 99 Exchange, gamblers deposit and withdraw money directly through UPI, gambler to gambler, with no mule network and no victim to file a complaint. But the ED's tools were designed for a system that leaves a trail. This one doesn't.In this episode, Mrunmayee joins host Snigdha Sharma to walk through how the money actually moves, and why the enforcement machinery has no good answer for it yet.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.
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When the monsoon fails, India's AI dreams fail with it
2w ago00:12:46Tap to summarizeIndia's southwest monsoon is running 35% below normal. Mumbai's reservoirs are at 12% of capacity. And the rain that should have arrived by June 11th still hasn't. The same water and power systems that keep this economy running are now being asked to power India's AI future too — a $180 billion data centre bet that nobody is stress-testing against a failing monsoon and climate change. The groundwater is already over-extracted. The grid hit an all-time demand record in May. And the choice about who gets water first when there isn't enough has already been written into law in some states. But almost nobody wants to say it out loud. 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.
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