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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.
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.
713 Episodes
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Semaglutide's patent just expired in India. The molecule behind Novo Nordisk's blockbuster obesity drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy, is now fair game for generic manufacturers. An 85 to 90% price drop is expected.Eli Lilly's Mounjaro had already been outselling Wegovy.For most companies, this would be the beginning of an exit. But Novo is doing the opposite. Why?Tune in.
India's hospitals have been slow to adopt AI. Its government, however, has not. A new programme aims to train 50,000 doctors in artificial intelligence. And not just to use it, but to help build it. The argument is simple: engineers understand disease like an algorithm. Doctors know it's never that clean. So what happens when clinicians become co-builders?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.
Bengaluru's water utility loses a third of everything it pumps. It owes Tokyo Rs 10,000 crore. It bleeds Rs 80 crore every month.Its answer to all of this was an app — GPS-tracked tankers, government-backed, 40% cheaper than the market.But nine months later the all the app has to show is 10,000 downloads and a 2.8 rating in a city of 14 million. So why are Bangalore's residents saying no to the state's efforts?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.
From platforms like Cred, Zerodha, and Groww integrating AI assistants, to Sebi-registered advisors now using AI to generate personalised investment recommendations, the shift is already underway. And with nearly 140 million investors and fewer than a thousand registered advisors to serve them, the math alone might make AI advice not just convenient, but necessary.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.
Seventy years ago, Homi Bhabha designed a three-stage nuclear plan built around one idea: that India's future was thorium, not uranium. The science was proven, the reactors were built, and by 1996, India had already demonstrated a thorium fuel cycle at an experimental reactor in Kalpakkam.What it never did was take it to commercial scale. In 2025, an eight-year-old American startup did exactly that — with a fuel designed specifically for Indian reactors, and a former chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission on its board of advisors. So what happened in between?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 telecom operators have spent decades controlling how signals reach customers indoors but that arrangement is now under serious pressure.A new breed of infrastructure companies, ones that do not own a spectrum and hold no licence, are taking control of how 5G reaches you inside airports, metro lines, malls, and office towers. The fight over who builds and who pays has drawn in regulators, sovereign wealth funds, and the Supreme Court.And it points to a much larger shift in who really owns the network.Tune in.
India's Northeast has always had money. Wealth managers are only now showing up to court it, and finding the welcome chillier than expected. Post-GST, a wave of newly banked business wealth is looking for a home. Sophisticated products like AIFs, PMS, bonds, are finding takers. But Northeastern millionaires play by different rules. They don't respond to cold calls. They don't trust outsiders easily. And they have little patience for managers who can't answer basic questions.So what does it actually take to win a client here — and why are so many wealth managers still getting it wrong?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.
Last Friday, Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur hosted 150 founders at Razorpay's Koramangala headquarters — not to talk payments but to let them showcase what they'd built with OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent taking the world by storm. The same week, thousands were queuing outside Baidu and Tencent offices in China just to get the software installed. The open source agent AI platform is the same but the two approaches are quite different. China is deploying OpenClaw at a scale and speed no other country is matching. India, meanwhile, is moving carefully, deliberately, problem-first. So here's the question: is India behind China on OpenClaw? And is speed is the only thing that matters in the AI race?Read Inc42's report here: The New Garage: OpenClaw And India’s DIY AI Agent BoomDaybreak 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 next time you pick up a strip of tablets at your neighbourhood pharmacy, consider this: the drug you just bought for Rs 170 may have left the factory for Rs 14. That's a markup of over a 1000%. And, it's completely legal.In this piece, The Ken's Mutasim Khan traces how India's drug pricing system works, and why the pharmacist, the doctor, and the manufacturer are all optimising for something, while the patient simply pays.This is a read aloud of Mutasim's original story, by Snigdha Sharma, on Daybreak.📖 Read the full story on The Ken: Wake up, Neo. There’s a glitch in the pharma matrixDaybreak 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.
In 1955, a man from a small village in Kerala paid 500 rupees for passage on a crowded boat to Abu Dhabi. He told no one he was leaving. He wasn't the first, and he certainly wasn't the last. Over the decades, millions followed — and the money they sent back quietly rebuilt everything: houses, schools, entire towns. Today, remittances make up over a fifth of the state's economy. Which means when war broke out across the Middle East last month, Kerala isn't just watching from a distance. The hurt is closer home.Tune in. Want to work with The Ken? Apply 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.
India is drinking more — and spending more when it does. Between 2020 and 2025, alcohol consumption nearly doubled. Post-Covid, drinkers didn't just drink more; they upgraded. Four bottles where there used to be one. Home bars where there used to be none. Global brands that once ignored India are now flooding distributors with enquiry emails. But the opportunity comes wrapped in one of the most complicated regulatory systems in the world — 69 permits for a single brand in some states, margins so thin most retailers stock only five or six labels. India is still a teenager. The hangover hasn't hit yet.Tune in.Want to work with The Ken? Apply here!
Within days of the war in Iran, panic spread across India’s cooking-gas system. Millions rushed to book LPG refills. Restaurants shut kitchens. A temple in Delhi halted its community meals. The government invoked emergency powers and warned hoarders they could face seven years in jail. But the panic revealed a deeper question.India now has 33 crore households cooking on LPG — one of the largest cooking-gas networks in the world. Yet the country’s strategic underground reserves amount to less than two days of national demand.And interestingly, in last year’s budget documents, the government told Parliament it had no plans to build any new LPG storage caverns. Almost no one noticed that line until now.How did the world’s most ambitious clean-cooking programme end up with a buffer this thin?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.
Uber is one of the most recognised brands in the world. But in India, it's losing ground — to a government-backed taxi app, a newer competitor, and its own shrinking margins. So it's making a surprising bet: instead of fighting harder for your weekend ride, it wants to drive you to work. The B2B transport market it's entering has been run by specialists for decades. And those specialists aren't sure whether to be worried or not.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.
Akasa Air wants to be India's most efficient low-cost carrier. Founded in 2022 by veterans who watched Jet Airways and Go Air collapse, the airline is copying IndiGo's early playbook — single aircraft type, ruthless cost discipline, long-term thinking. It has 35 planes, 5% market share, and serious backing from the Jhunjhunwala family. But Boeing strikes delayed deliveries, pilots left, two co-founders have exited, and airport slots remain locked up by bigger players. Meanwhile, IndiGo is stumbling and Air India is still reeling from last year’s tragedy. Can Akasa turn everyone else's bad year into its own breakthrough?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 just announced it wants to ban children under 16 from social media. Goa and Andhra Pradesh are considering the same. And on paper, it sounds like exactly the kind of protection kids need — platforms like Meta have spent years knowingly exposing children to addiction, exploitation, and harm, while spending millions lobbying against any legislation that would stop them. So a ban feels like the only way. But here's the thing: when Karnataka made the announcement, Meta's response was more compliant than history would have suggested. And that restraint might be the most telling part of this story. Host Rachel Varghese explains.Tune in.
Indians put more than half their household wealth into real estate. But almost all of it goes into one kind: residential. Commercial property like offices, shops, warehouses, barely features in the average Indian portfolio. Some investors argue that that might be a mistake. Commercial real estate offers higher rental yields, steadier returns, and in some cases, fewer headaches than the family flat. And today, you don't even need a crore to get in. REITs, SM REITs, and AIFs have opened the door to smaller investors. But the office isn't a free lunch. The risks are real, and they're different from anything most Indian investors are used to.This is a read-aloud version of this story from The Ken.Tune in.
Swish launched less than a year ago with a simple promise: hot food in 10 minutes. It's already raised 16 million dollars, with another 30 to 35 million reportedly on the way. But the giants who tried this before — Zomato, Zepto, Swiggy — have all stumbled, scaled back, or shut down. The problem isn't the idea. It's the math. Small order sizes, a lack of dedicated riders and razor-thin margins. Swish and its investors thinks it has an edge the others didn't. But can a one-year-old startup crack what India's biggest food delivery companies couldn't?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.
Yesterday, Reuters reported, Indian refiners have rushed to secure prompt cargoes of Russian crude as the war involving Iran disrupts supplies from the Middle East. The crisis has choked traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — a route that normally carries around 40% of India’s oil imports — forcing companies to scramble for alternatives. The shift is striking. New Delhi had spent months cutting back Russian imports under U.S. pressure. But with India holding only about 25 days of crude reserves, the war has quickly exposed how thin that buffer really is. So how did India’s energy strategy end up here, between Russian oil, U.S. pressure, and a war in Iran? Host Snigdha Sharma explains.Tune in.
Deepinder Goyal, the founder of Zomato, has a new startup. It's called Temple — a wearable that tracks blood flow in your brain. His theory is that improving that flow could slow down aging. Doctors aren't convinced. Investors seem to be.Temple is valued at 190 million dollars. The science behind it hasn't been peer reviewed. And India has a rapidly aging population that could genuinely use some answers.So who exactly is this for?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.
When Ozempic began changing how the world lost weight, most slimming companies panicked. But VLCC didn’t. Backed by Carlyle, it’s opening more clinics than ever before. Because to Carlyle, Ozempic isn’t a threat—it’s just another doorway into India’s beauty economy. In this episode, we look at how VLCC’s new owners are turning an existential challenge into expansion, why its products are taking a back seat to real estate, and what the future of India’s weight-loss industry looks like in the age of GLP-1 drugs.Tune in.*This episode was originally published on November 12th 2025Daybreak 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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lol the roadshitters are talking about AI
Ruined my morning. Got a person who has no connect with the ground reality in India and wants to copy ideas from the US and force down our throats. absolute disgrace!
Very important investment regulatory issue highlighted.