One quick thing: WazirX restarts exchange operations tomorrow, 15 months after crippling cyberattack 

In today’s newsletter: 

• Inside Vidit Aatrey's Meesho playbook
• AI in BFSI still in early days, says Perfios CEO
• Why Oracle wants to build AI-powered ambulances? 

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From WhatsApp resellers to Dalal Street dreams, Meesho co-founder and CEO Vidit Aatrey’s marathon isn’t about running fast — it’s about never running out of discipline.

The founder who built an empire one U-turn at a time.

• Aatrey and co-founder Sanjeev Barnwal cycled through pivots — from 2015’s failed hyperlocal app Fashnear to a reseller marketplace that finally clicked by 2017

Elevation Capital came on board that year after Aatrey overhauled Meesho’s business model in just six weeks — a move co-managing partner Mukul Arora told us still defines his “speed and conviction.”

• By 2019, Facebook (now Meta) had made its first-ever India investment — over $125 million — validating Meesho’s bet on small-town entrepreneurs and value-first commerce

While rivals chased blitzscaling, Aatrey built Meesho for endurance, not adrenaline.

• He cut commissions to zero and launched Valmo – Meesho’s in-house logistics arm – in 2024 to gain control over costs and quality
  
  
• When Shopee flooded India with discounts in 2021, Arora told us Aatrey “tightened operations instead of burning cash.”

That mix of restraint and focus turned Meesho into India’s leanest large-scale e-commerce player — more metronome than megaphone.

Now comes the long run — from private grit to public grind.

• Meesho has filed to raise Rs 4,250 crore through an IPO, testing Aatrey’s discipline in full view of the markets

Prosus’ Ashutosh Sharma believes public investors will demand “a new muscle” — short-term agility balanced with long-term conviction.

• For the marathoner-CEO who’s reinvented Meesho four times in a decade, the next test is sustaining stride once the markets join the race

Dig deeper

AI may be the new buzzword in financial services, but real adoption in India’s banking sector is still crawling.

India’s BFSI sector remains in the early experimentation stage of AI adoption, says Perfios CEO Sabyasachi Goswami, with Greenfield projects showing faster ROI while legacy systems struggle to adapt.

“Everyone’s talking about AI in banking, but very few are actually using it meaningfully,” the CEO notes.

Banks aren’t yet ready for full-scale AI as their systems still lack multi-cloud connectivity. The real impact will come only when intelligence, trust, and connectivity layers work together, current claims remain premature.

The remarks highlight a widening gap between AI enthusiasm and on-ground adoption in financial institutions, a key signal that India’s digital banking transformation still faces structural hurdles.

Warburg Pincus-backed Perfios is building an AI-powered operating system for BFSI on a multi-cloud platform (MCP). The fintech claims it has built the right infrastructure, but “the other side”, i.e. banks, also need to be ready to connect.

• Perfios has launched AI-driven tools such as CAM.AI (credit assessment automation), DIB (Data Intelligence Bridge for document processing), and Journey Builder (workflow creation)

 The company is also creating domain-specific Small Language Models (SLMs), arguing that global LLMs fail to handle the complexity of India’s BFSI sector.

Find out more

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison wants AI to hit the road, literally.

The $800-billion tech giant, better known for databases and cloud, is now building AI-powered ambulances.

• The move, unveiled at Oracle’s AI World 2025 in Las Vegas, is part of Ellison’s grand plan to create a connected healthcare network linking homes, hospitals, clinics, and emergency vehicles.

Nearly two-thirds of Ellison’s keynote was dedicated to healthcare, underscoring where Oracle’s next big push lies.

The company is developing internet-connected medical devices that continuously stream patient data into its systems, allowing doctors to monitor vitals in real time.

• The vision is seamless, i.e., data flowing from wearables to ambulances to hospital records, on Oracle’s AI Data Platform

Oracle is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer of digital healthcare, from databases to diagnostics.

• The company’s new AI Data Platform already has over $1.5 billion in backing from Infosys, Cognizant, Accenture, and LTIMindtree, among others, who are building industry use cases around it

Oracle is also rebuilding one of its hospital software using Gen AI and developing tools that could detect pathogens before pandemics break out.

Nevertheless, the road ahead isn’t without potholes, as Oracle spent $402 million on restructuring last quarter, and a major outage at 45 US hospitals recently exposed the fragility of digital health systems.

Dig deeper

What began with a viral deepfake of actor Rashmika Mandanna in 2023 has now culminated in India’s first formal attempt to regulate AI. Over two years, the government’s response evolved from ministerial warnings and advisories to court interventions and, now, finally, amendments to IT Rules that aims to legally define and mandate labelling of AI-generated content.

• The draft amendments, released on October 22, require platforms to label and verify synthetic content, among other obligations

Dig deeper

• Business AI company Uniphore has raised $260 million in a Series F round from tech giants NVIDIA, AMD, Snowflake, and Databricks, valuing the firm at $2.5 billion.
  
  
• Meta is cutting about 600 jobs from its “AI Superintelligence” team, just months after pouring billions into building it, calling the move an efficiency step. 

India’s skies may get tougher on your gadgets. 

Following a series of mid-air fire scares, the DGCA is reconsidering power bank regulations. 

• Expect possible bans on in-flight charging, stricter watt-hour labels, and mandatory under-seat storage 

With Emirates and Singapore Airlines already enforcing tight norms, India’s skies might soon enforce similar curbs. Find out more

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