Breaking: Antfin likely to offload entire stake in Eternal for Rs 5,375 crore via block deal

One quick thing: The investors who struck gold with Bluestone 

In today’s newsletter:

• Swiggy eyes R 2,500 crore from Rapido stake sale
• RBI Governor clarifies UPI stance 
• Tech firms woo banks to fine-tune LLMs, build agents

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Swiggy’s three-year-long ride with Rapido is set to come to an end. It’s going to be a wrap – a happy one, though.

Swiggy has kickstarted proceedings to entirely sell its 12% stake in ride-hailing startup Rapido, we were told. And there are handsome returns in store. 

• Swiggy had invested Rs 950 crore in Rapido in April 2022
  
  
• It is now looking to sell all its shares for Rs 2,500 crore
  
  
• That will translate to 2.5X gains in just a little over three years 

This will be a much-needed liquidity event for Swiggy, which has seen its losses widen for five straight quarters now. 

• Swiggy’s net losses amounted to Rs 2,278 crore in the past two quarters and totalled to Rs 6,600 crore over the past nine quarters
  

The mounting losses have depleted Swiggy’s cash reserves. 

• As of Q1FY26, Swiggy held cash and equivalents of Rs 5,354 crore
  
  
• Its arch rival, Eternal (formerly Zomato), was more than 3X of that at Rs 18,857 crore

• A successful exit from Rapido will give Swiggy at least two additional quarters of cash 

While Swiggy stands to gain from the transaction, Rapido’s not far behind. 

• Swiggy is pegging Rapido’s valuation at $2.7-3 billion during these negotiations 

• That is a sharp increase from Rapido’s $1.1 billion valuation in 2024 

The jump comes on the back of impressive growth at Rapido. 

• The company has grown 120% on a year-on-year (YoY) basis
  
  
• Rapido has $150-160 million cash at bank and is burning around $3 million each month, underscoring its strong financial profile 

Dig deeper

The debate over who should bear the cost of UPI is raging, with new twists and turns every fortnight, much to the chagrin of the Finance Ministry.

• And RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra now finds himself embroiled in it, evidently torn between competing camps

On August 6, Malhotra said that UPI is free only for the end users (consumers and merchants) while the government and the other ecosystem partners foot the subsidy bill.

• He noted that it’s still unclear who should ultimately bear the cost

Last month, the governor said that someone has to pay for UPI, a comment many interpreted as support for the industry's demand for merchant discount rate MDR.

• Now, he has clarified that his statement simply meant the mobile payments platform might not remain fee-free forever

For merchant transactions, which account for nearly two-thirds of all UPI volume, payment companies already charge merchants a small fee. Banks, in turn, charge the payment firms.

• Last year, the government reduced the UPI subsidy by one-third to Rs 1,500 crore

• This has led many fintechs to clamour for MDR to compensate for the expenses

While discussions continue around charging large merchants or high-value payments, the government has clarified that it is not planning to reinstate MDR on UPI.

• For now, the RBI governor has merely reiterated the facts, without clearly giving an opinion on who should bear the cost

​Dig deeper

From boring bots to banking brains: India’s GenAI race has a new battleground—your bank.

More than half a dozen banks have floated tenders to deploy domain-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) and Agentic AI tools tailored for financial services.

• Punjab National Bank (PNB) is seeking GenAI platforms with sector-specific LLMs and agent orchestration for use cases such as underwriting, fraud ops, and compliance
  
  
• Union Bank’s February tender calls for a multi-agent GenAI system with built-in explainability, security, and audit trails
  
  
• State Bank of India (SBI) and Bank of Baroda are looking to build prompt engineering infrastructure and onboard GenAI implementation partners

Behind the scenes, nearly every Indian IT major, consulting firm, and AI startup is hustling to grab a piece of this new GenAI gold rush.

Banks are no longer impressed by generic AI models or simple chatbots. 

• They now want AI copilots trained on real banking data 

Tools capable of drafting underwriting memos, flagging risk anomalies in filings and assisting branch staff in regional languages.

A silent contest is on, with tech majors and startups rolling out BFSI-tuned LLM stacks in hopes of powering next-gen banking systems.

• EY, Perfios and TCS are leading with grievance-trained copilots, agentic orchestration systems, and NeMo-powered infra stacks
  
  
• HCLTech and Infosys are developing LLMs and small language models (SLMs) for fraud detection, CRM-integrated service desks, and compliance automation
  
  
• Setu-Sarvam and Wipro are offering multilingual and custom-trained models for call centres and backend banking automation

Dig deeper

• OpenAI is in early talks about a potential secondary sale of stock for current and former employees at a valuation of about $500 billion.
  
  
• Google's Gemini has introduced a new StoryBook feature that lets users create personalised, illustrated storybooks with narration, aimed at families with young children.

In the battle for AI supremacy, it’s not just code that’s being tested, but paychecks too. 

Elon Musk took a dig at Meta’s lavish offers to poach top AI talent, claiming his xAI team has hired Meta engineers without sky-high salaries. 

“Do something great and your comp can shift substantially higher,” Musk said, pointing to xAI’s performance-based pay model.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei joined the dunk contest too, calling Meta’s approach unfair.

“If Mark Zuckerberg throws a dart at a dartboard and it hits your name, that doesn't mean that you should be paid 10 times more than the guy next to you," Amodei said.

Find out more

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