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In today’s newsletter: 

• Valley investors bet big on India
• Blinkit, Instamart, Zepto build Rs 40,000 cr war chest
• Govt sends notice to Apple over spyware alerts

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The Valley’s new India investment thesis isn’t SaaS … it is backing AI and deeptech startups!

Two back-to-back fundraises today for Airbound and Emergent.

Drone-logistics startup Airbound is raising $30 million led by Greenoaks with participation from Lightspeed, just months after closing an $8.65-million seed from Lachy Groom (Physical Intelligence), Humba Ventures, Lightspeed and Tesla operators. 

Similarly, AI startup Emergent is in advanced stages of raising over $60 million in a fresh round from Khosla Ventures, SoftBank and others, which will likely value the company at $300 million.

Emergent, founded by ex-Dunzo cofounder Mukund Jha and ex-Amazon AI Scientist Madhav Jha, helps users build apps and automate tasks using AI “vibe coding,” allowing people ship software without writing any code. 

Meanwhile, Airbound, founded by Naman Pushp, who first began working on drones at age 15, uses autonomous drones to deliver critical goods, starting with healthcare logistics, and is building a scalable drone-based delivery network for India.

Silicon Valley firms, once fixated on India as a GTM + SaaS factory, are now chasing IP-heavy, frontier bets built from first principles, from autonomy to agentic AI.

• Airbound’s autonomous delivery grid and Emergent’s AI ops platform both target markets far larger than India’s, giving VCs the scale they crave without forcing founders to relocate to the US

Valley funds also want defensibility in an AI-saturated cycle as AI apps blur together, investors want hard tech, robotics, infra and compute-adjacent plays.

India’s 10-minute merchants aren’t just delivering groceries — they’re delivering balance sheets that look more like battle plans.

Quick commerce is racing ahead on rocket fuel — and burning through plenty of it.

• Blinkit parent Eternal, Swiggy and Zepto now sit on over Rs 40,000 crore in cash, even after burning close to Rs 9,000 crore over the past year

• Swiggy’s QIP and Rapido stake sale push reserves past Rs 17,000 crore, giving Instamart fresh firepower to expand

• Eternal still holds the sector’s deepest pocket at Rs 18,314 crore, while Zepto’s recent $450-million round takes its war chest to roughly Rs 8,085 crore ahead of its IPO next year

If fundraising is the warm-up, cash burn remains the real competitive sport.

• Nearly Rs 9,000 crore has vanished in the last 9–11 months as players chase density, delivery speed and assortment breadth

• Swiggy’s burn topped Rs 3,500 crore, while Zepto vaporised roughly Rs 4,500 crore ahead of its IPO push

Even Eternal — the most capitalised — saw reserves tighten as expansion outpaced inflows.

As India’s commerce wars heat up, Amazon is rewriting its India playbook with cash, conviction and carefully chosen battles.

“First we build something differentiated and scaled — and then we make money,” Amazon India Country Head Samir Kumar told us, framing Amazon’s long-game even as rivals chase speed.

The firm is betting on a blended model — minutes for need-it-now buys, hours for routine orders and days for the long tail — arguing that assortment, not adrenaline, will win.

“We don’t coordinate our timing with competitors,” Kumar said, after Amazon announced $35 billion for India through 2030, a day after Microsoft’s $17.5-billion plan, insisting the timing was purely internal.

Dig deeper

Apple’s latest spyware alert has set off alarms in Delhi, too.

The Union government has issued a notice to Apple after the company sent out a fresh round of “mercenary spyware” warnings to users in India. 

• CERT-In has simultaneously released an advisory and is offering voluntary device checks for anyone who received the alert

Update to the latest iOS version (26.1).

• Refresh messaging and cloud apps
  
  
• Enable lockdown mode

• Stay alert to unusual prompts

Meghna Bal, Director at the Esya Centre, said that the rise of commercial spyware is weakening overall cybersecurity.

"Attacks are likely to get more frequent and sophisticated," she said.

In 2023, MeitY had questioned Apple after similar alerts were received by opposition leaders and journalists.

• Apple later told MeitY and CERT-In that its warnings stem from internal threat signals, not government attribution

Go deeper

• India’s GCCs have emerged as the single-largest engine of enterprise AI talent, now accounting for 22.5% of the country’s overall AI demand, according to an ANSR report.
  
  
•  Google DeepMind will open its first research lab for discovering new materials, like those used in batteries or semiconductors, as part of its push to apply artificial intelligence to more scientific fields.

Say goodbye to the Aadhaar photocopy you’ve handed over a thousand times.

UIDAI plans to phase out physical Aadhaar copies and shift identity checks to secure QR scans.

Service providers, from hotels to telcos, must now register to access new offline verification tools. Find out more

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