One quick thing: Curefoods in talks to raise $40 million funding, eyes IPO in 18 months.

In today's newsletter:

• Zerodha's billion-dollar revenue milestone
• Zoho's e-commerce, data centres play
• Whatfix's big $125 million funding round

P.S. Would you let AI take control of your life and happiness? This person is about to do just that. Scroll down!

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What’s cooler: a billion-dollar valuation or a billion in revenue? If Zerodha's numbers are any clue, it's definitely the latter.

Zerodha, one of the country's leading stock brokers, saw its revenue increase 21% year-on-year to Rs 8,320 crore (nearly $1 billion) in FY24. 

More significantly, the Nithin Kamath-led company's profit grew 62% to Rs 4,700 crore YoY. It has another Rs 1,000 crore as unrealised gains from investment. When added up, this gives Zerodha an operating margin of a mind-boggling 69% for FY24. 

• For context, Nvidia, arguably the hottest technology company today and one of the most valuable firms in the world, has an operating margin hovering around the mid-sixties.

Zerodha was overtaken by Groww as the country’s largest broker in terms of active customers last year. However, in terms of revenue and profitability, it remains unmatched. 

Groww’s financials for FY24 are not available yet, but in FY23, the company reported revenues of Rs 1,277 crore, which was only one-fifth of Zerodha's FY 23 revenue.

Angel One reported a net profit of Rs 1,126 crore on revenues of Rs 4,272 crore in FY24.

Read: Charging fees cost us market share, but we've fixed it: Nithin Kamath on Zerodha's recent dip

All stockbroking firms, including Zerodha, are facing regulatory heat on multiple fronts, which could hit their topline by around 30-50% in the current year.

The excessive futures and options trading in the market has everyone from the finance ministry to RBI to Sebi worried.

• Sebi is considering restrictions on retail customers’ F&O trading. The regulator has also stopped exchanges from giving rebates to stockbrokers based on trading volume.

Kamath pointed out this regulatory risk as one of the reasons why the company will stay away from an IPO

"We need to do more regarding revenue predictability, and it is impossible to do it just as a brokerage business," he said. 

Read more on how Zerodha plans to diversify its business

From one 'Z' to another 'Z'... Bootstrapped software major Zoho is stepping up the e-commerce game in India!  

The software firm has jumped onto the ONDC bandwagon with a brand new seller-side platform Vikra

Vikra is designed to help small businesses break free from the dominance of major players like Amazon and Flipkart. 

• Sellers can join the ONDC network, set up shop, and handle everything from operations to business analytics—all in one place. 

Psst: Zoho cofounder Sridhar Vembu told us on the sidelines that the firm will also explore buyer-side applications in the future.

Zoho isn’t just focusing on software anymore; it is spreading its wings into AI, hardware, data centers, and even semiconductors.

Speaking on the company's push for data centers, Vembu said they’re setting them up "everywhere" across the globe due to increasing demand for localisation. 

“By the end of this decade, we will cover every country. So far, we have 18 data centers,” Vembu said, emphasising that while tech markets remain open, the trend toward localising operations is growing stronger.

Zoho is also putting up a tech hub in Eastern Uttar Pradesh just like the Tenkasi model of creating offices and hubs in smaller towns. Vembu believes that this will create more jobs and expand Zoho’s business across the ‘Hindi-speaking’ states.

Big bucks have just hit Whatfix’s bank as the software firm has bagged a whopping $125 million funding round, led by Warburg Pincus and SoftBank Vision Fund 2.

• The deal is the latest sign that big funding rounds are making a comeback into India's funding ecosystem.

With the new funding, Whatfix is all set for a global expansion

• On the cards is a further expansion into Southeast Asia and the Middle East, plus some exciting generative AI products in the pipeline! 

• Little birdies tell us that the deal was done at a valuation of more than $790 million on a pre-money basis.

The firm has ambitious plans in the generative AI space, as it is seeing significant adoption and demand among its enterprise and SMB customers.

“We are rolling out an intermediate AI product in the next quarter that understands the knowledge of the application and generates the content automatically. For example, Whatfix used to create the workflows or walk-throughs, now that can be created with this new product for our users,” cofounder Khadim Batti told us.

• The firm, which saw its losses widen to Rs 328 crores in FY23, expects an Ebitda break-even in the next 7-8 quarters. 

• Whatfix has also seen healthy revenue growth of 45% YoY in FY24 which was Rs 285 crores last year. 

Read More

• James Cameron, the director of "Titanic" and "The Terminator" movies, has joined the board of Stability AI, the firm that has developed the Stable Diffusion text-to-image generative AI model.

• Generative AI is dramatically changing the way developers code, but coding itself isn't going away, Gabe Monroy, vice-president of Developer Experience at Google Cloud told us. Google’s AI coding assistant Gemini Code Assist is delivering productivity gains of 20-30% across the software development lifecycle at large companies, he said.

• In a controversial move, an Israeli regulator has cleared an AI startup to launch a chatbot that gives stock-picking advice in partnership with a large bank

A young woman turns to an AI app to take control of her life and happiness.

If this sounds like a Black Mirror episode, it's not. In fact, it's the story of Vikramaditya Motwane's upcoming thriller film. 

Titled CTRL, the movie stars Ananya Panday and Vihaan Samat and is set to debut on Netflix on October 4. 

Check out the trailer