The real cost of AI dependency; Anil Agarwal on India’s tech future

Hello,

The Online Gaming Bill is already shaking up India’s $3.8 billion gaming industry.

Fantasy sports platform Dream11 is reportedly preparing to shut down its real-money gaming arm after the Bill was passed in both houses of the Parliament. Its parent Dream Sports has also begun suspending offerings, pausing all ‘Pay to Play’ fantasy sports contests.

Core businesses of companies, including Zupee, My11Circle, WinZO, Games24x7, and Mobile Premier League, are expected to take a heavy blow.

On the Bill, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the harmful effects of online money games had necessitated the need for strong action, and assured the proposed legislation will promote esports and social gaming.

Elsewhere, the GST revamp has moved a step closer with the Group of Ministers agreeing to cut down the number of slabs, with most items currently taxed at 12% and 28% slabs to move to a lower slab.

Meanwhile, as the Karnataka High Court overturned the bike taxi ban in the state and gave the state government a month to frame a bike taxi policy, aggregators like Rapido and Uber have resumed services. 

However, Rapido is fighting other demons. The Central Consumer Protection Authority has imposed a penalty of Rs 10 lakh on the platform for misleading advertisements and unfair trade practices.

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• The real cost of AI dependency
• Anil Agarwal on India’s tech future
• Reimagining PT with gamification

Here’s your trivia for today: Which Indian freedom fighter revived Ganesh Chaturthi as a public festival in Maharashtra in the 19th century?

Interview

The real cost of AI dependency

While most SaaS companies are haemorrhaging cash to OpenAI and Google for AI capabilities, Zoho surfed on a different bet. 

In a conversation, Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Director - AI Research at Zoho, reveals the real cost of AI dependency for SaaS companies, the technical hurdles of building an enterprise-grade LLM in-house, and Zoho’s plans to scale beyond 100 billion parameters.

Key takeaways:

• After months of grinding through GPU shortages, hallucination fixes, and five model iterations, the Chennai unicorn has something to show for it: Zia LLM, an entirely in-house LLM that keeps customer data locked within Zoho’s ecosystem.
• Zia LLM is built on top of Zoho’s search platform. Context is determined by what you have access to—your emails, CRM leads, documents, etc… “We also built tool-calling capabilities so that if the model needs to fetch something outside its context window, it does so through governed, auditable APIs,” he said.
• “The zero-to-one moment for LLMs is gone. Today, the innovation cycle in LLMs is mostly incremental—tool use, image generation, etc. The LLM world does not know where to go from here,” he added.

Funding Alert

Startup: Mitra

Amount: Rs 14 Cr

Round: Bridge

Startup: Mithila Foods

Amount: Rs 1.5 Cr

Round: Seed

Startup: Edgehax

Amount: Rs 1.39 Cr

Round: Seed

Interview

Anil Agarwal on India’s tech future

Anil Agarwal, Founder and Chairman of diversified mining company Vedanta Resources, believes the convergence of natural resources and technology can propel India. 

In a freewheeling conversation with YourStory Founder and CEO Shradha Sharma, the 71-year-old mining magnate discusses everything from his optimism for India’s economic future to how perceptions about mining are changing in the country, and more.

What was said:

• Agarwal talks about support for entrepreneurship. “In America and other countries, if you start a business, take a loan, and fail, and you didn’t pocket the money, but put it into the business, no one punishes you…In India, if your money is lost, they’ll chase you for 10 years…This must go. The most important thing is trust.”
• After Independence, he says, “If you see, the entire industry that came up in India was set up in Bihar. All the intellectuals lived in Bihar. Sindri (fertiliser plant) was in Bihar, the refinery was in Bihar, Bokaro (steel plant) was in Bihar. Bihar was the first choice for industrial culture.”
• “…I tell every parent: make your daughters financially independent. Today is the era of girls…This confidence is in the girls, and it is the girls who will change the country, change their surroundings, and change society as well,” he says on the role of women in the workforce.

Startup

Reimagining PT with gamification

For many stroke survivors, regaining the use of their arms and hands is one of the toughest challenges on the road to recovery. Hyderabad-based BeAble Health is trying to change that with ArmAble, a smart rehab device that turns exercises into easy, familiar games to keep patients motivated and consistent. 

News & updates

• IPO: Fintech startup PayNearby plans to launch an IPO in the next financial year to fund expansion, CEO and MD Anand Kumar Bajaj told Reuters. India was the world’s second-biggest IPO market after the US in the first half of 2025, accounting for 12% of total proceeds globally, Reuters reported.
• Expand: Google is bringing AI Mode—its experimental feature that allows users to ask complex questions and follow-ups to dig deeper on a topic directly within Search—to 180 new countries in English. Google is also bringing new agentic and personalised capabilities to the feature.
• Freeze: Meta has frozen hiring in its AI organisation after restructuring the unit earlier this week, reported The Wall Street Journal. The hiring freeze—went into effect last week, and it’s not clear how long it will last—follows weeks of poaching more than 50 AI researchers and engineers from competitors.

Which Indian freedom fighter revived Ganesh Chaturthi as a public festival in Maharashtra in the 19th century?

Answer: Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The festival had lost state patronage and became a private family celebration after the end of the Maratha Empire.

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