Honasa widens premium play; BharatGen’s Ramakrishnan spotlights sovereign AI

Hello,

Fintech firm Pine Labs has secured key regulatory approvals from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) across multiple payment aggregator categories, making the company the only player authorised across all three aggregator verticals.

According to the RBI’s list of authorised entities, Pine Labs Limited received the Payment Aggregator–Online (PA-O) licence for its digital payments arm, Pine Labs Online, in May this year. The company also has approvals under Payment Aggregator-Physical (PA-P) and Payment Aggregator-Cross Border (PA-CB) categories, covering both inbound and outbound transactions.

Meanwhile, payments infrastructure firm Juspay posted its first full year of profitability in fiscal 2025, even as global expansion and heavy engineering investments continue. The company reported a profit before tax of Rs 27 crore and a profit after tax of Rs 62 crore, with the latter boosted by deferred tax benefits.

Moving on to the world of technology, a whopping 97% of listeners cannot distinguish between artificial intelligence-generated and human-composed songs, a Deezer–Ipsos survey showed on Wednesday. The survey underscores growing concerns that AI could upend how music is created, consumed and monetised, Reuters reports.

With AI replacing humans in several fields, is there anything that AI can’t do?

A recent paper finds that social media posts generated by a variety of LLMs are "readily distinguishable" from those made by humans with 70–80% accuracy, "well above chance."

In other words, AI has yet to master the art of online toxicity!

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Honasa widens premium play
• BharatGen’s Ramakrishnan spotlights sovereign AI
• Women building India’s climate resilience

Here’s your trivia for today: What Roman gladiator led a slave revolt that became the subject of a 1960 Oscar-nominated movie?

Ecommerce

Honasa widens premium play

Honasa Consumer, the parent of personal care brands Mamaearth and The Derma Co, said quick commerce now contributes around 10% to its total revenue, emerging as one of its fastest-growing and efficient distribution channels across its focus categories.

Adding to its portfolio of emerging brands, Honasa has invested Rs 10 crore for a minority stake in oral care startup FANG, marking its entry into the premium oral beauty segment. The company said it sees oral care as the next phase of premiumisation within beauty, following the uptrend already seen in skincare and haircare.

New ventures:

• The omnichannel beauty and personal care company said the rise of quick commerce has helped expand access for smaller-ticket products.
• CEO & Co-founder Varun Alagh noted that oral aesthetics will be key to the beauty regime over the next decade, with the segment expected to be a $700 million opportunity by 2030.
• Mamaearth, one of the company’s earlier digital-first brands to jump on the omnichannel wagon, saw its fortunes back in green again after its inventory correction last year. The turnaround was primarily driven by the growing share of direct distributors in offline retail. 

Funding Alert

Startup: Waaree Energy Storage Systems

Amount: Rs 325 Cr

Round: Undisclosed

Startup: Bombay Shaving Company

Amount: Rs 136 Cr

Round: Series D

Startup: HRS Navigation

Amount: $5M

Round: Pre-Series A

TechSparks

BharatGen’s Ramakrishnan spotlights sovereign AI

The global expansion of AI has spurred a shift in India toward building sovereign AI capabilities that are developed domestically, governed by Indian institutions, and aligned with local contexts.

Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Principal Investigator at BharatGen, a government-backed AI initiative, speaking on behalf of the consortium centred at IIT Bombay, described this shift as both strategic and cultural. He explained that the goal is to move India from primarily adopting external technologies to building its own systems end-to-end.

Sovereign ecosystem:

• What makes this mission distinct is the emphasis on inclusion by design. The aim is not to localise systems after they are built, but to ensure that cultural preservation, dialectal diversity and accessibility are built into the foundations. 
• The consortium has built language models spanning billions of parameters and continues to scale up. These models include text-based systems, speech recognition and synthesis models and a vision-language model for document understanding.
• The sovereign AI approach is being tested through domain-level implementations designed for practical use. These include agricultural advisory systems accessible through WhatsApp, legal text and case retrieval support tools, finance models and systems for water and sanitation planning and monitoring.

Climate Change

Women building India’s climate resilience

As the climate crisis deepens, women-led organisations are proving themselves to be critical responders. 

In India’s climate-tech and circular economy space, women founders are rewriting the playbook, combining mission, impact, and gender inclusivity. The organisations they lead span app-based behaviour change, circular plastics, insect-biotech feed, zero-waste lifestyle, and grassroots climate resilience.

News & updates

• Quantum computing: IBM announced on Wednesday that it has built a new experimental quantum computing chip called Loon that demonstrates it has hit a key milestone toward making useful quantum computers before the end of the decade.
• Profit: Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics maker, said Wednesday that its third-quarter profit jumped 17% from a year earlier, driven by growth in its artificial intelligence server business.

What Roman gladiator led a slave revolt that became the subject of a 1960 Oscar-nominated movie?

Answer: Spartacus

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