Rapido’s next growth focus; Inside Zetwerk’s moat

Hello,

The last day of TechSparks 2025 was all about momentum: growth, scale, and reinventing for AI.

Seasoned entrepreneur Ronnie Screwvala reflected on his investment in Lenskart during its early days, and how choice advice to narrow its focus sent it on the path it is today—especially now as it is set to enter public markets.

He touted reinvention as “an absolute must” for other entrepreneurs, and the importance of being resilient—something he believes will be crucial for AI ventures in the near future. 

Meanwhile, a panel featuring the founders of Observe.AI, CoRover.ai, and DevRev discussed how AI agents are quietly automating decision layers once handled by humans and transforming work as we know it. 

Groq CEO Jonathan Ross, on the other hand, had invaluable advice for those building with AI in the country: focus on the application layer. 

Lastly, Pocket FM is betting on nostalgia to resurrect a classic Indian pop culture icon: Shaktimaan!

The audio-series startup has recently launched Shaktimaan Returns to kickstart the larger plan of building an Indian superhero universe.  

In all, it’s been an exciting few days of insightful panels and interactions with the leading entrepreneurial minds of the country, centred on AI, the newest tech sensation that’s sweeping the nation. 

Don’t worry, if you missed it, we’ve got you covered. Catch all the action from the past three days here.

See you next time!

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Rapido’s next growth focus
• Inside Zetwerk’s moat
• NVIDIA’s Dhupar on AI’s hardware-led shift

Here’s your trivia for today: Which Indian movie holds the record for the most songs?

TechSparks

Rapido’s next growth focus is non-metros

Bengaluru-based bike and auto mobility platform Rapido is going full throttle beyond metros, expanding across India’s Tier II and III cities. Co-founder Aravind Sanka calls this the company’s next big wave of growth.

“We’re now present in every district headquarters, from Jhansi to Siliguri and across smaller towns,” said Sanka, during a fireside chat with Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory, at TechSparks 2025.

India on the move:

• With an average ticket size of Rs 100, the platform facilitates around Rs 50 crore worth of rides daily, though, as Sanka clarified, this figure reflects total customer spending on the platform, not company revenue.
• Sanka said the platform now facilitates more daily rides than the local metro system—a sign, he said, of how India’s mobility needs are being met outside traditional infrastructure.
• He said that in larger cities, about 35% of rides come from women. “Over time, we’ve worked hard to change their perception about safety.”

TechSparks

Inside Zetwerk’s moat

Zetwerk’s founders revealed what makes their manufacturing platform nearly impossible to replicate: a database of 60,000 suppliers mapped across 200 data points each, built over seven years of technical underwriting.

In a conversation with YourStory Founder and CEO Shradha Sharma at TechSparks 2025, co-founders Amrit Acharya and Srinath Ramakkrushnan described how they've built what they call an “extremely hard to get in, extremely hard to get out” business model, one grounded in supplier intelligence, proprietary technology, and millions of manufacturing transactions.

Make from India:

• The company has processed close to a billion AutoCAD files, and now trains its own language-vision models to match new drawings to past ones, identifying the right vendor, price, and quality controls instantly.
• Zetwerk’s footprint now spans India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, Germany, Spain, Eastern Europe, Mexico, and the US. About 30% of revenue comes from overseas clients, primarily in the US and Western Europe.
• Acharya said Zetwerk has already enabled the creation of 1 one lakh jobs indirectly, and the goal is to reach 1 million. The company is growing at 30-40% annually and expects to continue this momentum in the future too.

TechSparks

NVIDIA’s Dhupar on AI’s hardware-led shift

For years, the popular understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) has been shaped by the idea that it is simply software that automates or accelerates tasks. However, Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, South Asia, NVIDIA, believes the breakthrough came through the hardware that made modern neural networks workable at scale. 

During a fireside chat at TechSparks 2025, Dhupar expanded on the symbiotic relationship between software and hardware, the industrialisation of intelligence, and how India can become a hub for intelligence production by utilising its vast reserves of data and talent. 

News & updates

• AI safety: Seven families filed lawsuits against OpenAI, claiming that the company’s GPT-4o model was released without effective safeguards. Four of the lawsuits address ChatGPT’s alleged role in suicides, while the other three claim that ChatGPT reinforced harmful delusions.
• AI infra: A consortium of around 20 banks is providing a project finance loan of about $18 billion to support the construction of a data centre campus linked to Oracle in the US. The data centre campus is part of the $500-billion Stargate initiative to build AI infrastructure across the US.
• All about chips: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he had asked Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. for more chip supplies as AI demand remains strong. Nvidia’s three AI memory chip suppliers—SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics, and Micron Technology—have all scaled up “tremendous capacity” to support the company, he said.

Which Indian movie holds the record for the most songs?

Answer: Indrasabha. The 1932 film features a total of 72 musical numbers.

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