Anil Kumar, the accidental matchmaker; India as a hub of AI-driven adtech

Hello,

AI agents could soon become the centre of our digital lives. 

At Computex 2026, a premier global technology and AI exhibition in Taipei, Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano R Amon said 2026 would be “the year of agents” as AI evolves beyond responding to prompts and starts taking actions on behalf of users.

At the same event, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang highlighted the growing importance of connectivity in powering next-generation AI infrastructure. 

Elsewhere, Microsoft has unveiled a slew of AI initiatives at its annual software developer conference Microsoft Build in San Francisco: Scout, an ‘always-on’ assistant; new unmetered agentic AI models; and Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a desktop machine that runs personal agents and AI models. 

Meanwhile, referring to Google’s recent capital raise of $80 billion to support its AI infrastructure efforts, Uday Kotak, Founder & Director, Kotak Mahindra Bank, has given a wake-up call to Indian companies to invest in the future. 

“Now that IPL is done and dusted, time for India to focus on business of business,” he wrote on X. 

In other news, sportswear platform Agilitas has raised Rs 225 crore from Nexus Venture Partners and Rainmatter by Zerodha to strengthen its capabilities across manufacturing, brand building, retail, and technology.

Lastly, here’s a service that lets you hire people to carry your bags or push your toddler’s pram while you shop. Is this convenience or entitlement? 

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Anil Kumar, the accidental matchmaker
• India as a hub of AI-driven adtech

Here’s your trivia for today: What do the prisoners call the escape tunnels in the movie The Great Escape?

In-focus

Anil Kumar, the accidental matchmaker

Anil Kumar spent over a decade and a half in American academia and consulting before his own bruising search for love convinced him that Indian matchmaking was broken. Seventeen years and several near-death experiences later, Jodi365 is a profitable, growing business.

This is the story of how a PhD in hydrodynamics built an elite matrimonial service. 

The right fit: 

• From his mid-20s to mid-30s, Kumar tried every major online platform, Indian and American. Through all of it, he noticed that the existing matrimonial platforms were failing. The sites felt like instant-engagement factories. The dating apps, clones of American originals, were too provocative. There was nothing in between.
• In early 2009, Kumar conceived of Jodi365 to find the right match at a pace that is right for you. It aims to be a sensible hybrid between the traditional matrimonial sites and the emerging dating apps.
• When Kumar gets involved, at what the company calls its signature tier, the onboarding session rarely lasts less than two hours. Every question becomes a conversation. Must-haves are separated from nice-to-haves. Preferences are probed as spectrums: what is ideal, what is not ideal but still acceptable, what is a hard line. “Think of me not as a shopkeeper peddling finite goods in an inventory,” Kumar says. “Think of me as a headhunter.”

Report

India as a hub of AI-driven adtech

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the global advertising industry, creating significant opportunities for India to emerge as a leading hub for advertising technology, says a new report by Redseer Strategy Consultants.

The report titled 'Artificial Intelligence: The Next Growth Catalyst in Advertising' highlights that AI is reshaping every major layer of the advertising ecosystem, from media buying and audience targeting to creative production, measurement, commerce, and attribution.

Key takeaways: 

• The report points out that India has a substantial foundation for AI-led innovation, supported by around 2.7 million annual engineering and technology enrollments, 20-24 million GitHub developers, and nearly 1,900 GCCs generating $65 billion-75 billion in exports annually.
• As AI-native platforms, conversational assistants, and agentic commerce gain momentum, India is well-positioned not only to support the global transition but also to produce the next generation of global adtech champions.
• Technologies such as machine learning-led bidding systems, identity graphs, transformer-based recommendation engines, and agentic advertising infrastructure are increasingly becoming central to the ad industry’s evolution.

News & updates

• SpaceX IPO: Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to fix its IPO price at $135 per share to raise a record-setting $75 billion, according to a source familiar with the matter, Reuters reported. The ​company plans to sell 555.6 million shares. It is aiming for a valuation of $1.75 trillion, two other people said.
• Meta’s memo: Meta has scaled back parts of its plan to track mouse movements, keystrokes, and other actions of employees to use as AI training data, after employees expressed concerns. Employees can now pause the data collection for up to 30 minutes at a time. They can also request for exemption from the initiative. 
• Gag on Google: UK media websites, online publishers, and news organisations can now prevent Google from using their articles in AI search. They can block their content from appearing in Google’s AI summaries in UK search results, the British competition watchdog has announced.

What do the prisoners call the escape tunnels in the movie ‘The Great Escape’?

Answer: Tom, Dick and Harry

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