Lending beyond the top 100 markets; How India is defining the future of work

Dear Reader,

After raising around Rs 125 crore and building a presence across online and offline channels, The Ayurveda Co is calling it a day. Co-founder Param Bhargava said the company expanded too quickly, scaling across channels and building out its senior team before the business was ready.

Meanwhile, Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, making one of the biggest bets yet on the open AI ecosystem. Hugging Face, used by more than 18 million developers and over 200,000 companies, hosts more than 3 million AI models. Nvidia says it will remain an open platform and will continue to support other clouds, frameworks and chipmakers.

Closer home, global software giant Adobe has acquired an Indian AI startup that’s just a year old. Founded last year by IIT Bombay alumni Dhruv Jaglan and Georgi Boby, Rilo lets users build and automate complex workflows using simple text prompts in plain English. This marks Adobe’s second acquisition of an Indian AI company, following its purchase of generative-video platform Rephrase.ai in 2023.  

In funding news, homegrown beauty and wellness platform VLCC has raised Rs 110 crore from alternative credit firm BlackSoil Capital. The Carlyle-backed company, which operates across 130 Indian cities and 11 countries, plans to use the capital to launch new products and expand its store network.

Lastly, Uber is cutting about 3,400 jobs—roughly 10% of its workforce—in a major corporate restructuring, as it moves ahead on its $10-billion robotaxi push amid growing competition.

In today’s newsletter:

• Lending beyond the top 100 markets
• How India is defining the future of work

Here’s your trivia for today: What app originally launched as a location-based check-in network for whiskey lovers called ‘Burbn’? (Scroll down for the answer)

In-focus

Lending beyond the top 100 markets

Business Nextgen Finance (BNF), founded by Pankaj Poddar, has raised Rs 215 crore in equity capital from institutional investors, including Beams Fintech Fund I, Baring Private Equity India Fund 6, and Saison Capital.

The non-banking financial company (NBFC) provides secured lending to small businesses beyond India’s top 100 locations. BNF aims to scale its presence across 1,000 locations, focusing on smaller towns where traditional underwriting frameworks often struggle to accurately assess a business’s viability.

Key takeaways:

• BNF’s loans typically range between Rs 5 lakh and Rs 30 lakh, with an average ticket size of Rs 10 lakh to Rs 12 lakh and an interest rate of 17-18%.
• Rather than relying solely on conventional income documents or property values, its underwriting process assesses a borrower’s ability to generate cash by evaluating the underlying business and stock.
• The company targets assets under management (AUM) of Rs 150 crore across 20-25 branches by FY27, with a long-term goal of surpassing Rs 3,000 crore.

Study

How India is defining the future of work

India has emerged as a global leader in workforce transformation, according to the Microsoft 2026 Work Trend Index, a report on the state of AI at work.

Across offices in India, professionals are moving beyond basic AI tasks to manage complex, automated workflows, reveals the new research by Microsoft, unveiled on Thursday in Bengaluru. This workforce transformation is redefining the daily grind of employees as they move from repetitive work to high-value supervision.

Key takeaways:

• The study, across 20,000 AI users in 10 markets, shows that India has one of the world’s largest frontier workforces. Instead of letting technology replace them, these frontier professionals are steering it to unlock new opportunities.
• Despite the rapid adoption of highly automated systems, the findings show that Indian workers refuse to hand over final responsibility. Even as automation becomes increasingly sophisticated, human judgement is becoming more, not less, valuable, the study shows.
• All this is backed by a corporate culture that rewards reinvention. One in four Indian organisations rewards employees for workflow reinvention without immediate commercial results, compared with just one in eight globally. 

News & updates

• Roundtable: Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal discussed regulatory measures and power availability with stakeholders from the data centre industry. The discussions centred around ease of doing business and faster deployment of data centre infrastructure. 
• Flood relief: Garuda Aerospace is deploying drones in Nepal’s Rasuwa district to support flood relief and emergency response following severe flooding that damaged infrastructure and disrupted connectivity and supply chains.
• Tech training: Chip giant AMD and the University of Delhi have announced a partnership to train around 10,000 students in AI and semiconductor technologies over the next year.

What app originally launched as a location-based check-in network for whiskey lovers called ‘Burbn’?

Answer: Instagram

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