The Ken

Delivering sharp, original, insightful, analytical journalism about business and start-ups across India since 2016.

[The Ken @TheKenWeb]

Phones. TVs. Refrigerators. Homes. Hair transplants. MRI machines.

Bajaj Finance has lent for all of them — and somewhere along the way, became bigger than the business it was once a footnote to.

Episode 2 of Intermission → May 11.

[The Ken @TheKenWeb]

The story of how Jio Financial Services was born is nothing short of a magic trick.

In Rohin's words, it was like a 1,600-pound gorilla emerging from the mist!

Episode 2 of Intermission covers this in the larger story of how Bajaj Finance got built: https://t.co/cRAo9gBTuz

[The Ken @TheKenWeb]

India built a Rs 50,000 crore MSME fund to fight VCs’ tech bias. It still became a tech backer

Of the 750 companies the fund has invested in, 7 of 10 are tech-heavy—defying the fund’s intention of backing traditional manufacturers

Read in today's story https://t.co/dm4V24u1Fr

[The Ken @TheKenWeb]

When a bonus is not really a bonus

A misnomer, bonuses declared by companies like LIC and Reliance Industries are neither free nor a reward, just shareholders’ own money, handed back to them as shares

Read in today's Ka-Ching!: https://t.co/ipTo77F2Sx

[The Ken @TheKenWeb]

Where are Emergent’s users?

Invisible users generating extraordinary revenue

Listen on today's Two by Two: https://t.co/7UnkNWbGqC

[The Ken @TheKenWeb]

Listen on Spotify: https://t.co/yUNdW5baSu

Or Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/xvvR8YdLky

[The Ken @TheKenWeb]

Google is now Andhra Pradesh's first private electricity company. You'll be paying for that

Andhra Pradesh handed Google its own electricity licence to attract data centres. The state grid will be picking up the tab

[The Ken @TheKenWeb]

Lossfunk is the third space for Indian AI, beyond industry and academia

A look into the making of a ‘cosy home’ for ‘independent researchers’

Listen on today's Zero Shot: https://t.co/J7BuffVLIN

[Sakshi Sadashiv @sakshi_sadashiv]

Across the country, people are recording themselves cooking, cleaning, folding clothes and moving through their homes, earning ₹250-300 a task from data-collection companies…
1/4

[The Ken @TheKenWeb]

Tesla and Figure AI are building robots to act like humans. Indian workers are teaching them how...

…for a few hundred rupees. It may be a Faustian bargain, once again

Read in today's story: https://t.co/ktegI2rEWN

[The Ken @TheKenWeb]

Stock-market investors go all out on an energy-hungry India

And they don’t care what the electricity source is

Read in today's Long and Short: https://t.co/GBpB3nS8su

[The Ken @TheKenWeb]

The AI gold rush is over. The emperors are cashing out

Three AI giants are heading to public markets at the same time. The startups meant to follow them are disappearing

Listen on Spotify: https://t.co/XPrI3cfsGB

Or Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/xvvR8YdLky

[The Ken @TheKenWeb]

Dr. Alok Kulkarni, who consulted with IIIT Dharwad talks about the need to introspect on the basics of the system before the symptoms become even harder to undo.

Sign up to read: https://t.co/TAzfl8aIp1

[The Ken @TheKenWeb]

65 IIT students have died by suicide between 2021 and 2025. And last month, IITs were asked to create a high-level committee to figure out why students suicides are a regular occurrence.

Dr.

[The Ken @TheKenWeb]

Alok Kulkarni, who consulted with IIIT Dharwad talks about the need to introspect on the basics of the system before the symptoms become even harder to undo.

Sign up to read: https://t.co/TAzfl8aIp1

[Seema Singh @Singh10Seema]

Biomass is back in action. Maruti is prioritizing biogas over hybrid. This company is doing something different with biomass—high value chemicals, stuff big oil companies or Reliance never paid attention to. I write in @TheKenWeb today: https://t.co/IEtZ94V5EQ

[Nithin Kamath @Nithin0dha]

We keep hearing that retail Indians are borrowing too much, but despite all the noise, credit penetration in India remains relatively low and a significant population remains credit-starved.

That said, to the extent that individual Indians do have credit, I think Bajaj Finance has done more to improve access than even many of the bigger banks. In a lot of ways, they've been pioneers.

They took loan approvals from 3–5 days to 3 hours to, eventually, 3 minutes. They are also great at leveraging data. They track how old your appliances are and figure out your refrigerator is about to need replacing before you've even thought about it, and walking into Croma or Vijay Sales with a list of 50,000 customers ready to buy. Bajaj Finance knew you better than your retailer did.

Having said that, businesses like Bajaj Finance and even Zerodha have had it relatively easy over the past decade. As India went online and consumers got access to easy credit and the ability to invest easily, we kind of rode that wave. But as the saying goes, success attracts competition. With all the new players now wanting to be lenders, including us (@zerodhacapital ) with our secured business, the future will be interesting, to say the least.

Almost done with Episode 2 of @TheKenWeb's Intermission, and this one is on the giant that is Bajaj Finance, what it took to build that machine, and what it means for the future of credit in India. It’s free to watch. Link in comments.

Disclosure: Zerodha had a small part in the making of Intermission.

[Seema Singh @Singh10Seema]

Betting today runs on trust, direct peer-to-peer transactions on our famed UPI. There is no mule network the authorities can track, or unsuspecting victims who would make a complaint. @mrun_kulkarni has a brilliant, first-hand story today: https://t.co/hE9aGyRyMh

[Praveen Gopal Krishnan @peegeekay]

Pretty interesting story by Alok Kulkarni, a psychiatrist at an elite engineering campus on why suicides persist at IITs.

The entire piece is great and I recommended reading in full, but there's one specific thing that made me pause.

[Praveen Gopal Krishnan @peegeekay]

Equity has long been sold as indispensable to any portfolio worth its salt by the financial-services ecosystem. Not having a tidy part of your money in stocks or equity mutual funds is considered outdated, even scoffed at, in India

https://t.co/56AyoJaoAw

[Aakriti Bhalla @aakriti_bhalla]

Varun Beverages is the largest bottler for PepsiCo in India.

It even delivered 1000%+ returns to its investors between 2020-24 period.

But now that relationship with the beverage giant is changing, thanks to deletion of one clause in their exclusivity agreement.