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Source: Google Pomelli

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Apple Inc. is in discussions with key Indian banks and global card networks in preparation to start Apple Pay in the world’s most populous country.

• Apple Inc. is in discussions with key Indian banks and global card networks to start Apple Pay in India around the middle of 2026.
• Apple is talking to ICICI Bank Ltd., HDFC Bank Ltd. and Axis Bank Ltd., as well as payment networks Mastercard Inc. and Visa Inc. about the plan.
• Apple Pay in India is expected to support India's state-backed Unified Payments Interface, or UPI, alongside card-based payments.

Source: Bloomberg

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Stripe is considering a deal to buy some or all of PayPal Holdings, sources told Bloomberg, though talks are still in their very early stages and the deal may not happen.

The news comes the same day Stripe released its annual letter, giving updates on the business. The big news was that Stripe is making a tender offer that values the company at $159 billion, a 74% increase from last year. The investors buying employee shares this time around include Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital. Stripe will also buy back some stock, the letter said.

The latest valuation again makes Stripe one of the industry’s most valuable private companies. Based in Dublin, Stripe’s co-founder and CEO, Patrick Collison, told CNBC recently that going public was not on his list of priorities. PayPal Holdings (which includes the flagship product PayPal and its services, as well as other companies like Venmo) is currently a publicly traded company, with a market cap of around $40 billion.

PayPal’s stock rose slightly after reports of Stripe’s interest in an acquisition. Stripe declined to comment.

Source: TechCrunch

This is their first move toward building indigenous defence capabilities alongside our long-term mission of developing next-generation civil aviation platforms from India.

By bringing Sharang Shakti into LAT, they are building these capabilities in-house, from first principles, with the intent to deploy them across both defence and civil programs over time.

Source: Deepinder Goyal

Only two Indian apps crack India's top 20 by daily active users.

Indian apps hold 35 of the top 100, 123 of 300.

U.S. apps lead with 44 of top 100, 74 of 300.

Source: Indiadispatch

I still remember the first days after launching my SaaS. It felt exciting - the product was live - but also strangely quiet. No rush of users. No flood of feedback. Just me refreshing analytics and hoping someone would show up.

I had built something I believed in, but belief alone doesn’t create growth.

After this experience of launching, I realized that one of my main challenges was getting my product out to the general public. I would spend hours looking through different directories and copying/pasting information about my product.

I would also fill out forms and track where I had already submitted my product for listing on these directories. This was a long, tedious, and very inefficient process.

I discovered ListingBott software and realized that instead of spending weeks listing my product, I could now submit it to hundreds of directories in minutes and receive results within days. This forced me to rethink how I would ensure visibility for my SaaS product. I began to notice a multitude of new traffic sources as I was receiving small amounts of traffic and new customers were signing up. Finally, I got the first indications that my product was valuable to others. With the initial signs of interest in my product and backlinks, I knew I was moving in the right direction with my SaaS project.

That’s when I tried Backlinker.ai. The AI handled outreach at scale — generating personalized pitches and connecting me with relevant opportunities. Over time I started earning quality backlinks. Domain authority grew. Organic traffic followed.

It didn’t happen overnight, but it happened.

As the brand matured, I wanted to appear in credible publications. Not random blogs — real places where readers trust the content. That’s where PR and strategic placements became important.

After using Presscart to help get placements in reputable publications, I found the process very transparent. I collaborated with each publication on content, was able to approve my placements and had access to know where my story appeared. The key to using Presscart was not to focus on the number of links, but rather the quality and credibility of the link.

Reflecting on how I used the tools available to me made me realize it was not that the tools replaced the work, but rather, they amplified it.

• I used ListingBott for distribution
• I used Backlinker.ai for authority building
• I used Presscart to help tell our story on trusted sites

The biggest lesson I learned from this experience is that building your product is only part of building a business. You need to focus on the distribution and visibility of your business as well.

If you're in the same position I was in when I launched my business, keep building your business and keep distributing your business and keep telling your story.

Growth usually happens quietly at first, then over time it grows into something big.

1) Infrastructure

• Multimodal data: extract structure from documents, images, and videos for the enterprise
• Agent-native infrastructure: support massive "agent-speed" workloads
• Multimodal creative tools: give a model whatever form of reference content you have and work with it to make something new or edit an existing scene
• Al-native data stack: how Al agents navigate context problems the evolution of BI tools
• Interactive video: starts feeling like a place we can actually step into

2) Consumer

• Al-native university: professors become architects of learning, curating data, tuning models
• Healthy MAUs emerge: consumers who aren't sick but want to monitor their health
• ChatGPT becomes the Al app store: developers can now tap ChatGPT's 900M users
• World models in storytelling: full 3D environments from text prompts

3) Crypto

• Privacy creates network effects: privacy differentiates chains and creates chain lock-in
• Prediction markets scale: become bigger, broader, and smarter
• Know your agent: agents will need cryptographically signed credentials to transact
• Staked media: not only embraces idea of having skin in the game, but supplies the proof

4) Enterprise fintech

• Systems of record lose primacy: the interface becomes a dynamic agent layer
• Vertical Al goes multiplayer: the collaboration layer becomes the moat
• Voice agents expand: handling entire workflows and customer relationship cycles
• Al-native banking infrastructure: streamlined and parallelized workflows

5) American Dynamism

• Al-native industrial base: companies built with simulation, automated design, and operations from day one
• Factory mindset: modular deployment of Al with skilled workers to make complex processes operate like assembly lines
• Physical observability: understanding what's happening in cities, power grids, in real time
• Autonomous scientific labs: labs that close the loop from hypothesis to experiment design

Darren Mowry, who leads Google’s global startup organization across Cloud, DeepMind, and Alphabet, says startups with these below hooks have their “check engine light” on.

The two once-hot business models are looking more like cautionary tales:

• LLM wrappers
• AI aggregators

LLM wrappers are essentially startups that wrap existing large language models, like Claude, GPT, or Gemini, with a product or UX layer to solve a specific problem. An example would be a startup that uses AI to help students study.

“If you’re really just counting on the back-end model to do all the work and you’re almost white-labeling that model, the industry doesn’t have a lot of patience for that anymore,” Mowry said on this week’s episode of Equity.

Wrapping “very thin intellectual property around Gemini or GPT-5” signals you’re not differentiating yourself, Mowry says.

“You’ve got to have deep, wide moats that are either horizontally differentiated or something really specific to a vertical market” for a startup to “progress and grow,” he said. Examples of the deep-moat LLM wrapper type include Cursor, a GPT-powered coding assistant, or Harvey AI, a legal AI assistant.

In other words, startups can no longer expect to slap a UI on top of a GPT and get traction on their product like they could, perhaps, in mid-2024 when OpenAI launched its ChatGPT store. The challenge now is to build sustainable product value.

AI aggregators are a subset of wrappers — they’re startups that aggregate multiple LLMs into one interface or API layer to route queries across models and give users access to multiple models. These companies typically provide an orchestration layer that includes monitoring, governance, or eval tooling. Think: AI search startup Perplexity or developer platform OpenRouter, which provides access to multiple AI models via a single API.

While many of these platforms have gained ground, Mowry’s message is clear to incoming startups: “Stay out of the aggregator business.”

Generally speaking, aggregators aren’t seeing much growth or progression these days because, he says, users want “some intellectual property built in” to ensure they’re routed to the right model at the right time based on their needs — not because of behind-the-scenes compute or access constraints.

Mowry has been in the cloud game for decades, cutting his teeth at AWS and Microsoft before setting up shop at Google Cloud, and he’s seen how this plays out. He said the situation today mirrors the early days of cloud computing in the late 2000s/early 2010s as Amazon’s cloud business started taking off.

At that time, a crop of startups sprang up to resell AWS infrastructure, marketing themselves as easier entry points that provided tooling, billing consolidation, and support. But when Amazon built its own enterprise tools and customers learned to manage cloud services directly, most of those startups were squeezed out. The only survivors were the ones that added real services, like security, migration, or DevOps consulting.

AI aggregators today face similar margin pressure as model providers expand into enterprise features themselves, potentially sidelining middlemen.

For his part, Mowry is bullish on vibe coding and developer platforms, which had a record-breaking year in 2025 with startups like Replit, Lovable, and Cursor (all Google Cloud customers, per Mowry) attracting major investment and customer traction.

Mowry also expects strong growth in direct-to-consumer tech, in companies that put some of these powerful AI tools into the hands of customers. He pointed to the opportunity for film and TV students to use Google’s AI video generator Veo to bring stories to life.

Beyond AI, Mowry also thinks biotech and climate tech are having a moment — both in terms of venture investment going into the two industries and the “incredible amounts of data” startups can access to create real value “in ways we would never have been able to before.”

Source: TechCrunch

This week's launch of 5 indigenous LLMs, ranging from Sarvam's 105B model to Tech Mahindra's Hindi-first educational AI.

Which one have you given a try yet, and what's your feedback on them?

Over the last two years at Microsoft, and previously as Chief Operating Officer at Instacart and a Vice President at Meta, Asha has helped build and scale services that reach billions of people and support thriving consumer and developer ecosystems. She brings deep experience building and growing platforms, aligning business models to long-term value, and operating at global scale, which will be critical in leading our gaming business into its next era of growth.

Matt Booty will become Executive Vice President and Chief Content Officer, reporting to Asha. Matt’s career reflects a lifelong commitment to games and to the people who make them. Under his leadership, Microsoft Gaming has grown to span nearly 40 studios across Xbox, Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, and King, which are home to beloved franchises including Halo, The Elder Scrolls, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Candy Crush, and Fallout.

Source: Microsoft