Meetup Agenda:

• Q&A with Cursor team​ member
• ​Cursor power users share tips & workflows
• Meet with top builders from the cities below.

Register for events below:

• Bangalore - April 25, 2026
• Chennai - May 1, 2026
• Mumbai - May 9, 2026

A peer-reviewed CMU study (ICSE 2026) found 6 million fake stars across 18,617 repositories using 301,000 accounts - with AI/LLM repos the largest non-malicious category.

The definitive account comes from a peer-reviewed study presented at ICSE 2026 by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, North Carolina State University, and Socket. Their tool, StarScout, analyzed 20 terabytes of GitHub metadata - 6.7 billion events and 326 million stars from 2019 to 2024 - and identified approximately 6 million suspected fake stars distributed across 18,617 repositories by roughly 301,000 accounts.

The problem accelerated dramatically in 2024. By July, 16.66% of all repositories with 50 or more stars were involved in fake star campaigns - up from near-zero before 2022. The researchers' detection proved accurate: 90.42% of flagged repositories and 57.07% of flagged accounts had been deleted as of January 2025, confirming GitHub itself recognized these as illegitimate.

Key Points:

• Stars sell for $0.03 to $0.85 each on at least a dozen websites, Fiverr gigs, and Telegram channels - no dark web required
• VCs explicitly use stars as sourcing signals: Redpoint found the median star count at seed is 2,850, and firms run automated scrapers to find fast-growing repos
• An analysis sampling 150 profiles per repo across 20 projects and found repos where 36-76% of stargazers have zero followers and fork-to-star ratios 10x below organic baselines
• The FTC's 2024 rule banning fake social influence metrics carries penalties of $53,088 per violation - and the SEC has already charged startup founders for inflating traction metrics during fundraising

Source: Awesome Agents

You can now pay for Replit with UPI via Razorpay, alongside debit & credit cards.

Use Replit's Razorpay MCP to start accepting payments instantly.

Source: Replit

Nandan Reddy, co-founder of Swiggy is leaving the company and is also stepping down from the board.

Swiggy is bringing in CFO Rahul Bothra and co-founder Phani Kishan to the board as additional directors.

Reddy is expected to launch a new startup.

Group CEO Sriharsha Majety is now the only member of the founding trio still at the company. In 2013, they started logistics tech startup Bundl which became Swiggy in 2014.

CTO and co-founder Rahul Jaimini had left in 2020 for ed-tech startup Pesto.

Source: The Arc

OpenAI founder Sam Altman says, "To celebrate 3 million weekly codex users, we are resetting usage limits. We will do this every million users up to 10 million."

Source: Sam Altman

A user on X had tweeted today (hence deleted) that their confidentiality was breached when blinkit swapped their sensitive visa documents with someone else's application.

Blinkit, Zomato's quick-commerce app, lets customers upload PDFs for fast prints from dark stores, but a recent complaint about printing visa documents highlighted risks as operators review files, check them before packing, and store data.

Others shared mishaps like receiving a child's political map instead of court papers or a stranger's bank statements and PAN details. While Blinkit apologizes and claims to delete files after printing, many advise against using it for confidential info, favoring personal printers instead.

OFF/BEAT has raised ₹100 Crore in Seed funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

OFF/BEAT is a content and creator-led platform that leverages AI and tech for its build. Aman announced it last month after stepping back from boAt ops, calling it "Aman 2.0."

Source: Aman Gupta

Google is inviting AI-first startups to apply for Google for Startups Accelerator in India.

A three month, equity-free program for Indian AI startups building Agentic AI, Multimodal AI, Physical AI solutions or developing specialized Sovereign AI models.

Get expert mentorship across AI, Cloud, Product, Design and Growth, and so much more!

Applications closes on April 19, 2026.

Read more here.