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The most important development for anyone building in India today is MeitY's unveiling of three indigenous AI foundation models, EKA-1, Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B, built by Bengaluru-based Socket AI and ZenteiQ under the IndiaAI Mission. For product teams, the question is less about whether these models beat frontier systems and more about what a government-backed domestic model stack changes: a new option for data-sensitive workloads, a potential cost and latency advantage for Indian-language and regulated-sector use cases, and a signal that the public sector will be a buyer and distributor of homegrown AI. If you are building on foundation models today, now is the time to benchmark these against your current stack on your own tasks rather than on leaderboards.
The rest of the day's stories point to the same theme: capital and attention are moving toward products with real distribution and real unit economics. Giva's $100 million raise sits alongside Skyroot Aerospace crossing a $1 billion valuation after Vikram-1 reached orbit, a reminder that Indian deeptech is now producing exits and outsized rounds, not just aspirations. Blue Ashva's ₹50 Cr secondary exit from iD Fresh Food shows that D2C consumer brands are being priced on durability, with early investors liquidating and new capital demanding proof of margins. Vartis launching UdhaarSaathi, a small-business loan marketplace targeting ₹1,000 Cr in disbursements, and Enmovil's plan to grow its forward-deployed engineering team from roughly 30 to 100–120 people, suggest the same thing from different angles: fintech and enterprise AI are winning by embedding into real workflows, and the hiring pattern is shifting toward engineers who sit with customers.
On the hardware and consumer side, Apple's record India-linked quarter, with $30.71 billion in global revenue up 12%, and Vivo's Y32 5G with an 8,000mAh battery and 44W charging show that the mid-range Android market is still competing on battery life and charging rather than novelty. Meanwhile, Binance's claim that 95% of tokens affected by a $6.3 billion hack have been replenished is a sharp reminder that custody and reserve transparency remain the make-or-break questions in web3, and that trust is rebuilt operationally, not through messaging. And Shortgun Games' seed round, backed by Mahesh Babu's minority stake, underlines that celebrity capital is still flowing into Indian gaming.
What to watch this week: test EKA-1 and the Dhīr models against your own production prompts and track how quickly MeitY moves them into public-sector procurement, because that is where the distribution will come from. Do this week: map which of your features depend on a single foundation model vendor and decide whether a domestic fallback is worth a spike.
MeitY has unveiled three indigenous AI foundation models, EKA-1, Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B, built by Bengaluru-based Socket AI and ZenteiQ under the IndiaAI Mission. EKA-1 is a 26-billion-parameter model trained on 7.5 trillion tokens, supporting more than 100 languages. The Dhīr models support English and 10 Indian languages and run offline on mobile hardware. ZenteiQ is releasing weights under Apache 2.0 through AIKosh.
$100 million
Apple earned $30.71 billion, or $2.10 per share, in the July-September period, up 12% from $27.47 billion a year earlier. ET Tech's Daily Top 5 also covered Giva's $100 million funding. Peak XV Partners is leading the round and is expected to put in more than half the amount, with Google, Samsung Ventures and Stargazer also expected to participate. Early backers India Quotient and Sixth Sense Ventures exited partially.
Binance says 95% of the affected tokens have been replenished after a $6.3 billion heist. Co-CEO Teng told a Hong Kong Fintech Week event that the exchange's hourly inflows and outflows had "pretty much normalised". Binance describes itself as being in very strong financial health following the incident.
₹50 Cr
Blue Ashva Capital has exited D2C startup iD Fresh Food, selling its entire stake for ₹50 Cr in a secondary deal. Upsurge India, Triumph Global Fund and White Whale Ventures co-led the transaction, in which approximately 1% equity changed hands. iD Fresh's revenue rose from approximately ₹558 Cr in FY24 to ₹681 Cr in FY25, then crossed ₹870 Cr in FY26. Blue Ashva will now focus on deeptech bets.
Actor Mahesh Babu has taken a minority stake in Mumbai-based Shortgun Games, which raised $1 million (approximately ₹ 8.7 crore at the time) in seed funding in August 2025. The amount of his investment is undisclosed. The studio is building Project Takedown, a 10 to 15 hour action-adventure game set in near-future Mumbai for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, targeting the US, Europe and Japan, with release expected by the end of 2028.
Skyroot Aerospace crossed a $1 billion valuation in May 2026, and its Vikram-1 became the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach orbit. YourStory suggests India's next space unicorn may still be at college, pointing to a pipeline of student-led talent entering the sector.
Vivo has unveiled the Y32 5G with an 8,000mAh battery supporting 44W fast charging and reverse charging. It runs on a Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 processor and has a 6.87-inch 120Hz LCD display. Vivo claims up to 37 hours of local video playback. The single variant has 6GB RAM and 128GB storage, expandable up to 2TB via microSD, with IP68 and IP69 ratings. Pricing and sale date have not been announced.
Vartis Platforms, parent of LenDenClub, has launched UdhaarSaathi, a digital loan marketplace for small businesses, targeting ₹1,000 Cr in disbursements by the end of FY27. It offers collateral-free loans of ₹15,000 to ₹2.5 Lakh through NBFC partners, with an average ticket of around ₹1 Lakh. Vartis takes no credit risk. Founder Bhavin Patel says the company is preparing for a potential IPO over the next 12 to 18 months.
Enmovil plans to expand its forward-deployed engineering team from around 30 employees to 100–120 within a year. The agentic AI company builds supply chain and logistics orchestration software and is scaling in the US and Southeast Asia. It has 175 employees and expects revenue to rise from approximately $5 million to $8–9 million by the end of the current financial year. It has raised around $8 million to date.
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The 9:15 brief
Top Indian tech and product stories every morning at 9:15 IST. Every number sourced and dated.
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