Transactions that shaped 2025; AI experiments to enterprise solutions

This time, India’s markets themselves are going public.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) is set to issue approval this month for the country’s biggest bourse, the National Stock Exchange, to launch its stock market offering.

The approval will allow the NSE to prepare its IPO prospectus and is a crucial step in gaining IPO approval, given an ongoing legal dispute between the exchange and the regulator.

Elsewhere, the US Stargate AI initiative is getting a new avenue for its infrastructure buildout, with OpenAI and SoftBank Group investing $500 million each in SB Energy to expand data centre and power infrastructure. 

In further proof that AI investor appetite remains strong rolling into the new year, Andreessen Horowitz has raised more than $15 billion across five new funds less than two years after its last fundraising haul, of which $1.7 billion is for an AI infrastructure fund, $6.75 billion for a growth fund, and $1.12 billion focused on national interests like defence, housing and supply chain, the company said. 

Lastly, universally appealing tunes and lyrics are no longer prerequisites to being chart toppers. The key, instead, might be in going hyperlocal.

From Bad Bunny to Skai Isyourgod, locally specific music—rooted in accent, place, and cultural texture—is rapidly taking the streaming world by storm, and breaking long-held notions of what it takes to make it globally. 

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Transactions that shaped 2025
• AI experiments to enterprise solutions
• Leadership for first-gen students

Here’s your trivia for today: Which famous US inventor nicknamed his children “Dot” and “Dash”?

News

Transactions that shaped 2025

Accounting for roughly 75% of all retail digital payments in India by volume, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) serves as a powerful lens into the country’s economic trends.

In 2025, this proved to be especially revealing. It was a year of rapid shifts—from the sudden collapse of a multi-billion dollar gaming sector to a feverish rush for digital gold—the UPI data captured the many narratives that played out in 2025.

Digital frenzy:

• Annual transaction volumes surged to 228.3 billion, up from 172.2 billion the previous year, while transaction values climbed from Rs 246.8 lakh crore to Rs 299.7 lakh crore, according to NPCI.
• Digital gold witnessed a meteoric rise in investor appetite over the past year, with transaction values surging by a staggering 173% to reach a total volume of Rs 14,550.67 crore. This frenzy reached its zenith in October 2025, when festive-season buying pushed UPI spending to a record peak of Rs 2,290.4 crore.
• Last year delivered a fatal blow to India’s real-money gaming sector in the form of the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025. Consequently, monthly UPI transaction volumes, which previously averaged Rs 10,000 crore, plummeted to zero.

Startup

AI experiments to enterprise solutions

Founded in 2024, Aivar Innovations is an AI-first technology services startup that works with startups, technology-led businesses, and large enterprises to operationalise artificial intelligence across core business workflows. 

Earlier this week, the startup raised $4.6 million in seed funding, led by Sorin Investments, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners. The funding will be used to expand the startup’s geographic footprint across India, the United States, and the Middle East, strengthen its engineering and research teams, and deepen investment in its AI accelerators and go-to-market capabilities.

Enterprise AI adoption:

• Aivar positions itself as an AI Studio, working from use-case prioritisation and system design to deployment and long-term management. Engagements are structured around defined outcomes and short delivery cycles, typically six to eight weeks, extending up to twelve weeks for complex implementations.
• Aivar develops AI solutions using accelerators that combine reusable technology with custom features for each client. Convergent, the startup’s conversational AI platform, is built using an agentic architecture that allows multiple AI agents to operate within a single interaction.
• Since launch, Aivar has onboarded over 80 customers across fintech, healthcare and life sciences, logistics, retail, and D2C sectors. Around 80% of customers are currently based in India, with the remainder split between the US and the Middle East.

Social Impact

Leadership for first-gen students

When leadership development programmes talk about “confidence”, they often assume that it is already shaped by privilege: English fluency, urban exposure, inherited networks. For Nithyambika Gurukumar, Executive Director of the Aspiring Leaders India Foundation, that assumption is the first thing to be dismantled.

The Bengaluru-based non-profit runs fully funded leadership development programmes for first-generation low-income college students. In over a year since its launch in India, the Foundation’s approach has been informed by expanding what leadership can mean, and who gets to practise it.

News & updates

• Internet boost: The US Federal Communications Commission said on Friday it has approved SpaceX’s request to deploy another 7,500 second-generation Starlink satellites as it works to boost internet service worldwide.
• Approval: The US FAA has approved Boeing’s largest variant of its best-selling 737 MAX jet, the MAX 10, to move to the second phase of flight testing on the plane’s long-delayed certification campaign

Which famous US inventor nicknamed his children “Dot” and “Dash”?

Answer: Thomas Edison. He nicknamed his first two children, Thomas, Jr. and Marion, “Dot” and “Dash” in reference to Morse code.

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