⏰ Inside Flipkart’s quick commerce playbook

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24 May 2025 View in Browser

Hello,   An AI super-gadget is in the works.   OpenAI is reportedly working on its first piece of consumer hardware—a compact device roughly the size of an iPod Shuffle. The project is being developed in collaboration with Jony Ive, the former Chief Design Officer at Apple.   At least, it won’t be a wearable. The first generation of AI hardware—Google Glass, Microsoft HoloLens, or Humane’s AI Pin—all disappeared into obscurity, but perhaps the hardware version of ChatGPT can hold ground.   Meanwhile, Google is taking on OpenAI’s Sora, and some say it even excels at video generation. Unlike Sora, Google DeepMind's Veo 3 can include dialogue, soundtracks and sound effects, and blurs the line between real and fake.   Back home, a homegrown LLM model has cracked the JEE Advanced 2025 paper.    Sarvam AI, selected for building India’s foundational LL, has unveiled Sarvam-M, a 24-billion parameter open-weights hybrid language model. The startup says it sets new benchmarks in Indian language understanding, mathematics, and programming tasks for its size.   In other news. Zepto Cafe, the quick-service food arm of quick commerce startup Zepto, has temporarily shuttered operations of 44 newly-launched stores across seven smaller North Indian cities amid supply chain constraints.   Got to cut your losses!   In today’s newsletter, we will talk about  Inside Flipkart’s quick commerce playbook Rewiring the campus recruitment system  GCCs driving global innovation agenda Here’s your trivia for today: Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is the highest-grossing concert tour by a woman. Which female singer had the second highest-grossing concert tour?

Interview Inside Flipkart’s quick commerce playbook In a country obsessed with getting things done, every company—from Blinkit to Flipkart—is working at a breakneck speed to deliver groceries and essentials in under 15 minutes. Leading Flipkart’s quick commerce push is Kabeer Biswas, who believes that the segment is the most intense form of supply chain management.    In a candid conversation, Biswas and Kanchan Mishra, BU Head of Flipkart Minutes, talk about scaling fast, building stickiness through essentials, and why quick commerce is one of the most operationally intense businesses in the country.   Snowballing momentum: Flipkart Minutes is seeing orders double every 45 days, according to Biswas. That growth comes from tapping into Flipkart’s core strengths—its customer base, warehousing, logistics, and data. Moreover, the platform has also seen Flipkart users return, shop across more categories, and spend more, creating a sticky loop of retention and convenience, Mishra adds. While essentials like vegetables and dairy are leading categories for the quick commerce arm, it is also seeing adoption picking up for fashion, beauty, personal care, and electronics. While Flipkart Minutes is similar in its approach to dark store expansion, its key differentiator is Flipkart’s data, Biswas says. This data makes it easier to pinpoint demand hotspots, what items are selling, at what price points, and at what frequency, which in turn makes setting up each store more efficient. Know More

Top Funding Deals of the Week CureBay: $21M | Series B CloudSEK: $19M | Series A2 and B1 Mythik: $15M | Seed

Startup Rewiring the campus recruitment system As the former CEO of the educational institution, Maharishi Markandeshwar Group, Vishal Sood saw that when it came to campus placements, institutional machinery often left out students from rural or Tier II and Tier III India.   That experience shaped what would become PlaceCom, the flagship product under AlmaBay, a Chandigarh-based startup founded in 2016 and incorporated in 2021. AlmaBay was initially founded to improve alumni engagement, but the team pivoted toward placements after recognising how deeply access was skewed in Indian higher education.   Smart recruitment: PlaceCom, through its AI modules, helps students prepare for interviews in regional languages like Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, and Tamil (currently being tested), as well as Bahasa Indonesia and Armenian. It creates custom responses to likely interview questions and also analyses their English pronunciation, posture, and articulation to offer feedback on soft skill areas. The platform has onboarded 30 contract clients to date, including NIT Delhi, DAV University, and Himachal Pradesh Technical University, which recently procured 20,000 user licences of the platform for students. The startup clocked Rs 3 crore in revenue in FY25 and has already raised $2 million from billionaire investor Bobby Kang. With a $5 million round in the works, the startup plans to expand in Southeast Asia through a partner in Jakarta and is eyeing further expansion into the Middle East and North America. Know More

DevSparks GCCs driving global innovation agenda Over the last five years, global capability centres (GCCs) in India have evolved from saving costs to driving innovation, and this transformation is poised to accelerate, with GCCs becoming bigger as well as better in the country’s tech landscape.    At DevSparks 2025, YourStory’s flagship event for the developer community in Bengaluru, a panel discussion titled “The tech powerhouses of tomorrow: How GCCs are redefining innovation hubs” spotlighted this shift.   Innovation engines: Kaushik Das, Managing Director, JCPenney India believes the clincher for GCCs in India has been hitting the right notes in terms of strategic outcomes for the parent company. This push towards innovation by GCCs is expected to significantly transform enterprise operations. GCC teams need to be adept not just in technology, but also in understanding the business domain, according to Telstra’s Vineet Mehta. This is expected to drive value to enterprises, ensuring innovation is not just another check mark on the list, but an effort to solve business problems. Given the context of innovation, the panellists noted that talent within GCCs has also evolved to meet rising expectations. Today, talent is much more multi-dimensional, bringing together tech skillsets, business knowledge, and an open mind to learn new things, which has also changed global perceptions of GCCs. Know More

News & Updates

Trump tariffs: Apple was given a severe warning by US President Donald Trump on Friday, who threatened to levy a 25% tariff on the company’s goods if iPhones were still made in India or any other non-US nation. Some Wall Street analysts have estimated that moving iPhone production to the US would raise the price of the Apple smartphone by at least 25%.  Exit west: OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky is exploring a sale of the adult-content social network that would value it at about $8 billion, according to Bloomberg. The London-based company, which hosts pornographic content forbidden on most other social networks, is reviewing a number of offers, stated the report. Cybersecurity: Tata Consultancy Services is conducting an internal investigation to determine whether it was the gateway for a cyberattack on UK's Marks and Spencer that compromised customer data and disrupted the retailer’s operations, FT reported. The Indian IT company, which has provided services to M&S for more than a decade, hopes to conclude the probe by the end of the month.

Did you know?

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is the highest-grossing concert tour by a woman. Which female singer had the second highest-grossing concert tour? Answer: Pink.

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