One Thing Today in Tech One Thing Today in Tech

Agnikul Cosmos, a space launch vehicle startup in Chennai, yesterday successfully tested its first technology demonstrator rocket, Agnibaan, that showed its one-piece 3D-printed engine worked as intended, in a sub-orbital mission. To understand the significance of this success, Forbes India spoke with Narayan Prasad, chief operations officer at Satsearch, a Netherlands headquartered marketplace for the space industry, and co-founder and director of research and operations at Spaceport SARABHAI, a space economy think tank in India.

A year after it first announced the plan, the Reserve Bank of India yesterday launched a Fintech Repository that the regulator hopes will foster innovation by allowing it to stay abreast of the cutting edge of tech in the industry. To get a sense of why fintech entrepreneurs are welcoming this move, Forbes India spoke with Manish Kumar, co-founder and CEO of KredX, a startup specializing in supply chain finance.

The demand for data centres in India is surging, driven by everything from the expansion of the so-called global capability centres to the rise of our digital economy and the laws around localization of data as required under the data protection rules. In this episode, Arjun P Gupta, founder and CEO of Smart Joules, in New Delhi, which provides HVAC management and energy efficiency solutions, offers a quick overview of some of the practical challenges we face in powering India’s data centres with green energy.

Google’s large investment in Flipkart comes as a pleasant surprise even to seasoned investors in India’s digital economy – at a time when late-stage funding is yet to return, and the funding winter continues even as the monsoons will be a welcome relief from record heat waves across the subcontinent. 

Abhishek Goyal, co-founder of Tracxn, and an early investor in Flipkart, reckons the deal could be a straightforward bid to win a large account for Google’s cloud business. But as the funding turns the spotlight on India’s e-commerce, there are several noteworthy developments in the sector, he says.

Google is reportedly ready to make its Pixel phones in India, starting with the Pixel 8 to be assembled at a Foxconn International plant in Tamil Nadu. Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint Technology Market Research, and Navkendar Singh, associate vice president at IDC India, unpack the big picture here. Google is starting small, but has the heft to scale in a massive market by sheer numbers that is far from saturated. The long-term play is also about tapping the maturing electronics ecosystem in India over the next decade and beyond.

Why are some of India’s best-known fintech startups, but also others, engaging in what is popularly called a “reverse flip” to move their holding parent entities back to India from countries such as the US, Singapore and so on. It can be a fairly complex, time-consuming process, but these companies – Groww, PineLabs and Razorpay are in the news – feel it’s worth the trouble. In this episode, Keyur Shah, Partner and Leader – Financial Services Tax, EY India, succinctly unpacks this trend.