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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Travel fintech startup Scapia has raised $63 million in a fresh funding round led by General Catalyst, with continued participation from existing investors Peak XV Partners and Z47."We're still very young and very small in terms of the largeness of India. There's a large opportunity to scale the business into a larger customer base," said Anil Goteti, founder and chief executive of Scapia in a conversation with Mint.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.For all the noise around artificial intelligence—new models, new assistants, new tools—there’s a quieter shift underway. It’s not about which chatbot is smarter this month or which latest device has the most AI features. It’s about something far more fundamental: how people actually use these systems.Across workplaces, classrooms, and creative studios, the gap between people who get consistently good results from AI tools and those who don’t is widening.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.For years, companies have been looking to replicate the smooth conversational experience of ChatGPT with artificial-intelligence agents and chatbots on their websites. Now some are finding there might be value in cozying up to ChatGPT itself.OpenAI in recent weeks has seen a surge in businesses publishing so-called ChatGPT apps, including rollouts from Starbucks, Little Caesars Pizza and Wyndham Hotels last month.These apps are a way for users to engage with brands directly inside the ChatGPT interface, getting answers and advice on products and services.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.As a non-resident Bengali of my generation, I have witnessed with deep anguish the steady decline of West Bengal from its once-prominent position in India’s economic and intellectual landscape. What has been even more disheartening is the repeated pattern of large electoral mandates being given to successive governments—first the Left Front, and then the Trinamool Congress—followed by a growing sense of unmet expectations and a sense of repeated betrayal of trust.When Mamata Banerjee came to power in 2011, she carried with her a powerful promise of change: an end to decades of Left Front rule, which many believe had pushed the state into fiscal stress, industrial stagnation, and governance fatigue.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Broking firm Sahi has raised about $33 million in a funding round led by venture capital firm Accel Global, more than tripling its valuation to about $200 million, the company’s top executives told Mint.Less than a year ago, it had raised funds at a valuation of $60 million.“It has come on the back of the trajectory of the business in terms of how fast we have been able to grow, but more importantly, it's the quality of the business,” said Dale Vaz, founder and chief executive, Sahi.Accel Global led the round with a $20 million investment, with the rest coming from existing investors Elevation Capital and Accel Partners India. This takes the company’s total funding to over $43 million in under 18 months of operations.Founded in December 2024 by former Swiggy chief technology officer Dale Vaz and ex-Kotak Securities executive Manish Jain, Sahi offers a chart-first interface with features like real-time Greeks, open-interest tracking, technical indicators and one-click execution.“Since launch, we’ve been able to onboard about 400,000 demat accounts.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.A change in the way commissions are structured for onboarding clients to the National Pension System (NPS) may still fail to draw significant interest from distributors, experts said.Points of Presence (PoPs), the intermediaries that act as the primary customer interface for the NPS, can now earn 0.20% of the assets under management per annum as a trail commission in addition to a one-time onboarding fee of ₹200 when a new client is registered, the Pension Fund Regulatory Authority of India (PFRDA) said in a circular on 10 March.Before this, trail commissions—a recurring fee paid to distributors as long as a client remains invested—were not allowed. Distributors could only charge a direct fee of ₹200-300 per customer.PoPs are regulated institutions appointed by the PFRDA to provide services to all citizens seeking to open and operate their NPS accounts.

Her name is Lakshmi. She lives in a small village in the Krishna delta, Andhra Pradesh, where the fields flood in September and the nearest bank branch is a one-hour bus ride away. She wants to buy a buffalo, not as an aspiration, but as a business plan.

Chatbots don’t sound human by accident. Lots of work has gone into shaping that tone. Systems are trained to detect mood from text, infer context in a conversation and even respond with something resembling empathy or understanding.

India’s digital public infrastructure story has been remarkable. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) made digital payments a habit. CoWin demonstrated population-scale tech execution during a crisis.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. India’s banking regulator has asked digital payments facilitator the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to look into rising complaints of erroneous UPI Autopay debits, three people aware of the matter told Mint. Users of the Unified Payments Interface—a real-time instant payment system developed by the NPCI—began reporting involuntary autopay mandates and an inability to cancel such recurring payments towards the end of 2025.

Every week, artificial intelligence (AI) claims become more stratospheric. Earlier this month, Elon Musk told a podcast of his plans to put satellites housing giant data centres in space that would be run on solar power. “In 36 months, probably closer to 30 months, the most compelling place to put AI will be in space,” he said.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented a record ninth budget at a time of global uncertainty. In an interview, she spoke about the government’s efforts at creating more jobs, building industry’s competitiveness, facilitating easier cross-border trade and the investor interest in India’s defence production sector.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. If you could safely implant a chip in your brain to enhance your intelligence, would you? Some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful technologists want that future, including Elon Musk, who recently said he would ramp up production of his Neuralink brain chips this year as part of a noble effort to ensure humans can keep pace with superintelligent AI systems that might one day go awry.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The AI hack we unlock today is based on a tool—ChatGPT Translate.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. All over the world, millions of people have been doing something in private that’s now spilling into public spaces, on our sidewalks and in our open-plan offices alike. They’re…talking to their gadgets.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. As the world approaches the India AI Summit 2026 , the conversation on AI has evolved beyond algorithmic efficiency to encompass the more significant issues of digital sovereignty and ethics. A critical legal and ethical gap needs to be plugged: the definition of ‘AI accessibility.’ In India, the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPwD) Act of 2016 provides a robust legal framework for persons with disabilities (PwDs).

The ministry of road transport and highways has tweaked cab aggregator guidelines to ban advance tipping—a feature that allowed passengers to offer a tip upfront while booking a ride. What does this mean for the companies bracing for short-term friction, and how will incentive redesign to offset the long-term impact? Mint explains.Queries sent to Uber, Ola, Rapido and Namma Yatri following the 26 December notification did not elicit a response until press time.Advance tipping refers to a feature on ride-hailing apps that allows passengers to add a tip at the time of booking, before a ride is accepted or completed.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Mumbai: A plan by the National Payments Corp. of India (NPCI) to restrict an app to a little over a third of the overall transactions on fast payments platform UPI by the end of 2026 is a tough ask, regulators and financial sector experts said.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: India’s top consumer watchdog has imposed a penalty of ₹700,000 on quick commerce platform Zepto for using ‘dark patterns’ and misleading price disclosures, including drip pricing and basket sneaking. The Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) said Zepto's practices violated multiple provisions of the Consumer Protection Act, 2019.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It’s been nearly 10 years since the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) arrived in the Indian market and revolutionized how Indians make everyday payments. More than 636 million UPI payments worth nearly ₹82,000 crore were made on an average day in November.

In 2022, 74 years after Shannon's proposal, ChatGPT appeared, which caught the attention of the public, with some even suggesting it was a gateway to super-human intelligence. Going from Shannon's proposal to ChatGPT took so long because the amount of data and computing time used was unimaginable even a few years before. ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) learned from a huge corpus of text from the internet. It predicts the probability of the next word given the context: a prompt and the previously generated words.