Wellness Financial News

₹290 crore in a Series B funding round led by Bertelsmann India Investments, as the company looks to deepen its presence and expand its rural storefront network, Ankur Dahiya, co-founder and chief executive told Mint.“We started in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana and we feel its the right time to expand our footprint in the same Ganges belt,” said Dahiya. “Secondly, we want to increase our penetration in the areas we're present.”The fundraise comes as Rozana scales its hybrid rural commerce model—combining neighbourhood storefronts and centralized warehouses with a network of women-led last-mile partners—at a time when relatively few startups are focused exclusively on India’s rural e-commerce opportunity.The fundraise was led by German conglomerate Bertelsmann's local venture capital arm, Bertelsmann India Investments (BII) with participation from Fireside Ventures, US-based Spark Growth Ventures, FE Securities and a few family offices.The deal was majorly a primary investment with a small component of secondaries to give early angel investors an exit.

Mint.With BluSmart, Eversource aims to enter consumer mobility, expanding beyond the business-to-business fleet (B2B) model of Lithium Urban Technologies into the business-to-consumer (B2C) ride-hailing market, one of the people cited above said. Both people requested anonymity.Since the plan involves assets under insolvency proceedings, no valuation has been discussed at this point, the other person said.

NEW DELHI: India’s gadget buyers are shunning inexpensive smartwatches, a category that saw a massive surge in demand until two years ago. A lack of customer enthusiasm for barebone alternatives to the benchmark Apple Watch as well as existing buyers finding them unworthy of a second-time purchase, have caused smartwatch sales in the country to drop to its lowest in sales volumes and revenue in four calendar years.Data sourced by Mint from market researcher International Data Corporation (IDC) India showed that 28.9 million smartwatches were sold in 2025, generating net revenue of $780 million.

The Estée Lauder Companies has signed an agreement to acquire the stake it doesn’t already own in Indian luxury beauty company Forest Essentials, with the transaction expected to close in the second half of 2026, said Stéphane de La Faverie, president and chief executive officer of The Estée Lauder Companies.The deal completes an 18-year partnership with the luxury Ayurveda brand, which was founded by Mira Kulkarni.Forest Essentials sells Ayurvedic skincare and haircare products and competes with premium labels such as Kama Ayurveda. Estée Lauder had a 49% stake in the company in 2013, which it increased from a 20% stake it took in 2008.Speaking to Mint, La Faverie, said, “Today, this brand is the leader in prestige skincare in India, which is still a very small segment of the larger beauty business in India.

For investors keen to move from commission-based mutual fund advisory to fee-only advice, a common question is: How can I shift my portfolio from a mutual fund distributor (MFD) to a registered investment adviser (RIA) without disrupting investments or triggering avoidable taxes?The shift essentially involves moving from a regular plan, where commissions are built into the expense ratio, to a direct plan, which excludes distributor commissions and typically has lower costs. In the latter, you pay a fixed fee to the RIA.Investors broadly have two options.

Last week, India’s statistics ministry released its first estimates of gross domestic product (GDP) and other associated national accounts data with 2022-23 as the base year for a new GDP series. This is the second major economic indicator after the consumer price index (CPI) to have seen a base revision. Both these indicators had been using 2011-12 as base year, rendering them more than a decade old.

Cognizant says it is focusing on designing and executing AI projects better than rivals, rather than relying mainly on price cuts to win business.“So this is something that we are very careful when we first review the deal before we submit our bids. We look at very carefully how the need is constructed, and what is the solution because you don't win some of these deals on price point.

On National Science Day each year on 28 February, we rightly celebrate discovery and innovation. India’s scientific community has earned that recognition. However, the role of science in national life has changed in ways that are not immediately obvious.

Exits from international subsidiaries and associate companies in Japan, Finland and Sri Lanka in the financial year 2026 have narrowed the list of loss-making foreign companies for Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd, which is resetting its international business to back profitable businesses.The exits from international subsidiaries and joint ventures in the three countries have helped Mahindra and Mahindra shed companies with total annual losses of about ₹313 crore or 2.2% of its consolidated profit of ₹14,073 crore as of 31 March 2025.With these exits, the major loss-making foreign subsidiaries of the Mumbai-based company have narrowed down to companies in the US, Turkey, Mauritius and Germany, which together posted losses of ₹670 crore, or 4.7% of the company’s consolidated profits for FY25.Mahindra’s strategy to curb losses in its international businesses has come into focus after its exit from its Japanese subsidiary, Mitsubishi Mahindra Agricultural Machinery, on Monday, which it said will help reduce losses from a business it acquired in 2015.“On completion of the liquidation procedure, the promoter group would not have to incur the annual loss as well as fund these losses,” the company said in an exchange filing on Monday.The company’s renewed focus on exiting loss-making international businesses to double down on its high-growth areas and markets comes at a time when group chief executive Anish Shah is set to complete five years at the helm next month.Since taking over in 2021, Mahindra under Shah has exited several key international loss-making businesses as it seeks to increase profitability.

Mint.Today, Milky Mist is one of India’s fastest growing milk product brands with a 30% compounded annual growth rate between FY23 and FY25. Last fiscal year, the company clocked revenue of ₹2,350 crore with a product range that spans the entire milk spectrum—paneer, ghee, butter, cheese, yogurt, ice cream, chocolate and more.It is this exercise that has also emboldened him to try something few private sector dairy players have attempted so far—become a pan-Indian brand.The milk sector in India is dominated by strong regional players, almost all of them backed by state governments. They include Mother Dairy (Delhi), Nandini (Karnataka), Saras (Rajasthan), Aavin (Tamil Nadu), Milkfed (Punjab), Milma (Kerala) and Parag (Uttar Pradesh), to name a few.

In Indian boardrooms, ‘AI-enabled’ could overtake ‘digital transformation’ in its buzz quotient. If it’s new, app-based and comes with a valuation expressible in unicorns, it must be good, right? Well, India has always had a muscular pro-innovation bias. From UPI to ONDC, from Aadhaar to account aggregators, it has shown the world that technology can leapfrog infrastructure.

Kevin Warsh’s nomination to succeed Jerome Powell as US Federal Reserve chair has triggered a predictable frenzy of speculation centred on a single, narrow question: How hard will he push for interest-rate cuts? While such conjecture may be entertaining, it misses the forest for the trees. To focus solely on rate cuts is to misunderstand the Fed’s situation and the scale of the challenge awaiting its next leader.Warsh inherits an institution that, by any historical measure, is deeply fractured internally and lacks credibility externally.

₹9,200 crore, in annual revenue by 2030, by which time it aims to build 350 megawatts (MW) of operational capacity. The strategy contrasts with peers announcing gigawatt-scale investments, even as demand for AI infrastructure accelerates across the country.“We of course hope that in the next five years, we can scale our business up to $1 billion in annual revenue.

healthcare access, and household finances months after their exit from the company.However, employees noted that the CEO, Ankur Jain, was not at his residence during the demonstration.The group has also launched an Instagram page documenting employee grievances and the protest.The protest underscores the severity of the financial and governance crisis at B9 Beverages, once among India’s fastest-growing craft brewers. What began as delayed salary payments in late 2024 escalated into halted production, large-scale exits and mounting statutory disputes—raising broader questions around startup governance, employee protections, and accountability in venture-backed firms.Employees said repeated attempts to seek clarity on repayment timelines failed to yield firm commitments, prompting the decision to protest outside the promoter’s residence.“There is no other place for us to protest, except outside his house,” one employee said.Jain expressed regret over unpaid salaries.

order book can often speak louder than short-term price movements.It represents confirmed projects, assured revenue pipelines, and management’s ability to win and execute large contracts. When this order book outweighs the company’s own market capitalization, it signals a rare combination of strong demand and underappreciated scale.In this article, we spotlight the top four companies whose order books are larger than their market capitalization.The criteria: Return on equity (RoE) and return on capital employed (RoCE) above 12%, along with a debt-to-equity ratio below 1x.NBCC (India) Ltd is a Navratna Central Public Sector Enterprise under the aegis of the ministry of housing and urban affairs (MoHUA).The company provides value-added services in project management consultancy (PMC), engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) and real estate development.

Two recent blockbusters—Dhurandhar and Border 2, which earned ₹894 crore and ₹354 crore at the box office, respectively—helped boost business for tier-two and tier-three town cinemas by at least 20 percent over last year. However, the big challenge for theatre owners in the smaller markets is whether Bollywood can supply mass-market movies that can sustain this momentum through the year.

Big Tech’s acceleration of Agentic AI hangs like a sword of Damocles over traditional IT services. Consequently, global tech and Indian IT stocks lurch between optimism and unease as investors weigh the impact of these artificial intelligence (AI) tools on a services model built largely on billing human effort. The debate has moved beyond incremental automation to deeper concern over AI agents that can generate code, test applications and manage infrastructure.

NEW DELHI: Global investors have a positive outlook on India because of a stable, enabling environment and a pro-business approach in emerging sectors such as artificial intelligence data centres and processing of rare earths and critical minerals, the Asian Development Bank said.The multilateral bank’s private sector investment operations in India, a key part of its global investment portfolio, will continue to go up in sectors including renewable energy and financing of micro, small and medium enterprises, Isabel Chatterton, ADB’s director general of private sector operations department, said in an interview. Microfinance, agriculture, skilling and affordable housing too are areas that ADB finances.A fifth of ADB’s global investments is in India.

In November 2023, a few governments and technologists gathered at Bletchley Park to discuss artificial intelligence (AI), seeking to come to terms with the technology they were developing. The mood was sombre and fear was the dominant register.

The AI Impact Summit held last week brought many members of the global technology royalty to New Delhi. It also featured the launch of India’s first multi-billion parameter large language model, saw announcements of big investments in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and ended with an international declaration on the need for democratic diffusion of AI. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla set the cat among the pigeons by saying that AI may destroy the software services and business processing outsourcing businesses that are so important to the Indian economy.

Mint.The growth ambition comes as India’s premium personal care and wellness market intensifies, drawing aggressive FMCG majors, venture-backed startups and global brands. Cipla Health is betting that its pharmaceutical lineage and scientific credibility can help it scale brands into large consumer franchises.“We don't have as many large consumer health brands in India at the moment,” Puri said.