The CapTable

31/01/2026

Walk into a supermarket. Pick up a tin of Darjeeling tea.
What you don’t see? Rocks, rain, and chemistry quietly pulling carbon out of the air.

Indian climate tech startups are turning farms into carbon sinks, using science that actually holds up under scrutiny — measurable, verified, permanent.
From tea gardens to the ocean floor, carbon is being locked away for 10,000+ years.

And India might just be building the most credible carbon market in the world.

The real question: Can science scale faster than climate change?

Full story in the Captable deep dive.

29/01/2026

Aakash was supposed to be Byju’s safest asset.
Offline. Profitable. Old-school solid.

Five years after the deal, people close to the situation are still asking a basic question:

Who actually controls Aakash?

Newly surfaced letters show two sides telling completely different stories about what happened inside Aakash.

Byju’s resolution professional says key votes diluted its rights.
Directors of a major Aakash shareholder say they weren’t even informed that those meetings happened.

We’re talking boardroom votes, changes to Aakash’s articles, and a rights issue that shifted shareholding — all at a time when lender deals, Singapore entities and a Manipal rescue had already complicated the cap table.

What was a “closed acquisition” clearly wasn’t.

This is no longer just a Byju’s collapse story.
It’s a control story — about how power can move through tranches, debt, and paperwork.

Aakash was meant to be the crown jewel.
Now it’s the biggest question mark.

Full story 👇

Aakash was meant to anchor Byju’s offline ambitions. Instead, delayed payments, lender deals, Singapore vehicles, boardroom battles and a contested rights issue have turned the acquisition into a multi-layered ownership fight, where control is disputed and the original deal still remains unfinishe...

24/01/2026

India’s coffee boom looks loud ☕️
New cafés. New brews.

But the real winners? - Beyond the cups and beans?
👉 Coffee machines!

They make money when cafés open, scale, upgrade, or even shut down.
This isn’t a café story. It’s an infrastructure story.

For more on the where the real profits of India's coffee boom lie - watch the video and subscribe to the Captable.

21/01/2026

PhonePe has won India’s biggest fintech race.
Nearly 1 in 2 UPI transactions run through it.
But is it enough for the fintech giant to win public market investors’ confidence?
🧵

With UPI, PhonePe built scale and dominance.
But it didn’t build a profit engine.
Payments are increasingly a commodity — low margins, intense competition, expensive distribution.
So PhonePe’s “next act” isn’t optional anymore.

Over the last few years, PhonePe has quietly placed multiple bets:
Insurance. Lending. Broking (Share.Market). App store. Commerce.
The pitch is clear: use the UPI base to build a full-stack fintech.
The ex*****on? Still unfolding.

Now, with Sebi approval in hand, PhonePe is inching towards what could be one of India’s biggest new-age IPOs (talk of $12–15B).
Public markets will ask what private markets didn’t:
Is dominance enough? Or does it need a second engine?
All details👇🏻

UPI made PhonePe a household habit and India’s biggest payments platform. But public markets won’t reward dominance alone. As it eyes a $12–15 billion IPO, PhonePe must prove its diversification bet—lending, insurance, broking—can become a second engine.

19/01/2026

The Unacademy–upGrad deal was supposed to be Unacademy’s clean exit from years of reset. A term sheet had been signed. Investors had accepted a steep valuation haircut. And then, on Jan 5, it collapsed. Why? 🧵

Officially, upGrad’s Ronnie Screwvala cited valuation.
But multiple sources said the deal had progressed far beyond “negotiations”—Screwvala had met Unacademy’s team in Bengaluru, and the transaction looked close to completion.

So what really spooked the buyer?
Sources point to deeper concerns: Unacademy’s structure as a patchwork of businesses, the complexity of integration, and an offline vertical that insiders describe as operationally painful and expensive to run.

The collapse now forces a bigger question: what is Unacademy without a deal?
Munjal has told employees the company will exit company-owned offline centres and pivot to a leaner model, and he will be back at the helm. The next chapter depends on one thing: ex*****on.

Read more👇🏻

From a near-done term sheet to a sudden collapse, the upGrad–Unacademy deal unravelled over deeper concerns than price: a fragmented business, bleeding offline centres, and integration risks. Now Munjal is rebuilding—franchise-first, online-led, burn-cutting—but ex*****on will decide survival.

17/01/2026

Launching to space is now 95% cheaper — Reusability changed the game. SpaceX proved it.
Now Indian spacetech startups want to turn rocket recovery into a real business.

Funding is flowing. Tech is getting bolder.
But the real question isn’t who builds the rocket…

It’s who builds enough demand to rocket - relaunch and repeat! 🚀

Read The CapTable to go beyond the reusable rocket hype.

15/01/2026

While cafés battle rising rents, labour churn, and discount wars, with typical profit margins of just 10–15% and roughly 20% shutting within their first year, someone else is getting paid upfront, facing far less price resistance, and profiting whether the market expands, consolidates, or merely upgrades.

That someone is the coffee machine industry.

India’s coffee machine market, valued at $194 million in 2024, is projected to nearly double by 2032. European manufacturers such as La Marzocco, Cimbali, and Franke have pushed aggressively into India, while distributors like Kaapi Machines generate steady revenue not just from equipment sales, but from installation, training, and long-term maintenance contracts worth lakhs annually.

The paradox is hard to miss. Even as café owners complain about thin margins, they continue to invest in better, more expensive machines, not to elevate cup quality, but to stay in business.

When margins hover around 12% and labour is the largest cost after rent, automation becomes a survival strategy, not a discretionary upgrade.

In India’s coffee economy, the safest returns aren’t brewed at the counter or grown on estates. They’re captured by those selling the tools of the trade.

By Anuj Suvarna

Read more 👇🏻

Coffee machine suppliers are capturing India's steadiest coffee profits while cafés struggle and growers face volatile prices

12/01/2026

PayU India has spent the last decade in a part of fintech most users don’t interact with.
It isn’t a consumer brand like PhonePe or Google Pay.
But it processes payments for large merchants, banks, and institutions. 🧵

That role shapes incentives. Backend payments companies operate under tighter RBI oversight, longer approval cycles, and much lower tolerance for failure. Growth isn’t just about adding merchants; it’s about staying within regulatory comfort.

CEO Anirban Mukherjee summed up the internal posture in one line: “Compliance is a product capability, not a checklist.”

At PayU, governance teams have moved closer to product and expansion decisions, not just review at the end.

With payments getting more competitive and margins tighter, PayU has been expanding into adjacencies tied to its existing flows—embedded credit, value-added merchant services, and tools for banks. The question is how much these moves change the business, and how much they simply deepen it.

With a likely 2026 IPO, its diversification game could become central to how the market reads PayU’s strategy.

Here’s a quick look at PayU India’s C-suite👇🏻

With margins tightening in core payments, the company is pushing into high-stakes adjacencies like credit and issuer-side tech as it seeks disciplined diversification that can sustain growth for the next decade.

10/01/2026

Behind the boom of India's online sellers is a quiet layer of YouTubers and seller influencers who are onboarding offline traders and small businesses — in regional languages, with trust that ecommerce platform tutorials were never able to build.

Free content pulls sellers in. Paid ops and account management is where the real business sits.

Creators aren’t just coaches anymore — they’re becoming fractional e-commerce COOs.

Follow The CapTable for more on the economics of seller influencers.

09/01/2026

🏏💸 Cricket is India’s biggest attention engine—and is buying a front-row seat.

ChatGPT sponsoring (Women's Premier League) as 'Premier Partner' signals a clear shift in how AI companies are now approaching India: away from quiet, product-led growth toward high-visibility, big-budget brand building.

Expect more ad dollars, more cultural partnerships, and a push to make AI feel like everyday consumer tech, not just a workplace tool.

READ MORE about OpenAI's big marketing push into India's biggest consumer touchpoint in this article!
Link in the comments.

08/01/2026

Kozhikode wowed Portuguese traders in 1498. Lucknow dazzled travellers in the 1800s.
Yet today, most traditionally prosperous cities lag behind newer cities in online shopping

Data shows that of 84 historically prosperous Indian cities, only 5 are e-commerce hotspots.
Strong bazaars, local manufacturing, community credit, and walkable markets still beat apps.

It’s not just income—it’s memory.
Generational wealth breeds restrained consumption, while migrant cities drive digital demand. To know more, read ’s new story in the HCES series

Read more 👇🏻

From Kozhikode to Lucknow, India’s historically wealthy cities resist e-commerce. Their centuries-old bazaars, community credit networks, walkable markets and generational shopping habits make clicking 'buy now' seem unnecessary

07/01/2026

For decades, India’s botanical extracts industry was a fragmented, largely invisible layer of the consumer health economy. Family-run firms supplied ingredients like ashwagandha, bacopa and amla to FMCG, pharma and supplement brands, mostly as a trading business.

That equilibrium is breaking. The sector is seeing rising M&A interest as well-capitalised, venture-backed manufacturers—Botanic Healthcare, Zeus Hygia and Ingex Botanicals among them, push consolidation, professional R&D and scale.

Unlike pharma or specialty chemicals, botanical ingredients rarely attracted PE interest. Low R&D, conservative growth and relationship-led sales kept valuations muted. Today, science, regulation and margins are pulling the sector into the spotlight.

By Anuj Suvarna

Read more 👇🏻

After decades in the shadows, India’s botanical extracts industry is beginning to attract serious capital, forcing a shift from small, family-owned trading houses to professionally run, acquisition-led platforms.