Arvind's Newsletter

1.India Is Hot Trade Again as Funds Chase Trump-Era Winners: Bloomberg

Global funds are pouring money back into India, driving billion-dollar corporate financing deals and sending stocks prices to near a seven-month high, as investors bet that Asia’s third-largest economy can emerge as a winner in President Donald Trump’s trade war.

The NSE Nifty 50 Index surged to its highest level since October this week, fueled by optimism that India could be among the first to strike a deal with the US following upbeat comments by Trump. Corporate India has seized the momentum: Shapoorji Pallonji Group secured a $3.4 bn private credit deal, and Reliance Industries Ltd. locked in a $2.98 billion-equivalent loan, underscoring the rising appeal of the nation’s corporate debt to global investors.

2.Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India) nets over ₹1,200 crore after exiting stake in Porter, clocking 11-fold return: Mint

Peak XV Partners netted over ₹1,200 crore after exiting its investment in logistics company Porter’s latest funding round, a person familiar with the matter said. The profit was an over 11-fold return on investments of ₹116 crore across multiple rounds over the past decade.

Porter’s round, which was led by Kedaara Capital and Wellington Management and valued the company at $1.2 billion, had a mix of primary and secondary stake sales, with others such as Kae Capital also exiting.

Porter said last week it plans to use the funds raised to expand operations, build teams, and develop technology and operational excellence while continuing to set up a greener logistics network aligned with India’s decarbonisation efforts.

3.India releases first ever monthly employment data: April jobless 5.1%: Economic Times

5.1% is India’s official unemployment rate for April 2025 among individuals aged 15 and above,according to the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. The government will now publish this data monthly — instead of only quarterly for urban areas and annually nationwide.

Male unemployment stood at 5.2%, while female unemployment was slightly lower at 5.0%. Rural joblessness was 4.5%, compared to 6.5% in urban areas. Labour force participation was higher in rural India (58%) versus urban (50.7%). However, at 5.1%, the official unemployment figure is notably lower than the largely referenced private research firm Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy’s April estimate of 7.73%.

4.India’s space sector set to soar: Moneycontrol

India is gearing up to cement its position as a key player in the global space arena with the government actively encouraging private investment in the sector. And several states have come out with their space sector specific policies to attract investments.

Currently, India's space economy is valued at approximately $8.4 billion, representing 2% of the global market. The government has set an ambitious target to expand this to $44 billion by 2033, aiming for $11 billion in exports and a global market share of 7-8%.

This expansion is expected to be significantly driven by the private sector, with around 300 startups already active across various segments of India's space economy.

To further bolster this growth, the Modi government has established a Rs1,000 crore (approximately $118.6 million) Venture Capital Fund. Managed under the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe), this fund will be strategically deployed over five years to support startups at different stages of development.

5.Gene-editing breakthrough

A personalized gene-editing treatment successfully treated an infant with a rare genetic disease known as CPS1 deficiency, doctors announced yesterday. It marks the first time a patient of any age has been successfully treated via customised CRISPR gene editing. 

While CRISPR—which typically acts as molecular scissors, deleting faulty genetic code —has been approved to treat diseases like sickle cell and beta-thalassemia, these are relatively common diseases. CPS1 deficiency, which blocks the liver's ability to process ammonia, affects around one in 1.3 million children and is linked to specific mutations in each patient. Doctors used an advanced form of CRISPR known as base editing, which acts more like a "spell check" for genes and is capable of replacing individual bases with the correct code. 

Researchers hope the demonstration can be extended to treat millions of patients with rare or otherwise unique diseases. Read more about the development in the gift article in New York Times.

6.Microsoft’s CEO on How AI Will Remake Every Company, Including His: Bloomberg Businessweek

Nervous customers and a volatile partnership with OpenAI are complicating things for Satya Nadella and the world’s most valuable company. Read some excerpts from the long article and deep dive into gift article.

“Nadella’s primary allegiance now isn’t to OpenAI’s very expensive skunkworks. His ultimate objective is to sell whatever AI his customers might want through Microsoft’s platforms. Nadella had spent three years running various parts of the company’s cloud business, called Azure, before he became CEO in 2014, and that’s now central to his AI strategy. Customers can choose from over 1,900 different models on Azure, including ones made by Meta and OpenAI, and upstarts such as Cohere, Mistral, Stability AI and now DeepSeek. (Some, though, such as Google’s Gemini, aren’t available to Microsoft for competitive reasons.) Whether a model’s usage costs a customer $10 through OpenAI or 90¢ via DeepSeek, Microsoft gets paid for the cloud computing, cybersecurity protections, data storage and other upsold services.

The DeepSeek episode highlights another, arguably more revealing part of Nadella’s thinking: AI is rapidly commoditizing, and this is a good thing for Microsoft. While everyone in Davos was focused on AI consumption, Nadella was contemplating the history of coal production. One of his favorite economic theories is the Jevons paradox, which posits that as a resource becomes more accessible and its usage more efficient, consumption increases. This happened with coal during the 18th and 19th centuries and more recently with plane travel, when plummeting operational costs and airfares helped create frequent flyers, new flight destinations and booming sales for airlines. Nadella believes a similar phenomenon will play out with AI.

This econ mindset has been driving the company toward creating its own AI architectures, including some tiny models with capabilities similar to those of DeepSeek-R1. Over the past year, it’s also been training a series of large language models called MAI-2, the latest iteration of Microsoft’s in-house alternatives to OpenAI’s models, which it had been developing in secret. The goal is to build AI that requires less computing power than ChatGPT and bring down the cost to operate Microsoft’s equivalent service, Copilot. The company will still regularly tap OpenAI’s bleeding-edge technology, but Nadella is convinced Microsoft can deliver near-ChatGPT quality for a lot less.

What this all means for Microsoft’s arrangement with OpenAI is complicated. Six years on, what began as a nurturing kinship has turned into an intense sibling rivalry. A power struggle within OpenAI in 2023 was a turning point in the relationship between the companies, and in various ways Microsoft is asserting its dominance. The MAI-2 project, for example, offers protection for Microsoft, to avoid being “left exposed” in case anything “catastrophic” happens to OpenAI, says Mustafa Suleyman, the head of Microsoft’s consumer Copilot efforts. “The relationship with OpenAI has to date been pretty amazing,” he says. “But this is a 50-year-old company that needs to be in an amazing place in 2030, 2035 and 2040.”

7.Russian and Ukrainian officials join peace talks today in Turkey, their first such negotiations since Moscow’s 2022 invasion — a landmark meeting that officials were nevertheless downbeat about: CNN

Though Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy traveled to Turkey and called for his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to join, Moscow ultimately sent a relatively low-level delegation, with US President Donald Trump acknowledging that little progress was expected unless he himself met with Putin.

Though Trump initially pursued a rapprochement with Moscow, he has voiced growing frustration with Putin’s apparent unwillingness to enter ceasefire negotiations. The Russian leader’s dispatching of what Zelenskyy called a “sham level” set of negotiators “is a signal that Putin has chosen war over de-escalation,” one Russian analyst said.

8.Hollowing of New Zealand: Guardian

Over the past two years, tens of thousands of New Zealanders have left the country, surpassing the last spike in 2012. Record numbers of New Zealand migrants left the country through 2023 and into 2024. Figures remain high, with 69,100 leaving in the year to February 2025 – about 3% more than at this time last year.

Overall, more new migrants are still arriving in New Zealand than departing. But last year saw the biggest net loss of New Zealand citizens of any calendar year on record. About 56% of New Zealand emigrants – those planning to live overseas for a year or more – head to Australia, where the average pay rate is 26% higher.

For those aged 20-29, a backpacker-style overseas experience in Australia is a time-honoured rite of passage. They are still the biggest group leaving New Zealand but now, they are being followed by 30-39-year-olds and their children, as well as an unprecedented number of retirees – groups that are considered less likely to return.

Experts are also worried about the impact on the workforce, now and in the future. This is in part due to working age people leaving New Zealand, and compounded by tighter immigration rules last year that are seeing fewer people coming on work visas.

9.Five New Travel Tools to Save Time and Money This Summer: Bloomberg

Forget a travel agent, AI can plan your dream vacation for you.

Generative artificial intelligence tools will increasingly play a role in helping us decide where to go. 2024 survey from global consulting firm Oliver Wyman LLC showed more than 41% of travellers from the US and Canada had recently used this emerging technology for trip inspiration and design—up 30% from a year earlier. (One travel agency is embracing that inevitability, using AI to help turn your emotions into itineraries.)

If the latest suite of trip-planning tools is any indication, that percentage is sure to rise. A vast improvement in AI language models is adapting quickly to the ways we research our vacations. Take Gem, a new feature of Google’s Gemini that functions like a virtual travel agent, or Mindtrip, a collaborative itinerary builder that helps you map out trips with friends—the latter even uses Instagram images as fodder for inspiration. Other AI tools help travellers land the best hotel rates and airfares:such as Google's hotel price tracker and Kayak's hotel price-tracking tool, can help travellers find the best deals on hotels and flights, while apps like Going offer airfare alerts and mistake fare notifications.

Since 2023, Google has been steadily expanding the capabilities of Gemini, its AI-powered assistant. Free with a Google account, Gemini now lets you create a custom “Gem” for your trips—essentially a digital “concierge” that remembers your preferences, whether you’re into modern art, off-the-beaten-path adventures or local eats. Unlike Google Search, which excels at surfacing static information, it’s designed for open-ended, conversational brainstorming even if you’re starting with a vague idea, all while pulling from the personal profile you’ve fed it. Gemini of course then connects with your Gmail, Google Drive, Maps, Flights, Hotels and even YouTube. This means your itineraries, booking receipts and inspiration sources can all live in one ecosystem—and can be shared with a click.

Unlike all-purpose chatbots, Mindtrip was built specifically for travel planning, combining generative AI with content fact-checked by an actual team of human staffers, plus a visual interface that pulls maps, reviews, images and itineraries into a single screen. A quiz at the start asks for basic personal information and travel preferences—if you’re an early bird or a night owl, for instance—which helps refine recommendations that are pulled from web searches as well as a library of roughly 25,000 human-curated destination guides. You can then chat with it to refine your options. Use a simple menu on the left side of the screen to add places of interest and reorder them on your itinerary, which is on the right side of the screen, with a simple drag. You can even invite family or friends into your itinerary, so you can co-design the trip and stay on the same page. Read on .

10.Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset: The Economist

WHEN OFFERED a Boeing 747 by the government of Qatar to replace Air Force One, President Donald Trump responded: why not? Only someone dumb would turn down free money. No presidency has generated so many conflicts of interest at such speed in modern history. Yet the worst self-dealing in American politics is found not on a runway but on blockchains, home to trillions of dollars in cryptocurrencies.

Over the past six months crypto has taken on a new role at the centre of American public life. Several cabinet officials have large investments in digital assets. Crypto enthusiasts help run regulatory agencies. The industry’s largest businesses are among the biggest donors to election campaigns, with exchanges and issuers deploying hundreds of millions to defend friendly legislators and to crush their opponents. The president’s sons tout their crypto ventures around the world. The biggest investors in Mr Trump’s meme coin get to have dinner with the president. The holdings of the first family are now worth billions, making crypto possibly the largest single source of its wealth.

This is ironic, given crypto’s origins. When bitcoin was started in 2009, a utopian, anti-authoritarian movement welcomed it. Crypto’s earliest adopters had lofty goals about revolutionising finance and defending individuals against expropriation and inflation. They wanted to hand power to small investors, who would otherwise be at the mercy of giant financial institutions. This was more than an asset: it was technology as liberation.

That is all forgotten now. Crypto has not just facilitated fraud, money-laundering and other flavours of financial crime on a gargantuan scale. The industry has also developed a grubby relationship with the executive branch of America’s government that outstrips that of Wall Street or any other industry. Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset.

Deep dive (Free article)