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Edition #238

The Insight Labs Daily.

Fri · Sep 11 · 2026 ~7 min read
★ Lead Story
2 days ago · 2 min read

Flipkart is testing a food delivery service on its own staff first

Flipkart began testing a food delivery service called Eat In with its own employees in Bengaluru on September 9, and is piloting a standalone app for Flipkart Minutes with a small set of users at the same time.

The number that matters is the commission. Flipkart plans to route orders through ONDC and charge restaurants up to 11 per cent. Zomato and Swiggy charge 25 to 30 per cent.

Eat In sits inside the main Flipkart app for now. The test is expected to widen to all employees around September 15 before it opens to Bengaluru customers, with other cities after that.

Two earlier attempts at breaking this duopoly ran out of money, and ONDC's own food-delivery volumes have stayed small. What Flipkart has that they did not is a user base it already owns and a delivery fleet running dark stores in the same city.

The open question is what a restaurant does with 15 points of saved commission. Pass it to the customer, keep it, or simply list on all three.

The commission gap is the thesis and also the risk. Zomato and Swiggy do not earn 25 to 30 per cent only for carrying the order. It pays for discovery, photography, ratings, customer support and the ad auction restaurants bid into. A platform charging 11 per cent has to spend less on those or fund them from another pocket.

Flipkart's other pocket is the festive sale. Eat In and the standalone Minutes app are both arriving before the biggest selling fortnight of its year, and both add one more daily occasion inside the same app. Food and groceries are the only two categories people open an app for every day.

The first thing that moves is not market share but pricing power. Once a Bengaluru restaurant has a live 11 per cent option, every commission renegotiation in that city starts from a different number.

Today's Top 5

5 stories
PhonePe · 2 days ago

PhonePe now has a licence to run payments in a country that is not India

PhonePe said on September 9, at the Global Fintech Festival in Mumbai, that it holds two licences from the Central Bank of the UAE. One covers consumer payment instruments such as wallets and gift cards. The other covers merchant acceptance.

Until now its overseas presence meant an Indian traveller paying by UPI in Dubai. These licences make it a locally regulated payments company in the UAE, able to sign Emirati merchants and issue wallets to residents.

The UAE is home to roughly 3.5 million Indian residents and is one of the two largest sources of remittances into India. PhonePe is not starting from zero recognition there.

The part worth watching is remittances. Money sent home from the UAE currently passes through exchange houses and banks that earn a spread. A company holding a wallet licence on one end and hundreds of millions of Indian accounts on the other can compress that spread in a way a remittance specialist cannot.

It also changes what PhonePe can be valued on. A domestic UPI transaction earns almost nothing. A foreign licence, in a market where merchant discount rates are real, gives it revenue per payment for the first time. An IPO file reads differently with a second country in it.

Classic Legends · 1 day ago

The Jawa and Yezdi maker is doubling what it can build

Classic Legends, the Mahindra-backed company that revived Jawa and Yezdi, said on September 10 it will raise capacity from 120,000 motorcycles a year to more than 200,000 by December.

That is a 67 per cent increase in a segment that sells a small fraction of India's two-wheeler volume. Mid-size motorcycles above 250cc are a profitable corner of a very large market, and the company is building ahead of demand it does not yet have.

Part of the answer is exports. Classic Legends has been adding European and Latin American markets where a 350cc retro bike competes on price against much more expensive machinery.

New capacity in two-wheelers is a statement about who you expect to take share from. Royal Enfield holds the large majority of the 250-500cc segment in India. Every unit Classic Legends adds is a bet that a buyer who would have walked into a Royal Enfield showroom walks into a Jawa one instead.

The constraint is not the factory. Royal Enfield's dealer network is several times larger. Production that runs ahead of reach turns into stock sitting with dealers, which is how the previous retro-motorcycle revival unwound.

Nexus Select · 2 days ago

A mall REIT is paying Rs 1,600 crore for a building that is not finished

Nexus Select Trust said on September 9 it will buy 100 per cent of the Galaxy Complex in Beharbari, Guwahati, for Rs 1,600 crore. It is a 0.5 million sq ft mall and a 164-key Hyatt Regency, both still under construction.

The implied cap rate on the mall is 8.25 to 8.5 per cent, and the hotel works out to 11.5 to 12.5 times EBITDA. For a trust that has mostly bought completed, rent-paying assets, this is only its second under-construction deal since listing.

Guwahati has no organised mall of this size. Nexus has also named Kolkata, Siliguri, Patna, Bhubaneswar, Ranchi and Jamshedpur as priority markets.

REITs buy finished buildings because unitholders are paid from rent, and rent starts on day one. Buying a construction site moves development risk onto a distribution-paying vehicle. The compensation is in the cap rate: a completed metro mall trades nearer 7 per cent, so Nexus is being paid roughly 125 basis points for the wait and the geography.

The city list is the real signal. Each name is a market where a national apparel or food brand has no credible place to open a store today. Nexus is buying the first shelf in seven cities, funded about 40 per cent with debt and the rest with new units.

Xiaomi · 2 days ago

India's fraud office has asked for a full investigation into Xiaomi

The Serious Fraud Investigation Office recommended on September 9 a detailed probe into Xiaomi's Indian business, including the movement of funds and whether it sought the investment approvals India made mandatory for Chinese capital in 2020.

Xiaomi has been India's largest or second-largest smartphone seller for most of the last decade, and has already had thousands of crores frozen in an earlier foreign-exchange case.

A recommendation is not a charge. It is the step that decides whether a company spends the next two years answering a corporate-affairs inquiry.

The timing matters more than the allegation. India has spent this year reducing Chinese share through certification and compliance rules rather than outright bans, and a certification order this month shut out CCTV makers who held about a third of that market. A Xiaomi probe lands while Indian-brand phone manufacturing is being handed large state support.

For retailers the practical question is inventory. A brand under investigation keeps selling, but distributors start asking for shorter credit and smaller commitments, and that shows up in shelf space long before it shows up in any order book.

Swish · 1 day ago

A kitchen network that cooks inside one kilometre raised $24 million

Swish raised $24 million on September 10, led by Bertelsmann India Investments with Accel, Bain Capital Ventures and Hara Global, at about $175 million post-money. That is roughly 30 per cent above its last round.

The company runs its own kitchens rather than listing restaurants, and delivers within an average one-kilometre radius. Monthly orders have tripled since March to more than a million.

It operates in Bengaluru, Gurugram, Noida, Delhi and Ghaziabad. The money goes into more kitchens and supply chain.

Owning the kitchen removes the part of food delivery that has never balanced. A platform taking 25 per cent from a restaurant earning 10 per cent is squeezing its own supply. A company that cooks the food keeps the whole gross margin and can price a meal where a marketplace cannot follow.

The cost is that every new neighbourhood needs capital before it earns anything, and a half-empty kitchen loses money in a way a marketplace listing never does. At $175 million on roughly 12 million orders a year, the valuation works out near $14 per annual order, and that only holds if utilisation keeps climbing.

⚡ 30-Second Scan

Kuku is hiring a 1,000-person artificial intelligence team ahead of a Rs 3,500 crore IPO, on a catalogue where a good part of the audio is already machine-made.
Paras Dairy and Bengaluru's KIS Group will put Rs 1,000 crore into ten BioCNG plants, turning cattle waste from the milk business into fuel.
TCS opened a lights-out factory in Pune that runs production lines with almost nobody on the floor, built as a showroom for what it wants to sell manufacturers.

Sourced from public reporting; analysis by The Insight Labs.

Sources: Business Standard, Entrackr, Medianama, Assam Tribune, YourStory.

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