☕ Your Friday Brew

🕊️ Good morning, Masala Crew.
Today’s edition comes against the backdrop of a heartbreaking tragedy. The Air India Express crash has left the country in mourning, and our thoughts are with all those affected. As the day unfolds, we bring you the key developments shaping business and the economy—with the weight of this loss in mind.

☕️ Chai Shots

• 🌟 Google Cloud Crash Sends Internet into Chaos: A sweeping outage at Google Cloud caused major ripples online, taking down services like Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, and more. The breakdown began mid-Thursday and even hit some of Cloudflare's integrations. While some apps bounced back, many users were left refreshing in frustration. More in the Big Brew 👇

• 📈 PhonePe Trims MapmyIndia Stake for ₹486 Cr: PhonePe sold off 5% of its holding in CE Info Systems (MapmyIndia's parent), cutting its total stake to 13.74%. The shares were picked up by institutional investors at ₹1,786 a pop, but the move spooked the street—MapmyIndia stock slid 9.4% post-sale.

• 📅 Groww Grows Up, Fast: With profits jumping over 3x to ₹1,819 crore in FY25, Groww is strutting into IPO season. The startup also closed a $200 million Series F led by GIC, catapulting its valuation to $7 billion and setting the stage for its public debut.

• 🏦 Delhivery Pulls the Plug on UK Arm: Delhivery has officially dissolved its UK-based subsidiary, Delhivery Corp, as part of its global restructuring. The logistics giant said the move won't dent revenues and was already planned last year.

🏦 Market Masala

• 📉 Markets Buckle as Tariff Tensions Rise: Both the Sensex and Nifty plunged on expiry day, with the Sensex shedding 823 points and the Nifty falling below 24,900. Worries over global trade friction, geopolitical tension, and expiry pressure sent investors into sell mode.

• 💰 Mid & Smallcaps Join the Slide: BSE's midcap index dropped 1.4% and the smallcap index fell 1.3%, reflecting the broad-based nervousness across the bourses. Investors were quick to lock in profits amid rising uncertainty.

• 🔢 Technical Trouble Ahead?: Nifty is now flirting with its short-term support level at the 20-day EMA (~24,800). A decisive break below could signal a deeper market pullback.

• 🏦 Canara Bank clears massive ₹9,500 crore fundraise: Canara Bank has greenlit a fresh capital infusion plan worth up to ₹9,500 crore for FY26, aiming to shore up its balance sheet and ensure it meets Basel III requirements. The capital will be raised through Basel III-compliant debt instruments—₹3,500 crore via Additional Tier I (AT1) bonds and ₹6,000 crore via Tier II bonds.

• 🏗️ Steel parity scheme off to a slow start: A government-backed effort to offer discounted steel to export-oriented MSMEs is yet to gain serious traction, nearly two months post-launch. The initiative, meant to shield exporters from safeguard duty price spikes, only applies to select steel categories—hot rolled, cold rolled, wire rods, and alloy rounds—excluding coated and galvanised sheets that bear the brunt of the duty.

🌍 Global Masala

• 📅 Wall Street Shakes Off Inflation Woes: The S&P 500 climbed for the third straight session as investors cheered signs of cooling inflation. May's producer prices rose just 0.1%, raising hopes of stable rates ahead.

• 👤 Oracle Boosts Tech Sentiment: Oracle stock spiked 13% post-earnings, lifting the entire tech sector. Analysts praised strong cloud growth, helping offset concerns from the broader macro environment.

🍵 The Big Brew: Google Cloud Goes Down, Internet Goes Dark

• 🔧 A Digital Meltdown: Just after noon on Thursday (PT), Google Cloud services began sputtering, sending a cascade of outages through apps and platforms worldwide.

• 🚫 Who Got Hit: Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, Twitch, Character.AI, and even coding tools like Replit and Cursor all saw partial or full outages. Cloudflare confirmed some of its systems were affected too, though core services held up.

• 🧰 What Happened: Google confirmed that multiple cloud products were facing disruptions, but didn’t offer a full timeline for recovery. Engineers worked through the evening to restore services, with partial fixes rolling out slowly.

• 👷 Why It Matters: The incident underscores how deeply interconnected the digital ecosystem is. When one giant cloud provider stumbles, everything from communication tools to entertainment apps feels the tremor.

• 🔎 Who's Not Affected: AWS and Microsoft Azure both reported no issues, offering some relief to the broader tech landscape.

🧳 Takeaway: As businesses and users increasingly rely on third-party cloud infrastructure, resilience planning is no longer optional. Outages like this serve as both a warning and a wake-up call.

🚀 Startup Scoop

• 🚀 PlutoPe Bags $500K to Expand Crypto Access: DeFi-focused PlutoPe closed a $500K pre-seed round to scale its crypto neobank. With multi-chain swaps, remittances, and a debit card, it’s targeting underserved regions across MENA, LATAM, and India.

• 🔒 Repello AI Secures $1.2M for GenAI Security: Bengaluru-based Repello raised $1.2 million to develop its automated red-teaming AI security suite. The company simulates adversarial threats to expose weak spots in AI apps—and it already counts Fortune 500 clients.

• 🍷 Kisah Apparels Stitches ₹13 Cr from Wow Momo: Men’s ethnicwear label Kisah Apparels has bagged fresh capital to strengthen its offline footprint. The brand plans to push into malls and expand its D2C reach.

🔍 What’s Brewing Next?

• 🔹 IPO Radar: Groww’s blockbuster numbers may inspire other startups to rush their filings. Keep an eye out next week.

❓ Chai Break Trivia

🤔 Did you know MapmyIndia beat Google to launch India’s first 3D navigation app ? While Google Maps is more popular today, MapmyIndia was a pioneer in digital mapping long before smartphones were smart.

That’s all for today’s edition.
As we wrap up this Friday, our hearts remain with the families and communities impacted by the Air India Express tragedy. In moments like these, the numbers and news take a backseat to the lives behind them.

Wishing you a quiet evening and a safe weekend.