Bumper gains for Meesho backers; Inside India’s preventative healthcare strategy

Hello,

All that glitters is gold!

The yellow metal has seen a spectacular rise in the last few months, and there is more to come. According to a Goldman Sachs survey, many investors think gold will hit a new all-time high of $5,000 by the end of 2026, CNBC reports.

Gold prices have rallied 58.6% year-to-date, and broke through the landmark $4,000 level for the first time on October 8.

Ever wondered just how much gold there is in the world? This visualisation shows gold reserves by category. Unsurprisingly, India was the largest buyer of gold jewellery globally last year, with 560 tonnes in purchases. China ranked second, with 510 tonnes.

Meanwhile, India's economy grew at its fastest pace in 18 months in the July-September period, Reuters reports. The growth was attributed to robust consumer spending and front-loading of production ahead of local festivals and punitive US tariffs.

Moving on to the world of technology, Adani Group is planning to invest up to $5 billion in Google’s upcoming artificial intelligence infrastructure hub in India, Bloomberg reports, citing Chief Financial Officer Jugeshinder Singh.

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Bumper gains for Meesho backers
• Inside India’s preventative healthcare strategy
• Building predictive threat-response systems

Here’s your trivia for today: What was the first movie to feature Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro on screen together?

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Ecommerce

Bumper gains for Meesho backers

Ecommerce company Meesho is set to launch its IPO next week, bringing massive gains for its co-founders and shareholders, as it makes India's first ecommerce public market debut.

Meesho Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO Vidit Aatrey holds 11.1% stake in the company, which is currently valued at Rs 5,245 crore, marking a whopping 1,850x return. Co-founder and CTO Sanjeev Barnwal will also see his Rs 63.1 lakh stake, now worth Rs 3,504 crore, mark a 5,550x return.

Hyper-value winners:

• Y Combinator's early bet in the company paid off, acquiring 7.20 million shares at just Rs 1.02 per share, amounting to a total investment of only Rs 7.34 crore. Its stake now represents a staggering ~109× return, putting YC among the highest-multiple winners in the company’s cap table.
• Meesho chose a valuation aimed at attracting “right” long-term shareholders, according to CEO Vidit Aatrey, as it prepares to list next month at a likely $5.9-billion market cap—above its last private valuation but below its earlier $7–8 billion target. 
• The company has built its hyper-value commerce model by closely studying ecommerce behaviour in China and other emerging markets. The company draws heavily from platforms like Pinduoduo, which today has a market cap of $164.4 billion, according to Aatrey. 

Top Funding Deals of the Week

Startup: Blinkit

Amount: Rs 599.94 Cr

Round: Equity

Startup: 3ev

Amount: Rs 120 Cr

Round: Series A

Startup: Candi Solar

Amount: $58.5M

Round: Debt

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Insight

Inside India’s preventative healthcare strategy

India is building one of the world’s most ambitious preventive-care ecosystems, hoping that early detection and digital monitoring can slow down the country’s rising tide of chronic diseases.

But a new analysis by the Tony Blair Institute released earlier this week warns that India’s prevention efforts, though unprecedented in scale, may struggle to keep pace with the rapid growth of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

Key takeaways:

• To meet this challenge, India is expanding the Ayushman Arogya Mandir network. With over 170,000 health and wellness centres that now anchor India’s primary care system, these facilities house maternal and child health services, non-communicable disease screening, family planning, and telemedicine access.
• The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission has enabled unified, longitudinal health records through the Ayushman Bharat Health Account digital ID, allowing healthcare providers to track the progression of chronic diseases across years rather than single episodes of care.
• The scale of India’s NCD burden raises questions about whether this infrastructure can keep up. Public-health expenditure remains extremely low at 1.1% of GDP, according to government data, and out-of-pocket spending still accounts for the majority of healthcare expenses.

Startup 

Building predictive threat-response systems

As an Indian Air Force pilot, Chandan Singh Rathore often observed that emergencies would often overstress the systems meant to handle them.

Rathore realised this gap existed across military bases, refineries, airports and power plants—places where delay of even minutes can cost lives or huge losses. That insight sparked an idea and eventually led to the birth of CoreShield, an IIT Delhi-based deeptech defence and security startup founded in 2023. 

The CoreShield founding team, comprising Rana Amit K Navin (CTO), Bhavya Kumar (CIO), and Chandan S Rathore (CEO), is building an AI-driven security platform for defence and high-risk industrial sites.

News & updates

• Antitrust: Alphabet's Google on Friday dropped its EU antitrust complaint about rival Microsoft's cloud computing practices, a week after EU regulators launched an investigation to see if Microsoft should be subject to rules aimed at curbing its power in this sector.
• AI shield: Italian defense company Leonardo has unveiled plans for an AI-powered shield for cities and critical infrastructure, adding to Europe’s push to ramp up sovereign defense capabilities amid rising geopolitical tensions.

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What was the first movie to feature Al Pacino and Robert De Niro on screen together?

Answer: Heat

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