Hey 👋
Quick heads-up before anything else: Sessional-2 exams for Sem 7 kick in on my end starting this week, so I won't be able to reply to comments on this post for a bit. Please don't take the silence personally — I'll circle back and reply to everyone once exams wrap up. 🙏
Now, the actual backstory. Issue #1 got a solid response, and I added a Jobs Watch section — hiring drives, layoffs, who's actually recruiting. I said I'd try it from Issue #2, so here it is.
This issue covers India tech news from Sunday, Aug 30 to Saturday, Sep 5.
What's Inside
- 📰 The Big Headline — Jio's IPO Gets a Date Window
- 💰 This Week in Funding
- 🌐 The Bigger AI Picture
- 💼 Jobs Watch — Stats, Layoffs, and Who's Hiring
- 💻 Developer Corner — Open Right Now
- 🗳️ What Do You Want in Issue #3?
📰 The Big Headline — Jio's IPO Gets a Date Window
Last issue, Jio Platforms had just cleared SEBI's approval — the last major hurdle before what's expected to be India's largest-ever IPO. This week, we got the first real signal on timing.
According to a report picked up by Outlook Business, Jio Platforms is now targeting the Navratri–Diwali window (late October) to launch its IPO, which is expected to raise close to ₹37,800 crore (source).
A few things worth flagging:
- SEBI cleared the share sale on August 28 — nearly two months after the draft papers were filed in June.
- This would be Reliance's first IPO in almost two decades.
- It could end up overtaking NSE's own planned listing, which is also in the pipeline for this festive season. Why it matters for devs: the festive window is a popular listing target because retail participation tends to be higher. If Jio does launch around Diwali, expect a fresh wave of "should I apply" posts and — more relevantly for us — renewed attention on Jio's developer and API ecosystem as the company builds its public-market story.
💰 This Week in Funding
Two funding stories this week pulled in completely opposite directions — which felt worth sitting with instead of just listing as two rows in a table.
| Startup | Raise | What's Notable |
|---|---|---|
| slice | ~$100M (in talks) | At a $450–465M valuation — roughly a 70% cut from its 2022 peak of $1.5B, as it rebuilds itself as a digital bank after merging with North East Small Finance Bank |
| Ultrahuman | $70M | Led by Qualcomm Ventures; values the wearable health-tech maker at ~$365M — about 3x its 2023 valuation |
💡 Sourcing angle: slice was once one of India's flashier fintech unicorns. Ultrahuman was a comparatively quieter hardware bet. This week, the "quiet" one tripled its valuation while the "flashy" one raised at less than a third of its old price. Valuation isn't really a scoreboard for who's "winning" — it's a snapshot of investor confidence at one moment, shaped by very different business models (regulated banking vs. consumer hardware). Worth remembering next time a headline number gets thrown around as proof of anything.
Bringing back the Issue #1 sourcing check: total weekly funding numbers depend a lot on which tracker you read and where they draw the week's line.
| Tracker | Window | Total Raised | Deals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entrackr | Aug 31 – Sep 5 | $303.7M | 25 (5 growth-stage, 16 early-stage, 3 undisclosed) |
| Inc42 | Aug 31 – Sep 4 | $176.5M | 22 |
💡 Takeaway: Same week, ~$127M apart. Some of that gap is just the extra day in Entrackr's window — but a chunk of it is which deals get classified as trackable "growth-stage" rounds versus left out. Same lesson as Issue #1: the "$X raised this week" headline is never as clean as it looks.
Also worth a mention: RentoMojo set its IPO price band this week, another name to watch as India's 2026 IPO pipeline gets busier (source).
🌐 The Bigger AI Picture
Nothing dramatically new dropped on this front this week either, but two things are worth updating from Issue #1's numbers:
- Compute capacity is scaling up faster than the February figures suggested. Issue #1 mentioned 38,000+ GPUs subsidized under the IndiaAI Mission. That number has already crossed 45,000 GPUs as of June 2026 (source).
- SEMICON India 2026 is happening September 17–19 in New Delhi, themed "Silicon to Systems." Worth flagging because the framing has shifted — earlier policy conversation was about attracting individual chip fabs, this year's theme is explicitly about connecting component manufacturing, design, AI infrastructure, and downstream products into one value chain (same source). Why it matters for devs: if you're anywhere near hardware, embedded systems, or AI infra, SEMICON India is the one to watch this month — it's less about announcements and more about where India's compute-to-application pipeline is actually headed.
💼 Jobs Watch — Stats, Layoffs, and Who's Hiring
This is new, so bear with me while I figure out the right format. For Issue #2, I'm splitting it into three parts: the big-picture stats, this week's layoffs, and who's actually hiring right now.
The Big Picture
Nasscom's own Annual Strategic Review projects India's tech industry to cross $315 billion in FY26 revenue — up 6.1% — while adding a net 1.35 lakh jobs, taking total direct employment to roughly 59.5 lakh (source). On paper, the industry is still growing.
But that headline number hides a pretty split reality underneath it once you look at individual companies:
| Company | This Cycle | Signal |
|---|---|---|
| TCS | Cutting ~12,000 roles (2% of its workforce) through FY26, mostly mid- and senior-level | Still drawing scrutiny from Karnataka's labour ministry and MeitY |
| Wipro | ~7,500 freshers hired in FY26; no fresher hiring target set for FY27 | Sharpest freeze among the majors right now |
| Infosys | Crossed 20,000 fresher hires in FY26; planning 20,000+ more for FY27 | Most aggressive fresher hirer among the tier-1 IT majors |
| Cognizant | Targeting 24,000–25,000 fresh graduates in 2026 — up ~20% from last year | Betting on a "broader pyramid," using AI to make junior engineers billable faster |
TCS's official line on its own cuts: "TCS is on a journey to become a Future-Ready organisation." Wipro's CHRO Saurabh Govil was more blunt about fresher hiring for the year ahead: "We don't have any target for fresher hiring for the next fiscal."
(Note: TCS's 12,000-role cut was originally announced in July 2025 — this is an update on an ongoing FY26 process, not a fresh development from this week's window.)
💡 Takeaway: Same industry, same week, wildly different signals depending on which company's earnings call you read. If you only follow one company's hiring news, you're getting a skewed picture of the fresher job market — good or bad.
Layoffs This Week
The one that actually landed within our Aug 30–Sep 5 window: Uber is cutting around 200–250 jobs in India, as part of a global restructuring eliminating roughly 3,300 roles (about 10% of its global workforce) (source).
A few details:
- This is Uber India's second round of cuts in six months — it cut around 80 jobs earlier this year.
- The cuts are hitting technology and operations teams, with close to half of the AI Solutions team reportedly affected.
- Uber maintains this isn't a retreat from India — it says it's actually expanding its regional footprint here to run its Asia-Pacific mobility business.
Who's Actually Hiring
Zooming out from the IT majors table above, the more interesting fresher demand right now is sitting in GCCs (Global Capability Centres) — India-based R&D and delivery arms of multinationals, as opposed to services vendors like TCS or Wipro. GCCs are projected to add over 5 lakh jobs in 2026 alone, with names like Google India, Microsoft IDC, Adobe India R&D, SAP Labs India, Salesforce India, and JPMorgan Chase actively hiring freshers, concentrated mostly in Bengaluru and Hyderabad.
If you're a fresher reading this and only checking TCS/Infosys/Wipro placement portals, you might be missing where a decent chunk of the actual growth is happening right now.
💻 Developer Corner — Open Right Now
🏗️ Hacktivate 2.0
A 36-hour national hackathon by JIMS Engineering Management Technical Campus, Greater Noida. Registration closes September 12. Open to Indian college students and early-stage tech enthusiasts, teams of 2–4.
The listing advertises an "up to ₹15 lakh" prize and benefits pool, but the actual cash prizes are more modest — ₹20,000 / ₹12,000 / ₹8,000 for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place, with the rest of that ₹15L figure made up of goodies, sponsor credits, and mentorship rather than cash (source). Check listings →
💡 Heads up: this is exactly the kind of gap between a headline prize figure and actual cash payout that's easy to miss if you don't read past the poster. Worth doing for the 36-hour build experience and mentorship either way — just don't go in expecting ₹15L in your account if you win.
🗳️ What Do You Want in Issue #3?
A few quick questions, since this format is still finding its shape:
1️⃣ Was the Jobs Watch section useful in this format — split into stats / layoffs / who's hiring — or would you rather see it as one flowing section?
2️⃣ Anything you want more of? More funding deep-dives, more AI/infra coverage, more on IPOs as the festive season pipeline builds up — drop it in the comments.
As mentioned up top, I won't be able to jump into the comments this week because of Sessional-2 exams, but I will read every single one and reply once I'm back. Thanks for bearing with the slightly newsletter-shaped chaos of building this in public.
And in case you missed it — my last post picked up way more traction than I expected. Check it out below if you haven't already:
🇮🇳 Follow for the next drop — Indian tech doesn't slow down.
