Paytm’s story is the most dramatic comeback arc in Asian fintech. The company — formally One97 Communications — went public in November 2021 at a $20 billion valuation, watched its … Read more
Southeast Asia’s ecommerce platforms generated $157.6 billion in GMV in 2025, up 22.8% year-on-year (Momentum Works, April 2026). India’s e-retail market crossed $65 billion in the same period, growing 19–21% … Read more
PhonePe handles about 45% of UPI transactions by volume and about 49% by value in India (December 2025). Paytm handles roughly 7.7% by volume. Two years ago, that gap was … Read more
India’s digital economy was about $402 billion (INR 31.64 lakh crore) in FY2022-23, or 11.74% of national income, according to MeitY (January 2025), which projects about one-fifth of national income … Read more
Can India Become the World’s AI Inferencing Capital? India’s AI market reached USD 22.85 billion in 2025, making it the second-largest in Asia-Pacific behind China, and is projected to grow … Read more
The Asia Pacific AI market hit an estimated $102B in 2025. A country-by-country breakdown: China, India, Japan, Korea.
Why Is Every Asian Country Building Its Own AI Model? Sovereign AI — the development of domestically controlled artificial intelligence infrastructure, models, and data pipelines — has become the defining … Read more
Everyone loves the UPI story. And why wouldn’t they? A country that had 190 million unbanked adults a decade ago now runs the world’s largest real-time payments network. The Unified … Read more
In the space of a single decade, India built the world’s largest real-time payments network, enrolled 1.34 billion citizens in a biometric identity system, and created an open-finance data-sharing framework … Read more
There are 240 million Muslims in Southeast Asia and 600 million Muslims in South Asia, representing a $2.2 trillion dollar market, and with Ramadan just around the corner, brands are … Read more
The DIA Briefing
Asia’s digital markets, every other week. Free.