2024 Hurun India Under35s: Top Universities Shaping Young Entrepreneurs

In the 2024 Hurun India Under35s List, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) continues to dominate as the breeding ground for young entrepreneurial talent, producing the highest number of Under35s entrepreneurs. Here’s a closer look at the leading institutions shaping the next generation of business leaders.

Top Undergraduate Universities

IIT Madras takes the crown, producing 13 young entrepreneurs, closely followed by IIT Bombay with 11 and IIT Delhi and IIT Kharagpur with 10 each. These institutions have proven to be a fertile ground for entrepreneurial minds.

Top Postgraduate Universities

In postgraduate education, IIT Madras again leads the way with 7 entrants in the 2024 Hurun India Under35s List, followed by IIT Kharagpur with 6. Notably, prestigious international institutions like Cornell University and Harvard Business School have also made their mark.

The influence of IITs in nurturing the entrepreneurial spirit is evident in both undergraduate and postgraduate categories, with alumni making significant contributions to India’s startup ecosystem. As global institutions join the ranks, the 2024 Hurun India Under35s List underscores the pivotal role of education in shaping the future of Indian entrepreneurship.

Click here to access the full list.

Crorepati club gets bigger: India sees 5x jump in Rs 1 crore income tax filers

The number of individuals declaring over Rs 1 crore as taxable income has surged, increasing fivefold from 44,078 in assessment year (AY) 2013-14 to nearly 2.3 lakh in AY2023-24, ToI reported. This rise may reflect higher incomes and better tax compliance. During this period, the number of individual tax returns filed grew over 2.2 times from 3.3 crore to over 7.5 crore, according to the latest data from the tax department.

The share of salaried individuals declaring over Rs 1 crore taxable income reached around 52% in the last assessment year, up from 49.2% in AY2022-23 and 51% in AY2013-14. In the Rs 1-5 crore income segment, salaried individuals made up about 53%, but their numbers decreased at higher income levels, where more businessmen and professionals were represented. Notably, none of the 23 individuals declaring over Rs 500 crore in annual taxable income were salaried, while 19 of the 262 in the Rs 100-500 crore bracket were salaried.

In AY2013-14, only one person declared over Rs 500 crore income, while two were in the Rs 100-500 crore bracket. There was a slight decrease in the number of individuals disclosing incomes over Rs 25 crore from 1,812 in AY2022-23 to 1,798 in the last assessment year. Similarly, among the salaried individuals, those in the over Rs 10 crore segment saw a 4.7% decline from 1,656 to 1,577.

Individuals in the Rs 4.5 lakh to Rs 9.5 lakh income brackets accounted for 52% of the tax returns filed in AY2023-24, compared to 54.6% from the Rs 1.5-3.5 lakh segments in AY2013-14. One in every four returns was in the Rs 5.5-9.5 lakh segment, compared to one in every five from the Rs 2.5-3.5 lakh bracket. In terms of gross total income, the Rs 5.5-9.5 lakh group’s share strengthened to over 23%, up from 18% in AY2013-14. The Rs 10-15 lakh income group became the second largest contributor with over 12%, followed by 10% in the Rs 25-50 lakh range. This contrasts with AY2013-14 when the Rs 2.5-3.5 lakh group was second with a 12.8% share.

India has been minting a new billionaire every five days over the past year, pushing the total number of US dollar billionaires past the 300 mark for the first time. According to the 2024 Hurun India Rich List, the country now boasts 334 billionaires, an increase of 75 compared to last year. Wealth creation in India has become more decentralized and widespread. Over the past decade, the number of cities represented in the rich list has grown to 97, up from 95 last year and just 10 when the list was first introduced, the report noted.

Automobile exports from India rise 14% in April- September period

Automobile exports from India surged 14% in April-September thanks to renewed demand in Latin America and Africa. Passenger vehicle exports climbed 12%, led by Maruti Suzuki, while two-wheeler exports jumped 16%. Yet, three-wheeler shipments experienced a slight decline.

NEW DELHI: Automobile exports from India in the first six months of the current fiscal year rose 14 per cent year-on-year, led by gains in shipments of passenger vehicles and two-wheelers. According to Siam data, the overall exports in the April-September period stood at 25,28,248 units, up 14 per cent as compared with 22,11,457 units in the year-ago period.

"Key markets like Latin America and Africa, which had slowed down for various reasons, have bounced back. This has been the main reason for exports corning back," Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (Siam) President Shailesh Chandra said. He was replying to a query on the reasons for the bouncing back of vehicle exports in the April- September period. Various African nations and other regions faced challenges due to devaluation of currencies. This impacted the vehicle shipments as the nations focussed on import of essential items.

"Key markets like Latin America and Africa, which had slowed down for various reasons, have bounced back. This has been the main reason for exports coming back," Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (Siam) President Shailesh Chandra said.

He was replying to a query on the reasons for the bouncing back of vehicle exports in the April- September period.

Various African nations and other regions faced challenges due to devaluation of currencies. This impacted the vehicle shipments as the nations focussed on import of essential items.

Automobile exports declined 5.5 per cent in FY24 due to the monetary crisis in various overseas markets. Overall exports stood at 45,00,492 units in the last fiscal year as compared with 47,61,299 units in FY23. Total passenger vehicle shipments rose 12 per cent year-on-year to 3,76,679 units in the first half of the current fiscal year as against 3,36,754 units in the September quarter of FY24.

The country's largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki led the vertical with shipments of 1,47,063 units, an increase of 12 per cent over 1,31,546 units in the year-ago period. Hyundai Motor India exported 84,900 units, a drop of 1 per cent, as against 86,105 units in April- September period of the previous fiscal year. Two-wheeler exports rose 16 per cent year-on-year to 19,59,145 units in the April-September period this fiscal year as compared with 16,85,907 units in the year-ago period.

Scooter shipments increased 19 per cent to 3,14,533 units while motorcycle exports rose 16 per cent to 16,41,804 units during the period under review. Commercial vehicle exports rose 12 per cent year-on-year to 35,731 units in the first six months of the fiscal year. Three-wheeler shipments, however, declined 1 per cent during the period to 1,53,199 units as compared with 1,55,154 units in the April-September period of the 2023-24 fiscal year.

Asia shares wobble while bitcoin and gold rally

SINGAPORE, Oct 21 (Reuters) - Asia shares dipped in and out of positive territory on Monday, under pressure from weakness in Hong Kong stocks, but bitcoin scaled a three-month peak as "Trump trades" continued to ramp up.

Gold hit another record high, as global uncertainty over conflict in the Middle East and an extremely close U.S. presidential election boosted bullion's appeal.

Optimism over Beijing's slew of stimulus measures first announced late in September has turned into caution in recent days as investors look to further details of more fiscal support from policymakers.

Though China cut its benchmark lending rates on Monday, the move was anticipated.

China's blue-chip index (.CSI300), opens new tab swung between losses and gains in early trade, before turning decisively higher by the Asian afternoon, helped by a rise in technology companies. The benchmark was 0.4% higher, while the Shanghai Composite Index (.SSEC), opens new tab gained 0.31%.

The Beijing Stock Exchange 50 Index (.CSI899050), opens new tab jumped 14% to a record high, after the bourse said on Sunday it would help small- and medium-sized tech companies with training and access to finance so they can list.

That failed to excite Hong Kong markets, however, where stocks (.HSI), opens new tab fell more than 1%, pushing MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan (.MIAPJ0000PUS), opens new tab down 0.26%, a step back in sentiment after U.S. stocks posted a sixth straight week of gains on Friday.

Japan's Nikkei (.N225), opens new tab rose 0.12%.

Further details on Chinese stimulus might take some time to emerge.

"We might have to wait until late October or early November for concrete plans from the Standing Committee meeting of the National People's Congress," said Chaoping Zhu, global market strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management in Shanghai.

Stock futures pointed to a mixed opening in Europe, with EUROSTOXX 50 futures losing 0.1%, while FTSE futures ticked up 0.17%.

Nasdaq futures eased 0.08%. S&P 500 futures were flat.

U.S. ELECTION

With just about two weeks to go before the Nov. 5 U.S. election, bets reflecting a Donald Trump victory are on the rise across parts of the market.

The Republican candidate's tariff, tax and immigration policies are seen as inflationary, and thus negative for bonds and positive for the dollar. He is also seen as taking a more favourable stance towards cryptocurrencies.

"(It) seems now that Trump's ahead in the key battleground states, which suggests he's quite well placed to regain the White House and I think the markets started to factor that in last week with the stronger equities, higher yields, U.S. dollar obviously doing very, very well and bitcoin on track for a 10% gain over the past week," said Tony Sycamore, a market analyst at IG.

Bitcoin was last 0.5% higher at $69,080.72, after having touched its strongest level since July at $69,487 earlier in the session. The world's largest cryptocurrency gained 9.6% last week, and is up more than 8% for the month thus far.

"Things look pretty good for bitcoin right here. I think it can continue higher," said Sycamore.

The dollar hovered not too far from a high of more than two months against a basket of currencies on Monday, with the dollar index last at 103.49.

Sterling dipped 0.05% to $1.3041, while the euro fell 0.06% to $1.0861.

In the bond market, the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury yield last stood at 4.0809%, while the two-year yield was little changed at 3.9531%.

Spot gold peaked at a record of $2,732.73 an ounce, extending its rally after having gained more than 2% last week.

"One of the clearest Trump trades so far has been gold, given his belligerent stance on trade and willingness to weaponise the dollar, keeping demand for diversification well supported among emerging central banks," said Arun Sai, senior multi asset strategist at Pictet Asset Management.

Oil prices ticked higher on Monday, nursing a steep fall from last week.

Brent crude futures were last 0.6% higher at $73.49 a barrel, while U.S. crude rose 0.7% to $69.70 per barrel.

China cuts key lending rates to support growth

SHANGHAI/SINGAPORE, Oct 21 (Reuters) - China cut benchmark lending rates as anticipated at the monthly fixing on Monday, following reductions to other policy rates last month as part of a package of stimulus measures to revive the economy.

The one-year loan prime rate (LPR) was lowered by 25 basis points to 3.10% from 3.35%, while the five-year LPR was cut by the same margin to 3.6% from 3.85% previously.

The lending rates were last cut in July.

People's Bank of China (PBOC) Governor Pan Gongsheng told a financial forum last week lending rates will decrease by 20 to 25 basis points on Oct. 21.

The PBOC announced cuts to banks' reserve requirement ratio by 50 basis points and the benchmark seven-day reverse repo rate by 20 basis points on Sept. 24, kicking off the most aggressive stimulus since the pandemic that include measures to support the ailing property sector and boost consumption.

It also cut the medium-term lending facility rate by 30 basis points last month.

Most new and outstanding loans in China are based on the one-year LPR, while the five-year rate influences the pricing of mortgages.

Since the Sept. 24 measures, the CSI300 Index (.CSI300), opens new tab has broken records for daily moves and is up more than 14% overall. The yuan is down 1% against the dollar in that period.

Stocks have wobbled in recent sessions, though, as initial enthusiasm gave way to concerns about whether policy support would be big enough to revive growth.

Data on Friday showed China's economic growth was slightly better than expected in the third quarter, although property investment fell more than 10% in the first nine months of the year. Retail sales and industrial production picked up in September.

Officials addressing a press conference on Friday expressed confidence the economy can achieve the government's full year growth target of around 5%, and flagged another cut to banks' reserve ratio by the year-end.

"How influential further easing proves to be in China & Hong Kong equity and the CNH is up for debate, as market participants may be feeling a sense of policy easing fatigue," Chris Weston, head of research at Australian online broker Pepperstone, said in a note.

AI firm Simplismart raises $7 million in Series A funding led by Accel

The funding will be used for infrastructure and R&D which enables organisations to deploy AI models seamlessly

Artificial intelligence (AI) firm Simplismart has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by venture capital Accel. Shastra VC, Titan Capital and angels including Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari also participated in the round, the firm said on October 18.

Co-founded in 2022 by Amritanshu Jain and Devansh Ghatak, Simplismart has outperformed public benchmarks by building the world’s fastest inference engine. This engine allows organisations to run machine learning (ML) models at high speed, boost performance, and drive down costs.

Inferencing in AI refers to the process of using a trained model to make predictions or draw conclusions based on new, unseen data. It involves applying learned patterns from training data to infer outcomes, classifications, or insights in real-time applications.

The funding will be used for its infrastructure that enables organisations to deploy AI models seamlessly.

“With the steep costs and complexities involved, nearly 90 percent of machine-learning projects are estimated never to make it to production,” Simplismart said. Its fast inference engine allows users to leverage optimised performance for all their model deployments.

“This tranche, more than ten times the size of the previous round, will fuel R&D and growth for their enterprise-focused MLOps (ML Operations) orchestration platform,” the company said.

The startup said it is positioning itself as the critical enabler for AI’s transition into mainstream enterprise operations, the way cloud computing was adopted.

It said most companies struggle to deploy large AI models in production, at a time when Generative AI (Gen AI) is estimated to generate over $10 billion in revenue by next year.

The firm, which had under $1 million as initial funding, has engineered on-premise enterprise deployments, which is also agnostic towards choice of model and cloud platform. This is in contrast to most competitors, who focus on hardware optimisations or cloud computing.

Anand Daniel, Partner at Accel, said not only did Simplismart identify opportunities in this segment early, they already have begun serving some of India’s fastest-growing AI-powered companies in production. “Amritanshu and Devansh have everything it takes to win in the massive but fiercely competitive global AI infrastructure market,” he said.

Meta launches AI model that can evaluate other AI models’ work, Spirit LM that freely mixes text and speech

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, on Friday, said that it was releasing a series of new AI models from its research division – Fundamental AI Research (FAIR). These models include a ‘Self-Taught Evaluator’ that could likely offer the possibility of less human involvement in the entire AI development process, and another model that freely mixes text and speech.?

The latest announcements come after Meta’s paper in August that detailed how these models would rely on the ‘chain of thought’ mechanism, something which has been used by OpenAI for its recent o1 models that think before they respond. It needs to be noted that Google and Anthropic, too, have published research on the concept of Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback. However, these are not yet out for public use.?

Meta’s group of AI researchers under FAIR said that the new releases support the company’s goal of achieving advanced machine intelligence while also supporting open science and reproducibility. The newly released models include updated Segment Anything Model 2 for images and videos, Meta Spirit LM, Layer Skip, SALSA, Meta Lingua, OMat24, MEXMA, and Self-Taught Evaluator.?

Self Taught Evaluator?

Meta has termed this new model capable of validating other AI models’ works as “strong generative reward model with synthetic data”.The company claims that this a new method for generating preference data to train reward models without relying on human annotations. “This approach generates contrasting model outputs and trains an LLM-as-a-Judge to produce reasoning traces for evaluation and final judgments, with an iterative self-improvement scheme,” the company said in its official blog post.?

Essentially, the Self Taught Evaluator is a new method that generates its own data to train reward models with the need for humans to label it. Meta says that the model generates different outputs from AI models and then uses another AI to assess and improve those outcomes. This is an iterative process. According to Meta, the model is powerful and performs better than models that rely on human-labled data such as GPT-4 and others.?

Meta Spirit LM

The Spirit LM is an open source language model for seamless speech and text integration. Large Language Models are usually used to create systems that convert speech to text and vice versa. However, this could also lead to natural expressiveness being lost from the original speech. Meta has developed Spirit LM, its first open-source model that can work with both text and speech in a more natural way.?

“Many existing AI voice experiences today use ASR to techniques to process speech before synthesizing with an LLM to generate text — but these approaches compromise the expressive aspects of speech. Using phonetic, pitch and tone tokens, Spirit LM models can overcome these limitations for both inputs and outputs to generate more natural sounding speech while also learning new tasks across ASR, TTS and speech classification,” Meta said in a tweet.?

The Meta LM is trained on both speech and text data, making it possible to switch between the two effortlessly. Meta has created two versions of the model – Spirit LM Base that focuses on speech sounds, and Spirit LM that captures the tone and emotion in a speech such as anger, excitement to make it sound more realistic. Meta claims that this model can create more natural-sounding speech. It also learns tasks like speech recognition, converting text to speech, or classifying different types of speech.