The consumer-robotics graveyard is littered with well-funded American startups. Moxie, Jibo, Anki—all raised millions, then collapsed under cloud costs and thin margins.

Enter Miko, a Mumbai company selling AI companions to American kids. With Indian manufacturing cutting costs to one-fifth of US production and subscriptions driving recurring revenue, Miko has advantages its rivals never had. Yet it's still losing money—120 crore rupees last year. Now, as the company hits 500,000 units in annual sales, it's reaching the exact scale where others stumbled.

Can Miko's India edge break the robotics curse, or will it become just another cautionary tale?

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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Uttar Pradesh now makes more than half the smartphones produced in India. Big electronics companies have set up factories in and around Noida. A place once known for small industries is suddenly part of a global supply chain.

In this episode, we look at how that happened. What changed after the pandemic. Why policy, infrastructure and geography mattered. And why almost all this growth is packed into a small belt near Delhi.

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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India has the engineers, the users, and the ambition to be an AI superpower.

But as OpenAI floods the market at ₹399/month, Google invests $15 billion, and global giants harvest Indian data, a critical question emerges: Will India settle for being the world's largest AI user, or can it become a builder that matters?

From DeepSeek's $6M shock to the race for AI sovereignty, we connect the dots on India's AI moment—and what could be next.

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Episodes mentioned:

1. Deepseek: Spotify | Apple | Youtube
2. ChatGPT 399 Plan: Spotify | Apple | Youtube
3. India's Sovereign AI: Spotify | Apple | Youtube
4. Deloitte's AI blunder: Spotify | Apple | Youtube
5. AI Browsers: Spotify | Apple | Youtube
6. Why AI minds are refusing big bucks: Spotify | Apple | Youtube
7. Call Centres are being rewritten by AI: Spotify | Apple | Youtube

Write to us with your thoughts at podcast@the-ken.com!

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.