Adani Breaks Records with Unprecedented $16B Expansion Drive

Adani Portfolio has reported a record-breaking capital expenditure of ₹1.53 lakh crore ($16.1 billion) in FY26 — the highest ever by any Indian corporate — marking a historic inflection point in India’s infrastructure growth. The group also posted its all-time high EBITDA of ₹94,834 crore, with 87% of earnings coming from core infrastructure.

Key Highlights of FY26 Performance

• Record Capex: ₹1,52,967 crore invested, surpassing all previous benchmarks in Indian corporate history.
• Asset Base: Expanded to ₹7,85,098 crore, reflecting accelerated infrastructure development.
• EBITDA: ₹94,834 crore, up 5.6% year-on-year.
• Core Infrastructure Contribution: 87% of earnings came from energy, utilities, transport, and logistics.
• Liquidity: Cash balance of ₹55,852 crore, covering debt servicing for at least 17 months.

Major Projects Commissioned

• Navi Mumbai International Airport: Began operations in Dec 2025.
• Guwahati Terminal: Operational since Feb 2026.
• Ganga Expressway: Commissioned in April 2026.
• Renewable Energy: 5.1 GW added, total capacity now 19.3 GW.
• Battery Energy Storage: Expanded to 3.37 GWh at Khavda.
• Copper Smelter: Commissioned as part of primary industries diversification.

Strategic Significance

• Scale of Investment: FY26 capex alone equals the group’s first 25 years of asset creation.
• Infrastructure Push: Aligns with India’s national growth priorities in transport, energy, and utilities.
• Competitive Positioning: Strengthens Adani’s dominance against rivals like UltraTech and Shree Cement in eastern India.
• Future Earnings Visibility: Newly commissioned projects expected to drive stronger cash flows from FY27 onwards.

Risks & Challenges

• Regulatory Approvals: Large projects remain vulnerable to delays in clearances.
• Debt Management: Despite strong liquidity, high leverage requires careful monitoring.
• Market Competition: Cement and energy sectors remain highly competitive.
• Execution Risks: Timely completion of mega projects is critical to sustaining momentum.

This milestone is a landmark corporate story showcasing India’s largest-ever private investment cycle. It ties into themes of national infrastructure growth, industrial diversification, and global competitiveness.

Aquapulse Raises ₹45 Cr Led by NABVENTURES, With IAN Alpha Fund Joining to Transform India’s Shrimp Value Chain for Global Exports

IAN Group, the country's largest early-stage investment platform, through IAN Alpha Fund, has participated in the successful closure of Aquapulse's ₹45 crore funding round, led by NABVENTURES through its AgriSURE Fund. The company plans to deploy the fresh capital to strengthen farm-level technology and disease management systems, expand its farmer procurement network across eastern India, scale processing and export operations, and build working capital infrastructure to support its growing global business.

With assistance from Aquapulse in the areas of water quality monitoring, feed discipline, disease early-warning systems, and harvesting coordination, local entrepreneurs can oversee clusters of shrimp ponds according to the company's aquapreneur concept. The Company brings increased transparency and consistency for purchasers around the world while giving smaller, shrimp farmers stable revenue streams. Pre-harvest technology assistance, lagoon-based harvesting, processing collaborations, and export logistics are all integrated by the company into a single traceable supply chain platform. At the moment, they mostly export shrimp to China, Vietnam, and Japan, but it also serves institutional and modern trade clients in the country.

Established in 2023 by Abhishek and Abhilash Dwivedy, Aquapulse uses a hub-and-spoke strategy to directly enable increased productivity and therefore earnings for small shrimp farmers. While the company started with Odisha based farmers, the company has demonstrated scale as it expanded its model to Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal farmers. The Company has created a technology-enabled, farmer-focused procurement platform that directly links shrimp producers with organized domestic and international markets.

India is one of the biggest exporters of frozen shrimp in the world, and the industry contributes significantly to the nation's seafood export in 2025, for instance, seafood exports from India amounted to US$ 8.28 billion. Nonetheless, a significant portion of shrimp output still originates from dispersed smallholder farms, which largely lack access to organized market connections, technological assistance, stable pricing, and traceability mechanisms. Simultaneously, foreign consumers are keen for end-to-end sourcing visibility, sustainability, and consistency in quality, as there is a high demand for Indian shrimps. The company’s model is based on the belief that India's strength is based on organizing its large number of small farmers by integrating technology with organized market access. For India, this is an excellent aggregation model for low-earning small farmers to access global customers, with significantly higher earnings.

Abhishek Dwivedy, Co-Founder, MD & CEO, Aquapulse, said, “This round is a vote of confidence in the smallholder shrimp farmer. The capital lets us deepen the aquapreneur cluster model, strengthen pre-harvest technology at the pond, and scale processing and exports without losing the farmer-first discipline we started with. We are not trying to replace the existing value chain overnight. We are trying to organise it — pond by pond, cluster by cluster — so that quality, traceability and farmer income all move in the same direction.”

Abhilash Dwivedy, Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer, Aquapulse, said, “Our job is to make the smallholder shrimp farmer a named, recognised participant in the global seafood chain — not an anonymous input.”

Sarika Saxena, Managing Partner, IAN Alpha Fund, said, “We invest in scalable, execution-driven companies that bridge critical market gaps. Aquapulse stood out immediately due to their deep understanding of the aquaculture ecosystem and a ground-level operational model that drives genuine value for both vendors and customers. By building a seamless 'farm-to-port' platform, Abhishek and Abhilash are matching dynamic international demand with unparalleled transparency, traceability, and market access. Aquapulse perfectly aligns with our fund’s thesis: backing innovative solutions that solve real-world problems at scale."

About Aquapulse

Aquapulse is the brand of Phoenix Marine Exports and Solution Pvt. Ltd. (PMES), a pond-to-port integrated shrimp aquaculture tech and seafood export company headquartered in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. The company works directly with smallholder shrimp farmers across Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal through an aquapreneur-led hub-and-spoke model — supporting them with pre-harvest technology, lagoon-based harvesting, processing and export logistics.

Aquapulse exports primarily to China, Vietnam and Japan, and serves domestic customers through a parallel channel. The company’s focus is on organising India’s fragmented smallholder shrimp value chain into a single, traceable platform that delivers consistent quality to global buyers and a more predictable livelihood to farmers at the pond.
About IAN Alpha Fund

IAN Alpha Fund, a $100 Mn SEBI-registered Category II AIF VC Fund, is the 2nd fund in IAN Group’s series of funds. The Fund explores opportunities in diverse sectors such as healthtech, cleantech, deep tech, agritech, medtech, hardware and electronics, manufacturing, Web 3.0, Metaverse, Industry 4.0, SaaS, and other sectors where innovation is transformational. The Fund invests in innovative startups solving real problems for India and the world, with sustainable business models enabling scale by leveraging technology. With the IAN Alpha Fund, IAN Group continues its two-decade legacy of building a portfolio of technology-focused, innovative companies led by founders who not only understand customer needs but also have the leadership qualities to build large and valuable businesses.

About IAN Group

IAN Group is India’s largest horizontal platform for early-stage investments, comprising the IAN Angel Fund, BioAngels, and a series of SEBI-registered Venture Capital Funds, the latest being a US$100mn VC Fund, IAN Alpha Fund. IAN enables entrepreneurs to raise from Rs. 50 lakhs to Rs. 50 crores, supported by high-quality mentoring by successful entrepreneurs, enabling access to global markets. IAN Group backs founders across domains and helps them scale their companies across India and beyond. Forbes has recognised IAN as one of the most iconic business and economic developments of Independent India over the last 75 years, alongside institutions such as LIC, NASSCOM, the RBI, and Naukri.com.

NVIDIA's AI Push is Reaching Aircraft, and an Indian eVTOL is Part of the Story

A central theme of Jensen Huang's COMPUTEX keynote this week was Physical AI — the convergence of AI, simulation, robotics and autonomous systems. While much of the AI boom has focused on software, NVIDIA's vision is increasingly centered on intelligent machines operating in the real world. From industrial robots and autonomous systems to digital twins and edge computing, the company is building the technology stack that will power the next generation of physical machines. Increasingly, that vision is extending beyond factories and robotics into sectors such as aerospace.

One of the companies living inside that vision is an Indian aerospace startup called The ePlane Company. Featured during Jensen Huang's keynote, ePlane represents an emerging class of companies using AI, simulation and digital-twin technologies not to build software, but to engineer systems that operate in the physical world.

With this recognition, ePlane becomes only the third eVTOL company in the world to be supported by NVIDIA, and the only one from Asia (for their certification journey).

What distinguishes this partnership from a typical technology endorsement is its depth. ePlane was the first eVTOL company globally to publicly commit to NVIDIA hardware within its onboard avionics architecture, and is now actively pursuing aircraft certification with that hardware integrated into the system. This is a foundational hardware-software co-development programme designed from the ground up to meet aviation-grade certification requirements.

"Being on Jensen's stage at GTC Taipei is not a moment we take lightly," said Prof. Satya Chakraavarthy, Founder and CEO, ePlane. "It is a signal to the world that India is not a follower in this technology cycle. We are co-developing safety-critical systems with the most consequential embedded infrastructure company on the planet, at the standards required for certified flight. That is a different conversation that speaks to the growing maturity and global relevance of India’s aerospace ecosystem.”

For ePlane, the Omniverse integration goes well beyond simulation as a tool. By building physics-accurate digital twin environments that model aircraft behaviour across a comprehensive range of flight conditions, failure modes, and edge cases, the company is able to generate simulation evidence that directly feeds into its DGCA certification pathway. The rigour matches what global aerospace leaders apply, and is now being built indigenously, in Chennai.

"Partnerships like this one do not happen by accident," said Vishnu Ramakrishnan, SVP Customer Strategy & Business Partnerships, ePlane. "They happen when a company's technology is genuinely credible at the global level. Being selected by NVIDIA as a reference for how their platform is applied in certified aviation tells our partners and investors something no pitch deck can: that the world's leading embedded infrastructure company has looked at what we are building and decided it belongs on their stage."

ePlane is currently in the Ground Test Vehicle phase of its first full-scale aircraft, with a Series C fundraise underway.

About ePlane

The ePlane Company (Ubifly Technologies Pvt. Ltd.) is an IIT Madras-incubated eVTOL company building electric air mobility solutions for India and global markets. The company is developing a compact, safety-certified electric aircraft for passenger, cargo, and emergency medical services applications. ePlane holds Design Organisation Approval from the DGCA, with its Type Certification application officially accepted. The company is backed by [key investors] and is currently in advanced stages of its Series C fundraise.

Palo Alto Networks Completes Acquisition of Portkey to Secure AI Agents

• Portkey expands Prisma® AIRS™ capabilities with control plane to monitor, orchestrate, and govern autonomous agents at scale

Palo Alto Networks® (NASDAQ: PANW), the global cybersecurity leader, today announced it has closed the acquisition of Portkey, a pioneer in AI Gateways. This acquisition establishes the AI Gateway as a mission-critical control plane for the enterprise, enabling organizations to accelerate AI innovation with confidence.

As organizations move from simple chatbots to autonomous AI agents that take action they face a trust gap. Giving AI the power to execute tasks independently introduces new risks of unauthorized actions, data exposure, and unchecked costs. To bridge this, an AI Gateway acts as the central nervous system for all AI traffic. It delivers the essential capability to monitor, orchestrate, and govern agent interactions, helping ensure that every request is routed to the best model for the job, monitors token usage to help prevent runaway costs, and provides a critical layer of runtime protection to help stop malicious or unintended AI behavior in real-time.

Portkey’s unique architecture is purpose-built to secure AI deployments at scale, with its ability to process trillions of tokens, and its AI Gateway can be implemented with minimal effort. By establishing Portkey as the core AI Gateway for Prisma AIRS, the comprehensive AI security platform, Palo Alto Networks will be able to deliver a solution that natively integrates:AI Runtime Security: Serving as the foundational AI Gateway for Prisma AIRS and inspecting all AI traffic at runtime to help detect and stop novel, agent-based threats before they can impact the enterprise.
Agent Identity Security via Idira™: Authenticating every agentic interaction to prevent unauthorized tool use and lateral movement, helping ensure all agents are treated as privileged users.
AI Observability via Chronosphere: Providing deep technical telemetry to help ensure AI workloads are performing reliably at production scale.

Lee Klarich, Chief Product & Technology Officer of Palo Alto Networks, "AI is evolving so rapidly that organizations often feel forced to choose between two failing strategies: scrambling to integrate a patchwork of 'point products' to stay current, or falling behind while waiting for legacy platforms to catch up. We're breaking that cycle. Palo Alto Networks is delivering a platform that stays on the cutting edge through a deliberate combination of organic innovation and strategic acquisitions. By making Portkey a critical component of the comprehensive Prisma AIRS platform, we do the heavy lifting of integration so our customers don't have to, enabling them to adopt the latest AI capabilities with speed and security."

Rohit Agarwal, CEO and Co-Founder of Portkey, "We joined Palo Alto Networks to bridge the trust gap that prevents AI from reaching its full potential. Our mission is to help enterprises move fearlessly. By combining our gateway with Palo Alto Networks AI security platform, we are helping organizations scale from experimental pilots to core business operations without compromising on safety or reliability."

About Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ: PANW), the global AI cybersecurity leader, protects our digital way of life with a comprehensive portfolio of cybersecurity solutions and platforms across Network, Cloud, Security Operations, AI and Identity. Trusted by 70,000+ customers and powered by Unit 42 threat intelligence, our AI-driven platforms eliminate complexity, empowering enterprises to modernize with confidence and securing the speed of innovation. Explore the future of security at www.paloaltonetworks.com.

Palo Alto Networks, Prisma, Prisma AIRS, Idira and the Palo Alto Networks logo are trademarks of Palo Alto Networks, Inc. in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other trademarks, trade names, or service marks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners. Any unreleased services or features (and any services or features not generally available to customers) referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available (or are not yet generally available to customers) and may not be delivered when expected or at all. Customers who purchase Palo Alto Networks applications should make their purchase decisions based on services and features currently generally available.

Adani to Invest $26m in New Cement Plant at Kharagpur by 2028

Adani Group will invest over US$26 million (approx. ₹217 crore) in a new greenfield cement plant in Kharagpur, West Bengal, with a planned capacity of 5 million tonnes per year, expected to be operational by 2028. The project revives a stalled ACC proposal from 2012 and marks Adani’s continued expansion in eastern India.

Key Project Details

• Investment Size: US$26m (₹217 crore approx.)
• Location: Kharagpur, West Bengal
• Land Area: 80–198 acres (reports vary)
• Capacity: 5 million tonnes per annum (5Mt/yr)
• Operational Timeline: Targeted for 2028
• Type: Grinding plant (due to investment scale)

Background & Context

• The original proposal was made by ACC in 2012 but lapsed when construction failed to begin within five years.
• After Adani’s acquisition of ACC in 2023, the group reapplied for the land and revived the project.
• Adani has also invested in upgrades at Farakka and Sankrail plants, boosting capacities to 5.6Mt and 4.2Mt respectively.

 Strategic Importance

Factor	Details
Regional Expansion	Strengthens Adani’s footprint in eastern India, especially West Bengal.
Supply Chain	Supports demand in eastern and northeastern states, reducing reliance on imports.
Employment	Expected to generate hundreds of direct jobs and many indirect opportunities.
Competition	Positions Adani against UltraTech and Shree Cement in the region.

Risks & Challenges

• Regulatory Approvals: Awaiting cabinet clearance in West Bengal.
• Timeline Risks: Large-scale projects often face delays in land acquisition and environmental clearances.
• Market Competition: Cement demand growth in eastern India is steady but competitive.

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