Piyu Dutta

Piyu DuttaSep 24, 2026

Airtel Money could become London's biggest IPO since 2021. The plan is for $800 million share sale valuing the company at $8B- $9B. The offering is entirely secondary, with no fresh capital raised. What I love about this story is the long bet. Bharti Airtel bought Zain's African operations in 2010 for $10.7B. At that point of time, it was one of the largest overseas acquisitions by an Indian company. Zain was rebranded as Airtel. Zain's mobile wallet business called Zap was rebranded as Airtel Money in 2011. Like Kenya's M-Pesa, Zap was built for people with a mobile phone but no bank account- ie, for the under and un-banked population. The strategic significance here is that a telecom acquisition became the foundation for a financial services business which now commands a $8B valuation of its own. This is what makes long bets interesting. When you look back you see how acquisitions are rarely about what they are at that time but what they can become over time :)

Piyu DuttaSep 22, 2026

FT carried out a fascinating read recently on how 8ft x 20ft steel containers revolutionised global trade. For decades before the 1950s open wooden boxes for coal that could be hoisted by cranes from barges to railway carriages were the first prototypes for “intermodal” containers, ie containers capable of switching from one form of transport to another. Later, the US Army developed a ribbed steel container just over 8 feet as a “transporter” that would remain sealed until the point of delivery. These boxes could be easily shifted between road, rail and ships. They halved the time from the US to Korea from 55 to 27 days and reduced theft on the docks. Global trade still remains an extraordinarily physical business. Goods may move seamlessly from factory to truck to ship and to rail, yet the information and financing that of those goods remain largely fragmented. It is heavily dependent on multiple parties, systems and tonnes of physical documentation. That is what makes the history of the container so interesting. The breakthrough was not a better and secured steel box. It was standardisation. We have yet to find the equivalent standard for the financial and information layer of global trade. Maersk and IBM’s TradeLens tried to create a shared digital infrastructure using blockchain, but it was discontinued in 2022 after failing to achieve the level of industry-wide collaboration required to make the platform commercially viable. At a time when tariffs, reshoring, sanctions and supply chains are continuously being shuffled, the next revolution may be in how the information and capital moves with the goods in the container. Anthropia Pic credit:Financial Times

Piyu DuttaSep 17, 2026

Please apply if you believe you are a fit ⤵️