Infosys records poor Q4 performance; Toast’s billion-dollar India R&D plans

Hello,

Investors have turned up the heat on Medikabazaar.

Series C investors in the B2B medical equipment company have filed a Rs 279 crore indemnity claim following allegations of fraudulent financial reporting tied to earlier funding rounds.

The compensation demand largely stems from alleged misstatements made during the company’s $75 million Series C funding round, where several global and domestic investors participated. 

Meanwhile, the tides seem to have turned for Indian markets.

While IT heavyweights like Wipro and Infosys have weighed down the IT sector with dismal forecasts, financial stocks have come through to haul benchmark indexes to their best week in more than four years.

The market rally coincided with foreign inflows of around $1.12 billion in the past couple of days, which has also had an added benefit: helping the rupee log its best weekly performance in a month. 

Whether this reversal of trends is here to stay is yet to be seen.

In other news, we may have the strongest evidence of life on another planet yet—but it’s not quite the ‘little green men’ you’d imagine. 

Scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope have detected the chemical fingerprints of the gases dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide in the planet’s atmosphere, which on Earth are only produced by living organisms. 

Little green men? Well, maybe little green microbes. 

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Infosys records poor Q4 performance
• Toast’s billion-dollar India R&D plans
• AI for speech and neurodevelopmental care

Here’s your trivia for today: What popular cocktail ingredient also glows in the dark?

Earnings

Infosys records poor Q4 performance

Infosys, India’s second-largest technology services exporter, reported an 11.7% decline in net profit for Q4 FY25, much below the market expectations. The company's subdued performance summarises the disappointment of the Indian IT industry, as evident from the quarterly results of its peers, TCS and Wipro. 

Infosys reported a net profit of Rs 7,033 crore for Q4 FY25, compared with Rs 7,969 crore a year ago. The revenue for the quarter stood at Rs 40,925 crore—a year-on-year increase of 7.9%.

Much uncertainty:

• Infosys has projected that its revenue for FY26 in US dollar terms will be in the range of 0-3%. On the business outlook, Infosys CEO Salil Parekh said, “The environment remains uncertain and we are keeping a close watch.”
• The upheaval in the business environment is primarily due to tariff wars unleashed by US President Donald Trump, which had an impact on the performance of Infosys. Infosys’ revenue in the January-March 2025 quarter in US dollar terms saw a quarterly decline of 4.2%.
• The CEO remained confident about the outlook as he sees a ramp in the large deals Infosys has won. The total contract value of large deals for FY25 stood at $11.6 billion.

Funding Alert

Startup: Good Monk

Amount: $2M

Round: Pre-Series A

Startup: That Sassy Thing

Amount: Rs 6 Cr

Round: Seed

Interview

Toast’s billion-dollar India R&D plans

Initially launched as a consumer-facing restaurant app, Toast pivoted from simply processing customer payments to providing comprehensive restaurant point-of-sale solutions. Toast exemplifies vertical SaaS, embedding payments, lending, payroll, and more. With $1.5 billion in ARR, the Boston-based firm derives 80% of its income from fintech offerings alone. 

In an interview with YourStory, Aman Narang shares how AI is disrupting the vertical SaaS industry, outlines Toast’s AI strategy, and weighs in on how India is central to the company’s billion-dollar R&D plan.

Opportunities ahead:

• Over the past few years, we’ve expanded our business. For the first decade, our focus was primarily on small and mid-sized restaurants in the US. In the last three to four years, we’ve grown into the enterprise segment and expanded internationally—now operating in the UK, Canada, and Ireland, with more countries on the horizon, the CEO said.
• Toast aims to become the go-to platform for in-person commerce, much like how people think of Shopify when they think of ecommerce. “That’s how we see Toast evolving over the next decade and beyond,” he added.
• India, in particular, is a key part of our long-term vision. While we haven't launched our products here, we have a significant presence through our team in India, which plays a critical role across R&D, product innovation, customer support, finance, and back-office operations, Narang said.

Startup

AI for speech and neurodevelopmental care

In India, nearly 15% of the population faces some form of communication disorder, with one in eight children affected by neurodevelopmental conditions. The country’s infrastructure for early detection and therapy also remains limited, with only one qualified speech therapist available for every 10,000 people. 

Gabify, a Delhi-based startup founded in 2024 by Sahil Chopra, Prachi Sood, and Vasyl Leshchuk, aims to address these challenges. The AI-driven platform offers research-backed speech therapy services tailored to individual needs.

Key takeaways:

• Gabify’s self-assessment web application helps parents and caregivers identify early signs of speech and neurodevelopmental disorders such as Autism, ADHD, and speech delays in children, enabling timely intervention.
• Its system tracks development milestones through metrics like vocabulary use, response time, motor behaviour, and eye contact, providing families and professionals with ongoing insights.
• The startup offers initial AI screening for Rs 499, and a 100-session home-based therapy programme is available for Rs 50,000. Each programme includes virtual sessions supported by printable exercises and parent coaching materials, allowing families to continue therapy at home.

News & updates

• Tariffs: India plans to end taxes on US ethane and LPG imports under broader negotiations with Washington as it looks to reduce its trade surplus and ease its tariff burden. The proposal to get rid of duties comes as India mulls scrapping import tax for US LNG and boosting purchases of the fuel from the US.
• Fed tussle: US President Donald Trump said that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell's termination “cannot come fast enough,” while calling for the US central bank to cut interest rates, the sort of pressure that Powell just a day before had pledged to resist as the US Fed grapples with an outlook complicated by Trump’s policies.
• Feature: Elon Musk’s xAI announced a “memory” feature for Grok that enables the bot to remember details from past conversations with a user. Now, if you ask Grok for recommendations, it’ll give more personalised responses, assuming you’ve used it enough to allow it to “learn” your preferences.

What popular cocktail ingredient also glows in the dark?

Answer: Tonic water. It contains quinine, which absorbs UV light and emits it as a photon of visible light in a soft blue colour.

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