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DraftFCB+Ulka launches India chapter of Asterii Analytics
MUMBAI: As part of its pursuit to expand offerings in India, Draftfcb+Ulka Wednesday announced the launch of its analytics agency – Asterii Analytics.
The agency will be headquartered in India and led by Niteen Bhagwat who will act in the capacity of executive director and CEO.
Asterii will support clients across the entire spectrum of marketing activities and is a specialist marketing analytics company. The agency is one more manifestation of the group‘s continuing endeavour to build capabilities and solutions to help create “brand wealth” for all its clients.
The firm‘s global analytics network has over 100 analysts within the Draftfcb network with key resources in Europe and USA. Asterii has domain expertise across retail, automotive, financial services and packaged goods.
Asterii is a coined word and is derived from the word Asterism which means seeing a pattern of stars in the sky. Patterns, which give meaning not just to the billions of stars in the sky but also the billions of data points that any business has to interpret and decipher.
Asterii will gain from over 50 years of expertise in creating ‘brand wealth” and developing communication programmes and marketing strategies that are based on unique consumer insights.
Asterii said it will go beyond techniques and tools to bring ‘insights’ which are rooted in data and analytics. These insights will help create solutions which will have a predictable impact on the client’s brands and business.
At the launch of the agency, Bhagwat said, “This agency will focus on creating brand wealth. In today’s world where the intuitive decision making no longer works, data analytics provides the platform to make informed decisions.”
Asterii is supported by a global network of analysts in the DraftFCB ecosystem. Its solutions tool kit will span the entire spectrum of marketing activities from the assessment phase to growth and maintenance strategies for a brand. The entire array of solutions and capabilities are supported with monitoring solutions and reporting solutions that can give near real time inputs on marketing programmes.
Asterii Analytics will offer three specific modules – assessment solutions, growth solutions and relationship management solutions.
The assessment tools include tools to help clients evaluate and select markets, map competitive forces and, thus, help assign a value to the consumer opportunity and help create a macro view on the brand and also help develop go-to -market strategies.
The growth solution module explores growth opportunities that emerge from being able to segment the market and do predictive modelling based on behaviour data or other unstructured data sources.
The third module is based on Asterii’s belief that the best means of growth are from within and that meeting customer expectations and creating customer delight is far more valuable than acquiring new customers.
Asterii has capability in deploying market mix models, forecasting to measure marketing effectiveness based on goals and KPI’s.
As marketing communications go digital and social media becomes the media of choice for many consumers, it becomes critical to have a monitoring and optimisation solution for the entire digital programme. Asterii helps develop social strategies by doing insight mining, identifying key influencers and mapping the interaction paths for various consumer segments.
MUMBAI: Apple just folded a photonics startup into its empire because when you’re building the future of light, sometimes you need to acquire the blueprint. Apple has quietly acquired key assets from invrs.io, a small AI-focused photonics startup, and brought its founder and sole employee, Martin Schubert, on board, according to a regulatory filing submitted to the European Union in October 2025.
The filing reveals that Apple would take over certain assets from invrs.io while hiring Schubert, a research scientist with prior stints at Meta, Google, and Micron Technology, where he worked on advanced display, semiconductor, and optical technologies.
Invrs.io specialised in open-source frameworks for photonics research, the science of controlling and manipulating light, critical to cameras, sensors, LiDAR, and displays across Apple’s ecosystem. The startup’s tools used AI-guided design to accelerate optical system simulation, optimisation, and benchmarking, aiming to make complex engineering more accessible to AI researchers and hardware developers.
Apple has not disclosed specific plans for integrating the technology, but the acquisition points to deeper ambitions in hardware-level AI. Enhanced light-based modelling could refine camera performance in iPhones and iPads, boost sensor accuracy in wearables, optimise spatial computing in Vision Pro, and advance next-generation displays and LiDAR systems.
Though modest compared with Apple’s blockbuster deals, the move underscores the company’s push to embed AI not just in software but in the physical foundations of its devices. As custom silicon and on-device AI accelerate, photonics expertise at the intersection of light and intelligence could prove a key differentiator.
For a company that once revolutionised screens with Retina displays, quietly snapping up a photonics innovator feels like the next logical step ensuring the light inside Apple’s world shines brighter, sharper, and smarter than ever.
