e-commerce
Airtel boosts its digital content portfolio – launches ‘Airtel Books’ to bring an exciting reading experience to smartphone users
MUMBAI: Bharti Airtel (“Airtel”), India’s leading telecommunications services provider, today launched a new app – Airtel Books to bring an exciting collection of e-books to smartphone users. With this, Airtel has further diversified its fast growing digital content portfolio to add to its popular offerings like Wynk Music and Airtel TV.
Available to both Airtel and non-Airtel customers in iOS and Android, Airtel Books will initially offer over 70,000 titles from leading Indian and international authors. Latest launches like Mind Without Fear from Rajat Gupta are part of the exciting collection. Airtel Books plans to rapidly expand its e-books collection by partnering with leading publishers as well as leveraging its strategic partnership with Juggernaut Books.
All Airtel Books users will get a complimentary 30 day trial to experience the app and can access ‘Free’ titles from the Readers Club. Airtel smartphone customers will also enjoy a one-time special benefit of being able to access any five ‘Paid’ titles from the Readers Club, which has a collection of over 5000 e-books.
Airtel Books has a subscription service called, Reader’s Club which is priced at Rs. 129 for 6 months and Rs. 199 for 12 months. Customers can also buy books on a per book basis with best-in-class offers.
Sameer Batra, CEO – Content & Apps, Bharti Airtel said: “Airtel Books is another major milestone in our journey towards building a world-class digital content portfolio. E-books is a fast growing segment along with music and video, thanks to large screen smartphones becoming the cornerstone of digital lifestyle. We are delighted to roll out this initiative and take it to the smartphone users across India through our deep distribution reach. As we have demonstrated with Wynk Music and Airtel TV, our aim is to use deep customer science to curate great reading content for our users and add to their smartphone experience on our best-in-class network.”
Chiki Sarkar, Co-Founder, Juggernaut Books said, “Reaching the growing smartphone users in the country and getting them phone friendly books at low prices has been the reason Juggernaut was set up. Our association with Airtel has helped really make this vision come alive.”
Some of the popular authors on Airtel Books are Twinkle Khanna, Sourav Ganguly, Rajdeep Sardesai, Sunny Leone, Arundhati Roy, Devdutt Pattnaik, Preeti Shenoy, Yashwant Sinha, Kanhaiya Kumar, Raghuram Rajan, Rujuta Diwekar, Perumal Murugan, Benyamin and Rajat Gupta.
Alongside these names, Airtel Books also offers a large catalogue of stories from as short as five pages across a range of genres – crime, love, sex and romance, business, history and politics, fitness, diet, spirituality and classics.
e-commerce
American Express to acquire AI startup Hyper to boost automation
Deal targets expense management as AI reshapes corporate spending tools.
MUMBAI: From receipts to robots, the expense sheet is getting a brain upgrade as American Express moves to bring artificial intelligence into the heart of corporate spending. The company has announced plans to acquire Hyper, a relatively young but fast-rising startup founded in 2022 that builds AI-powered agents capable of organising expenses, generating reports, verifying compliance with budgets and policies, and nudging users with timely reminders. The deal, expected to close in the second quarter of 2026, underscores a growing shift among financial institutions to automate traditionally manual, time-heavy workflows.
Hyper counts Sam Altman among its backers, adding a layer of Silicon Valley credibility to the acquisition. While financial details remain undisclosed, the strategic intent is clear: deepen automation capabilities and sharpen American Express’s position in the competitive corporate spending ecosystem.
The two companies are not strangers. They previously collaborated in 2024 on a co-branded credit card product, suggesting that the acquisition is less a cold buy and more an extension of an existing relationship. With this move, American Express is effectively bringing that capability in-house, aiming to embed AI directly into its commercial services stack.
Chief executive Stephen Squeri had already signalled the direction of travel in a recent shareholder letter, describing AI as a “structural shift” in how businesses operate. The Hyper acquisition appears to be a direct response to that shift, particularly in expense management, where processes such as approvals, compliance checks and reporting remain ripe for automation.
Alongside the acquisition, the company is also expanding its product suite. A recently launched business credit card offers cashback and benefits at an annual fee of $295, with another card expected later this year moves that complement its broader push into commercial services.
Taken together, the strategy points to a future where managing expenses may require fewer spreadsheets and more algorithms. For American Express, the bet is simple, if businesses are rethinking how work gets done, the tools that power that work need to evolve just as quickly.
