Last Updated:February 24, 2026, 17:12 IST

Prabhkiran Singh, Co-Founder and CEO of Bewakoof, steps down after 14 years, leaving a Mumbai slum startup turned national youth brand.

Prabhkiran Singh announces his decision to step down as CEO of Bewakoof after 14 years.

Prabhkiran Singh, Co-Founder and CEO of Bewakoof, has announced that he will be stepping away from the company he built over the past 14 years, marking the end of a long entrepreneurial chapter that began in 2011.

Bewakoof is a D2C fashion brand, which is popular among GenZ.

From Mumbai Slum Startup To National Youth Brand

In a LinkedIn post shared on Tuesday, Singh reflected on starting Bewakoof at the age of 21 with a fellow engineering graduate. The company was launched from a small room in a Mumbai slum at a time when direct-to-consumer (D2C) fashion brands were still a nascent concept in India and equity funding was limited.

He recalled personally handling early operations, including making T-shirt deliveries via local trains and responding to customer queries. Over time, the brand scaled significantly, growing from campus T-shirt sales to shipping over 20,000 products daily.

Bewakoof went on to become one of India’s prominent youth-focused fashion brands and, according to Singh, was the first D2C fashion startup in the country to cross ₹100 crore in revenue. The company also built a social media community of more than 6 million followers.

Backed By TMRW And Aditya Birla Group

Singh stated that the company is now “structurally ready” for its next phase, supported by a strong leadership team and the backing of TMRW and the Aditya Birla Group.

He added that after 14 years of building the business, he intends to prioritize his health, family, and personal goals. Singh will continue to lead Bewakoof until the end of March.

Calling the startup his “firstborn,” Singh said he will continue to support the brand from the sidelines as it works toward building a long-term legacy.

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Two stories from the past few weeks capture something essential about where we are with AI.The first concerns Salesforce, the enterprise software giant that aggressively embraced AI for customer service. CEO Marc Benioff proudly announced that AI deployment had allowed the company to cut support staff from 9,000 to roughly 5,000. Then reality intervened. Reports from late 2025 indicate that the company is now withdrawing from AI due to widespread failure. The AI agents confidently gave wrong answers, dropped instructions when given more than eight steps, and lost focus when users asked unexpected questions. Customers complained that AI support took longer than the simple old search function. Salesforce is now retreating to rigid, rule-based scripting–essentially admitting they were, in their own words, “more confident” than the technology warranted.The second story is a zeitgeist shift. Over the past couple of months, the conversation around AI and coding has transformed completely. People who were skeptical six months ago–senior developers who actually write code for a living–are now saying the age of human beings writing code is ending. Not in some distant future, but imminently. Entire features are being shipped by AI with minimal human intervention. The productivity gains are no longer incremental; they’re structural.How can both be true? How can AI fail comprehensively in customer service–seemingly straightforward–while revolutionising software development, which appears far more complex?The answer is that we’ve been thinking about AI wrong. We treat it as a single phenomenon that will sweep through the economy at roughly the same pace. However, AI in business is not a single story. It’s many parallel stories, moving at wildly different speeds. And the distinction has almost nothing to do with how intelligent the AI is.I’ve written about this tension before. A year ago, I argued that “the fact that a revolution is real doesn’t mean that every business claiming to be part of it will succeed.” More recently, I observed that “the gap between what AI demos well in controlled environments and what it actually delivers when confronting the messy real world remains enormous.” I now think there’s a more precise way to understand this gap. It’s not random. It’s structural.Consider what makes coding fertile ground for AI. Code is formally structured and machine-verifiable–it runs and passes tests, or it doesn’t. The feedback loop is immediate. When AI makes a mistake, a developer (or another AI agent) notices, fixes it, and moves on. Errors are private and reversible. Now consider customer service. Customers don’t speak in data schemas. Emotion, sarcasm, and cultural context matter enormously. One wrong answer can escalate to social media outrage or regulatory complaints. The failures are public and often irreversible.The difference isn’t intelligence. It’s what I’d call error economics. AI thrives where mistakes are cheap, private, and correctable. It struggles where mistakes are expensive, public, and permanent.We received a clear illustration of executive disconnect just a few days ago. During Bajaj Finance’s Q3 call, CEO Rajeev Jain announced that AI had listened to 2 crore calls and generated 100,000 new customer offers. “We’ll be able to listen to 100 million calls next year,” he said proudly. The response on social media was predictable hilarity. As the entire country, except apparently Mr Jain knows, Bajaj Finance’s incessant spam calls are the butt of countless jokes. Here was a CEO using sophisticated technology to optimize something customers actively despise. Machine learning works perfectly; the learning about customers is absent.For investors, the implications are significant. When you hear “AI” attached to a business function, ask: what happens when it’s wrong? If the answer involves customers, regulators, or reputations, progress will be slower than vendor PPTs claim. If the answer is “someone notices and fixes it,” that’s a different world entirely.The story of AI in business is not one of universal acceleration. It’s one of the selective escape velocities. Coding has left the atmosphere and gone into orbit. Customer service is still fighting gravity. Most other functions lie somewhere in between–mistakenly assumed to be closer to the rocket than they really are. The many worlds of AI are not converging. They’re diverging. And that divergence will determine which investments succeed and which disappoint.(Dhirendra Kumar is Founder and CEO of Value Research)

Gold prices fell on Tuesday as investors booked profits after bullion rose more than 2% in the previous session, while pressure from a stronger dollar also weighed on the yellow metal.

Spot gold fell 0.8% to $5,189.99 per ounce, snapping a four-session winning streak and dropping from a more than three-week high hit earlier in the day.

Bullion gained 2.5% in the previous session.

US gold futures for April delivery were down 0.3% at $5,210.40.

“Obviously, we had a meaningful rally (in gold) yesterday.

We have a little bit of a digestion here, and I think it’s noteworthy that we don’t see the panic that we saw on Wall Street extend into the Asian market,“ Ilya Spivak, head of global macro at Tastylive, added that a firmer dollar and profit-booking by investors were responsible for bullion’s drop.

Asian stock markets stuttered in early trade on Tuesday as a selloff on Wall Street overnight rattled investors, with sentiment hurt by heightened uncertainty over US President Donald Trump’s tariff policy and rising US-Iran tensions.

The dollar edged up, making greenback-priced bullion more expensive for holders of other currencies.

US President Donald Trump on Monday warned countries against backing away from trade deals negotiated recently with the US after the Supreme Court struck down his emergency tariffs, saying that if they did, he would hit them with much higher duties under different trade laws.

Elsewhere, Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said he was open to leaving interest rates on hold at the March meeting if the upcoming February jobs data indicated the labour market had “pivoted to a more solid footing” after a weak 2025.

Markets currently expect three 25-basis-point rate cuts this year, according to CME’s FedWatch Tool.

Spot silver fell 1% to $87.38 per ounce, after hitting a more than two-week high on Monday.

Spot platinum lost 0.7% to $2,139.25 per ounce, while palladium gained 0.3% to $1,748.12.