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In science, advances are a daily occurrence, but true breakthroughs are rare. What does it take to achieve world-changing scientific breakthroughs? Some are the result of a lucky accident, combined with curiosity: scientists traveling down one road suddenly find reason to veer onto another road, one they never planned to travel — a road that may well lead nowhere.

Other major breakthroughs stem from scientists pursuing a very specific dream. One day, usually early in their career, they get an idea that they can’t stop thinking about. It’s crazy, they say to themselves, but is it really impossible? They talk to respected colleagues who often remind them of all the reasons their idea might not work, and how damaging this could be for their career. It’s a sobering message, yet the idea won’t die. So, they scramble to find financial support and seek out colleagues willing to risk traveling that road with them — a road that may well lead nowhere. But sometimes the road leads to major breakthroughs like penicillin and mRNA vaccines.

Breakthroughs due to lucky accidents and curiosity

One day in 1928, Dr. Alexander Fleming at St. Mary’s Hospital in London was growing bacteria in a laboratory dish. Fleming was not pursuing a scientific dream. He was a microbiologist, just doing his job.

Then he noticed something odd: overnight, another kind of microbe, a fungus, had traveled through the air, landed on the laboratory dish, and started to grow and spread on the dish where the bacteria were growing. Fleming soon noticed that the growing fungus seemed to be killing the bacteria. He surmised that it was making some substance that killed the bacteria. Because the name of the fungus was Penicillium rubens, he called the substance the fungus was making “penicillin.”

When Fleming published a paper about his discovery, few were interested. It took another 10 years before other scientists tried to generate large amounts of penicillin to see if it might be able to cure bacterial infections and save lives. We all know how that worked out.

Fleming’s scientific breakthrough, like some others, occurred not because Fleming had a brilliant idea and exclaimed “Eureka!” Instead, it occurred because he noticed something and said, “That’s odd,” and then tried to figure it out.

Breakthroughs due to persistence and resilience in pursuit of a dream

The story of mRNA vaccines, like the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines for COVID-19, is very different from the story of penicillin. For 30 years, a small group of scientists believed that mRNA vaccines would have great advantages over traditional vaccines — if only several obstacles could be overcome. Many of these scientists gave up as they encountered those obstacles, but a few persisted and, ultimately, succeeded. (I described what mRNA vaccines are, how they work, and how obstacles were overcome in a previous blog post.)

One scientist, Dr. Katalin Karikó, joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1990s with the dream of creating an mRNA vaccine. She applied for grants to support her work, but was repeatedly rejected: the reviewers stated that it was so unlikely that she or anyone could overcome the obstacles that supporting her research would be a wasted investment. Her university only agreed to continue supporting her work if she accepted a demotion and a pay cut. She accepted both, and doggedly pursued her dream.

One major obstacle to mRNA vaccines particularly fascinated her: the violent reaction of the immune system when it encounters mRNA from a virus. Ten years of dogged work helped Karikó and her colleague Drew Weissman figure out how to make a small change in mRNA that prevented that violent immune response — a major step in making all mRNA vaccines possible. Without this, the world wouldn’t have mRNA COVID vaccines today.

Two other scientists who created the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID vaccine, Uğur Şahin and Őzlem Turëci, are Turkish immigrants to Germany who met, fell in love with the idea of creating an mRNA vaccine, and then fell in love with each other. According to The Wall Street Journal, one day in 2002 they took a break for lunch, got married, and then returned in the afternoon to their laboratory to finish an experiment — just one more among many conducted over 30 years. Each experiment was one more possible step toward their ultimate dream until finally, in 2020, they achieved that dream: their mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 proved to be very safe and effective.

Holding hard to their dreams

Whichever path scientists who achieve lifesaving breakthroughs travel, they often endure disinterest, like Fleming, or repeated skepticism, ridicule, and rejection, like Karikó, Weissman, Şahin, and Turëci. Only through sheer persistence did these scientists bring their dreams to life. They have been rewarded with fame and wealth and something even more valuable: the knowledge that because of their work hundreds of millions of people around the world never got sick, and millions never died before their time.

Of course, a relentless obsession with an improbable dream fails to pay off for many scientists. Their ideas, while quite brilliant, in the end are proved wrong: nature doesn’t turn out to operate the way they predicted. In the end, their beautiful theory is murdered by a brutal gang of facts.

Still other scientific dreamers ultimately prove to have been on the right track all along and would have achieved their dream — if only they had done the experiment a little differently, if only they had persisted a little longer, or if only the support for their work had not run out. As a result, neither they nor the rest of us benefited from what would have been — until other scientists rediscovered their work years later.

Ultimately, scientific breakthroughs are possible only if a society is willing to invest in dreamers, recognizing that not all investments will lead to major breakthroughs. However, the investments that do lead to breakthroughs bring an economic return that is far greater than the investment — as well as preventing suffering and death and changing the world.

This story originally appeared in the Harvard Health Blog.

Anthony L. Komaroff is the Steven P. Simcox/Patrick A. Clifford/James H. Higby Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, senior physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and editor-in-chief of the Harvard Health Letter.

The queen is the most powerful piece on the chessboard. Unlike any other (including the king), it can move any number of squares vertically, horizontally, or diagonally.

Now consider this queen’s gambit: If you put eight of them on a standard board of eight squares by eight squares, how many ways could they be arranged so that none could attack the other? Turns out there are 92. But what if you place an even larger number of queens on a chessboard of the same relative size, say, 1,000 queens on a 1,000-by-1,000 square chessboard, or even a million queens on a similarly sized board?

The original version of the n-queens mathematical problem first appeared in a German chess magazine in 1848 as the eight-queens problem, and the correct answer emerged a couple of years later. Then in 1869, the more expansive version of the problem surfaced and remained unanswered until late last year, when a Harvard mathematician provided an almost definitive answer.

Michael Simkin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, calculated that there are about (0.143n)ⁿ ways the queens can be placed so none are attacking each other on giant n-by-n chessboards.

Simkin’s final equation doesn’t provide the exact answer but instead simply says this figure is as close to the actual number as you can get right now. The 0.143 figure, which represents an average level of uncertainty in the variable’s possible outcome, is multiplied by whatever n is and then raised to the power of n to get the answer.

On the extremely large chessboard with one million queens, for example, 0.143 would be multiplied by one million, coming out to about 143,000. That figure would then be raised to the power of one million, meaning it’s multiplied by one million that many times. The final answer is a figure with five million digits.

Simkin was able to come up with the equation by understanding the underlying pattern for how large numbers of queens would have to be distributed on these enormous chessboards — whether they’d be concentrated in the middle or on the edges — and then applying well-known mathematical techniques and algorithms.

“If you were to tell me I want you to put your queens in such-and-such way on the board, then I would be able to analyze the algorithm and tell you how many solutions there are that match this constraint,” Simkin said. “In formal terms, it reduces the problem to an optimization problem.”

By focusing on the spaces that have the greater chances of being occupied, Simkin figured out how many queens would be in each section of the board and came up with a formula for to get a valid number of configurations. The calculations resulted in what’s known as the lower bound — the minimum number of possible configurations.

Once he had that number, Simkin then used a strategy known as the entropy method to find the upper bound, which is the highest number of possible configurations.

Simkin found the lower bound answer almost perfectly matches the upper bound answer. Simply put, it showed that the exact answer is sandwiched somewhere in between the two bounds in a relatively small mathematical space.

Simkin has been working on the n-queens problem for almost five years. He says that he personally is a terrible chess player but is seeking to improve his game. “I still enjoy the challenge of playing, but, I guess, math is more forgiving,” said Simkin, who became interested in the problem because of how he could apply breakthroughs from the field of math he works in called combinatorics, which focuses on counting and problems of selection and arrangements.

Working on the problem has been a test of patience and resilience. Four years ago as a Ph.D. student at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he visited mathematician and chess wiz Zur Luria at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. The pair collaborated and developed new techniques to get at an answer. In the end, after two years of work, they only came up with a better lower bound figure and knew they were missing something.

Simkin finished his Ph.D. in 2020 and moved to Boston to start working at Harvard. The problem was always at the back of his mind, and he came back to it when he realized he had to start focusing on spaces the queens would be rather than giving equal weight to each space.

Even though it’s theoretically possible to get a bit closer to an even more exact answer, Simkin for now is happy to let someone else come to it.

“I think that I may personally be done with the n-queens problem for a while, not because there isn’t anything more to do with it but just because of I’ve been dreaming about chess and I’m ready to move on with my life,” he said.

The Earth sits in a 1,000-light-year-wide void surrounded by thousands of young stars — but how did those stars form?

In a paper appearing today in Nature, astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) reconstruct the evolutionary history of our galactic neighborhood, showing how a chain of events beginning 14 million years ago led to the creation of a vast bubble that’s responsible for the formation of all nearby, young stars.

“This is really an origin story; for the first time we can explain how all nearby star formation began,” says astronomer and data visualization expert Catherine Zucker who completed the work during a fellowship at the CfA.

The paper’s central figure, a 3D spacetime animation, reveals that all young stars and star-forming regions — within 500 light-years of Earth — sit on the surface of a giant bubble known as the Local Bubble. While astronomers have known of its existence for decades, scientists can now see and understand the Local Bubble’s beginnings and its impact on the gas around it.

The source of our stars: The Local Bubble

Using a trove of new data and data science techniques, the spacetime animation shows how a series of supernovae that first went off 14 million years ago, pushed interstellar gas outward, creating a bubble-like structure with a surface that’s ripe for star formation.

Today, seven well-known star-forming regions or molecular clouds — dense regions in space where stars can form — sit on the surface of the bubble.

“We’ve calculated that about 15 supernovae have gone off over millions of years to form the Local Bubble that we see today,” says Zucker, who is now a NASA Hubble Fellow at STScI.

The oddly-shaped bubble is not dormant and continues to slowly grow, the astronomers note.

“It’s coasting along at about 4 miles per second,” Zucker says. “It has lost most of its oomph though and has pretty much plateaued in terms of speed.”

The expansion speed of the bubble, as well as the past and present trajectories of the young stars forming on its surface, were derived using data obtained by Gaia, a space-based observatory launched by the European Space Agency.

“This is an incredible detective story, driven by both data and theory,” says Harvard professor and Center for Astrophysics astronomer Alyssa Goodman, a study co-author and founder of glue, data visualization software that enabled the discovery. “We can piece together the history of star formation around us using a wide variety of independent clues: supernova models, stellar motions and exquisite new 3D maps of the material surrounding the Local Bubble.”

Bubbles everywhere?

“When the first supernovae that created the Local Bubble went off, our sun was far away from the action” says co-author João Alves, a professor at the University of Vienna. “But about 5 million years ago, the sun’s path through the galaxy took it right into the bubble, and now the sun sits — just by luck — almost right in the bubble’s center.”

Today, as humans peer out into space from near the sun, they have a front row seat to the process of star formation occurring all around on the bubble’s surface.

Astronomers first theorized that superbubbles were pervasive in the Milky Way nearly 50 years ago. “Now, we have proof — and what are the chances that we are right smack in the middle of one of these things?” asks Goodman. Statistically, it is very unlikely that the sun would be centered in a giant bubble if such bubbles were rare in our Milky Way Galaxy, she explains.

Goodman likens the discovery to a Milky Way that resembles very holey swiss cheese, where holes in the cheese are blasted out by supernovae, and new stars can form in the cheese around the holes created by dying stars.

Next, the team, including co-author and Harvard doctoral student Michael Foley, plans to map out more interstellar bubbles to get a full 3D view of their locations, shapes, and sizes. Charting out bubbles, and their relationship to each other, will ultimately allow astronomers to understand the role played by dying stars in giving birth to new ones, and in the structure and evolution of galaxies like the Milky Way.

Zucker wonders, “Where do these bubbles touch? How do they interact with each other? How do superbubbles drive the birth of stars like our sun in the Milky Way?”

Additional co-authors on the paper are Douglas Finkbeiner and Diana Khimey of the CfA; Josefa Groβschedl and Cameren Swiggum of the University of Vienna; Shmuel Bialy of the University of Maryland; Joshua Speagle of the University of Toronto; and Andreas Burkert of the University Observatory Munich.

The start of the new year can feel like the perfect opportunity to follow through with that resolution to learn a new skill or finally tackle a challenge. But sometimes it feels like the older you are, the harder it can be to change habits, add a new skill to your repertoire, or start a hobby. Is it really true that an old dog can’t learn a new trick?

One thing learning scientists do know is that fluid reasoning — the ability to think logically and solve problems quickly in new situations — does tend to decline as adults age. However, crystallized intelligence — knowledge that comes from experience and prior learning like reading comprehension or vocabulary — increases over time, explains Chris Dede, Harvard Graduate School of Education professor and co-principal investigator on the NSF-funded National AI Institute on Adult Learning and Online Education.

“Essentially, what this means is that some forms of learning are harder as one ages, but other forms of learning actually become easier,” says Dede. Here, Dede draws from research around adult development and learning science to provide five tips for learning new things that adults can keep in mind as they head into the new year:

1. Start with what you already know

This is because learning science suggests that people learn by building off existing knowledge or “the edges” of what they already know. So, for example, if you’re an accomplished photographer but you’ve always wanted to take up painting, you may be able to learn faster because you can build off what you already know about composition and light. “Because adults have more knowledge from past experiences, they have more edges to learn from and build off of,” says Dede.

2. Identify your motivation

Learning something new at a later stage in life tends to be more about positive self-concept and intrinsic interest. While motivation is key in the K–2 space too, adult learners don’t generally have to pass a test at the end of a unit. As a result, there’s often less pressure or lower stakes attached, making the conditions more conducive to positive experiences with learning tasks.

3. Analyze your interest to help find potential new areas to explore

Think about what you like doing and ask yourself why. Maybe you like cleaning the house because it’s a finite task with a concrete sense of accomplishment. Maybe you like jigsaw puzzles because you like recognizing patterns. By deconstructing your engagement with different activities, you’re exposing more “motivational edges” you can build on as you expand learning.

4. Find ways to connect and bond with others

The best way to learn is often to teach or to have someone to bounce ideas off. It can also help to have someone to hold you accountable. In fact, studies have found that you’ll often work harder to help a protégé than yourself. Find someone who appreciates what you know and tackle the project together.

5. Challenge yourself and have a growth mindset

Surmounting a challenge has been shown to make people happier — and learning something new can provide that kind of challenge. “Picking something you might enjoy and building your growth mindset by learning it in a challenging way that involves other people can really make all the difference and help form a successful learning experience for an adult,” says Dede.

The global pandemic threw a wrench in the plans of restaurants all over the world two years ago when diners stayed home, causing many eateries to shift their business to pickup or delivery.

Roberto Cebrián and David Villarreal both had experience working with restaurants in Mexico and recognized that many restaurants were not prepared to change their operations quickly, so they jumped on the opportunity to help them.

“There are a bunch of food tech solutions in Latin American and U.S., but it ended up turning the operations in both the front and back of the house into a mess,” Cebrián said. “The pandemic was a crazy experience. Not a lot of people knew what would happen, but the downside was that restaurants closed.”

Roberto Cebrián, co-founder of Parrot. Image Credits: Parrot

With an eye on reversing that trend, they created Monterrey-based Parrot in April 2020, and in 2021 launched with ParrotConnect, its point-of-sale software for restaurants enabling them to digitize and take advantage of the home delivery boom to accelerate growth.

Cebrián told TechCrunch that many restaurants were balancing an average of three delivery apps and 15 different menus at each location. Often connectivity issues and menu errors caused restaurants to get anywhere from 10% to 15% of the orders wrong or late when they were pushed from the apps to the restaurant’s point-of-sale software so that they could be made.

Instead, ParrotConnect offers a way for restaurants to centralize all of those fragmented operations, including table service and online orders — into one management portal where users can operate functions like menus, kitchen management, payment methods and reports.

The company is working with over 60 collaborators on the product and now has more than 500 restaurants across Monterrey, Mexico City and the Riviera Maya using ParrotConnect.

On Monday, the company announced it secured $9.5 million, led by F Prime Capital, to continue developing ParrotConnect and expand its footprint in Mexico. The new capital gives the company a total of $11.7 million in funding.

Parrot is the latest company raising capital as part of a broader trend of companies helping restaurants thrive in this new digital world, including Zak, also developing point-of-sale technology for restaurants, payment system Sunday and restaurant management software company MarginEdge.

Since making a soft launch in January 2021, Parrot is now working with over 500 restaurants — all paying customers, Cebrián said. It has 60 employees currently after starting in 2021 with 10 employees. The company has been focused on helping restaurants grow, and Cebrián said it was too early to disclose revenue figures. Plans for ParrotConnect start at $73 per month for companies with one POS.

“We are heavily investing in product because we want to give the right experience,” he added. “The restaurant industry is an old industry, and it always finds its way out, so we are happy to be helping them do that with technology. We admire the industry and how creative they are to make things work. Delivery has played a huge part in saving a lot of restaurants during this time.”

Instant purchase and delivery of food and other essentials was one of the big bubbles of opportunity in the world of e-commerce in the last year, with dozens of startups big and small emerging and scooping up funding to build out businesses to bring items like groceries, toilet paper and Tylenol to people’s doors in 30 minutes or less. Now a startup called Arive that’s applying this concept to the wider world of consumer goods in a Prime Now-style service — partnering with premium stores and brands to sell and deliver items like Apple electronics and Bose headphones, Lululemon active wear, furniture and beauty and bath products and Van Moof electric bikes, and then delivering items via its own courier service —  is announcing a Series A of $20 million to see if the idea finds traction beyond essentials.

The funding is being led by Balderton Capital, with Global Founders Capital (the firm connected to Rocket Internet’s Samwer family), Burda Principal Investments, La Famiglia and 468 Capital also participating. (La Famiglia and 468 Capital are repeat backers of Munich-based Arive, both having invested in the seed round for the company, which is not to be confused with the mortgage startup of the same name in the U.S.)

Arive’s funding, and list of backers, is notable in that it’s based on a pretty limited run so far. The startup launched only four months ago and is currently active in just four cities in Germany — Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Frankfurt — although now the idea will be to use the investment to expand further across the country and to start considering which other markets to tackle next.

The reason for the vote of confidence is that so far, the numbers look promising. Arive is not disclosing how many customers it has or what its revenues are looking like, but it notes that the average order size is between €50 and €100 ($56 and $113) across some 1,000 SKUs, with the average basket containing between one and four items. That presents what Arive is doing as a very different proposition to what, say, a GoPuff or Getir is hoping to achieve with its instant delivery model, essentially replacing the weekly grocery shop with multiple baskets delivered to one’s door.

“It’s not just about being the next quick commerce vertical but building the next generation of e-commerce,” said Maximilian Reeker, who co-founded Arive with Linus Fries (the two co-lead the company). He described that next generation like this: “Very convenient delivery of between 30 and 60 minutes, connecting people to local stores with a bike-based service, in an app optimized for the phone.” All of its couriers are employed by the company, either full-time or part-time.

Arive has up to now split the model into three parts, providing consignment, wholesale and, in the next 2-3 months, marketplace options for sourcing supply. Fries said that currently the wholesale part accounts for the largest part of its business and sales.

Beyond that, white label services — where Arive might sell its backend technology and delivery infrastructure to third-party retailers to build their own instant delivery services — is another area that the company is considering, Fries said. This could be a very interesting opportunity in areas such as fashion: typically online sales of clothes have been challenged by issues of sizing and dealing with returns, which make for a high barrier of entry for a company like Arive without making extensive and focused investments to address them. What it could do, however, is provide its technology to fashion brands and retailers that have, who are considering ways of getting apparel faster to would-be online buyers.

Meanwhile, although it’s taking a different approach in instant delivery by eschewing groceries and FMCG essentials and focusing on higher-ticket slower-moving consumer goods, Arive is still operating very much with those grocery delivery startups in mind for another reason.

Reeker told me that Arive actually relishes the oversupply of these startups in certain markets — indeed, the bubble has definitely started to burst for some of these startups, as they get snapped up by much larger and highly capitalized rivals looking to expand to new geographies — because they become a signal for where Arive should be considering to expand to next.

“We want to go to more places in Germany and expand internationally, and while we haven’t decided which cities, we looking at those where existing grocery plays are live,” said Reeker. “The UK, France, they are all interesting. Having those grocery companies there is an advantage for us because it’s evidence of the consumer shift that has taken place. They are already used to getting their food quickly, which is the first step.”

Arive is not the first company to have thought of building a service around instant delivery of virtually any kind of item a person might like to have without leaving their homes to buy it. This was basically the premise behind Amazon Prime Now, which the e-commerce giant launched the service in 2014. Pointedly, although Amazon expanded it to several markets, eventually it discontinued the standalone app and branding it had built for Prime Now, which now exists as a faster-delivery option for some of the items that it sells via Prime.

The message there could be interpreted in two ways. It could point to challenges for scaling something like a fast-delivery service without also providing a wider range of options that offer cheaper options and longer delivery times to customers put off by the premium that comes with instant.

Or, it could point to how there remains an opportunity for a smaller and more focused company to get the model right, understanding that the market has matured in the last eight years and consumers are not only more willing to shop online than ever before due to Covid-19, but have focused their expectations of how that experience should more closely mirror the instant-gratification of shopping in person.

Investors are willing to bet that the two co-founders — which hatched the idea of Arive while at business school — have a shot in building something fit the latter of those.

“Linus, Max, and the entire team at arive are challenging e-commerce conventions with energetic execution and an acute sensitivity to the priorities of modern brands,” said Colin Hanna, partner at Balderton Capital, in a statement. “Using light electric vehicles to rapidly fulfill orders leaves a lighter footprint on our planet and ensures that customers are home to receive goods they’ve purchased online, avoiding costly failed deliveries. The team is also committed to building their UX in a way that protects, rather than erodes, the value of the brands they are lucky to work with. Finally, high basket sizes and no wastage means the company has a much stronger path to a sustainable business model over the long run.  Balderton is fortunate to be backing arive as it scales rapidly across Europe.”

Shares of Paytm dropped to ₹1,155 ($15.6), the lowest since its market debut in November following the nation’s biggest-ever initial offering after a key brokerage house further cut its price on the payments stock.

The stock, which opened Monday at ₹1,226, dropped 6% at 2.40 pm India standard time. Paytm, which has been struggling to improve its stock price ever since its debut, has slid by over 46% from its issue price of ₹2,150 ($28.9). The firm’s market cap, at the time of publishing, was $10.15 billion, nearly half of what it had sought during the debut and below the $16 billion valuation at which it raised a financing round in late 2019.

The plunge in price follows brokerage house Macquarie’s report on Monday in which it retained its lowest rating on One97 Communications, the parent firm of Paytm, and cut its target price to ₹900 ($12.14), down from ₹1,200 that it had assigned ahead of the market debut on November 18. Paytm, which says it has amassed over 300 million users, operates a number of businesses including mobile wallet, credit top-ups, movies and travel ticketing businesses, and an e-commerce service.

Macquarie was the only brokerage firm which had such a grim view on Paytm’s outlook at the time of market debut. Analysts at Bernstein, in comparison, had estimated that Paytm’s valuation will swing between $21 billion to $24 billion. (A Bernstein spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment in November.)

“Post the various business updates and results, we believe our revenue projections, particularly on the distribution side, is at risk and hence we pare down our revenue CAGR from 26% to 23% for FY21- 26E. We are roughly cutting revenue estimates for FY21-26E on an average by 10% every year due to lower distribution and commerce/cloud revenues offset partially by higher payment revenues,” Macquarie analysts wrote Monday.

“We cut our earnings (increase our loss projections) by 16-27% for FY22-25E owing to lower revenues and higher employee and software expenses. We cut our TP (target price) sharply by ~25% owing to lower target multiple of 11.5x (price to sales ratio) (from 13.5x earlier) and lower sales numbers. Maintain UP with a revised TP of ₹900.”

The brokerage firm said RBI’s proposed digital payments regulations could cap wallet charges, which would hurt Paytm’s business, where payments side still accounts for 70% of the firm’s overall gross revenue. Macquarie also cited departure of senior Paytm executives and the shrinking ticket size for loans disbursed by Paytm as other factors that could impact the firm’s future outlook.

In a report in the second half of December, analysts at Morgan Stanley labeled Paytm’s stock as “overweight,” and assigned a target price of ₹1,875 ($25.2), saying the firm was “well positioned to capitalize on upcoming acceleration in digital distribution of financial services/commerce in India.”

“Huge TAM (total addressable market), India’s distinctive tech architecture and regula- tory supportive partnership approach are key enablers, we believe. India is under-penetrated in financial services, and across segments we expect strong growth. More importantly, the penetration of third party digital distribution of financial services is significantly low and we will see strong acceleration over the next five years – this will be helped by the distinctive rails in India around identity, payments and data sharing,” they wrote in a report to clients on December 18.

“Also, we believe that Paytm’s financial services is synergistic, in line with the regulatory thought process and scalable. Balance sheet risk is low, and Paytm’s technology capabilities to leverage alternative data sets as well as design customized products are some key value adds against the above backdrop.”

The story was updated to reflect further price drop.