District by Zomato has announced the launch of Splitpay, a new feature designed to make group dining payments simpler and more convenient. Available within the District app, the feature allows diners to instantly split restaurant bills and pay their exact share at the table, removing the need for post-meal transfers, reminders, and payment follow-ups.

The feature addresses a common challenge faced during group outings, where one person typically pays the entire bill and waits to be reimbursed by others later. With Splitpay, users can enter the total bill amount, choose the number of people in the group, and divide the bill equally or customise individual shares directly within the app. Each diner can then complete their payment in just a few taps.

District by Zomato says the feature is aimed at making dining experiences smoother by eliminating the need to calculate dues, share payment screenshots, or chase friends for settlements after a meal. Since all payments happen within the app, users do not need to exchange payment details with one another.

Adding to the benefit, every diner receives cashback on their individual share of the bill, ensuring that rewards are not limited to the person who makes the full payment.

Commenting on the launch, Rahul Ganjoo, CEO, District by Zomato, said, "A meal out belongs to the whole table, but it has always ended with the least social moment: one person paying and everyone else doing maths. It's something we noticed at restaurant tables, on social media, and in conversations with our users, so we built Splitpay to fix it. It's one more step in the same direction we've been moving all along: taking the effort out of every stage of going out, so the only thing people take home is the experience itself."

To support the launch, District has unveiled a campaign film featuring veteran actors Boman Irani and Anupam Kher. The film captures a familiar dining situation where friends compete to pay the bill at the end of a meal. What begins as a polite attempt to settle the bill quickly turns into a humorous struggle, eventually reaching a comic peak when Anupam Kher stuffs the bill into his mouth to prevent his friend from paying.

While the campaign highlights a well-known social habit through humour, it also showcases how Splitpay offers a practical alternative by allowing everyone at the table to pay their own share instantly and receive cashback in return.

Galgotias University is witnessing a growing wave of student-led innovation, with its students increasingly making their presence felt on global technology and startup platforms.

Students from the university are currently representing India at the Global EDVentures Startup Competition in Hong Kong, showcasing ideas and ventures developed within the university’s classrooms, labs, maker spaces, and collaborative student communities.

The global participation comes during a year marked by several major achievements for the university’s innovation ecosystem. These include 18 winners in the global Apple Swift Student Challenge, the launch of 37 live applications on Apple’s iOS ecosystem, and growing involvement with international startup ecosystems connected to organisations such as Y Combinator.

One of the standout developments has been the rise of student-led startup Cybergenix, which recently secured INR 3 crore in funding. Notably, one of the startup’s co-founders is only 18 years old, reflecting how early-stage entrepreneurship and innovation are becoming deeply embedded within the student culture at the university.

Over the last year, the university has seen a visible shift in how students approach academics and career building, with many now focusing on creating products, launching startups, building apps, and exploring global opportunities alongside their studies.

The Apple Swift Student Challenge results further highlight this momentum. After recording 10 winners in 2025, the number increased to 18 winners in 2026, indicating stronger mentorship, peer learning, and technical confidence across the student ecosystem.

Innovation activity at the university is also expanding beyond traditional engineering programmes. Students from artificial intelligence, design, management, and interdisciplinary backgrounds are collaborating on projects connected to healthcare, accessibility, education, immersive learning, productivity, and digital communities.

More than 135 startups have emerged from the broader innovation ecosystem at Galgotias University so far, supported through incubation programmes, mentorship, prototyping support, and the INR 10 crore Galgotias Innovation Fund.

The university has also strengthened its technology infrastructure through Centres of Excellence and specialised labs built in collaboration with organisations including Apple, Intel, Cisco, NVIDIA, Salesforce, Tata Technologies, and Capgemini.

During a recent visit to the university, Ramana Ramanathan interacted with student founders behind ventures such as Project Tacto and Tekurious, both currently representing India at the Global EDVentures Startup Competition. Discussions focused on product scalability, real-world application, user behaviour, and market relevance.

Speaking about the university’s innovation culture, Dhruv Galgotia said the growing confidence among young Indian students to build globally relevant products directly from India reflects a larger cultural shift taking shape across campuses.

As student-led achievements continue to grow, Galgotias University is steadily building a reputation as a fast-growing innovation and startup-driven academic ecosystem where experimentation, collaboration, and entrepreneurial thinking are becoming part of everyday campus life.

Sapaad, a bootstrapped cloud-native Unified Commerce platform serving restaurant businesses across India and international markets, has launched Sapaad Signals, one of the industry’s first pre-loss intelligence systems created specifically for restaurants.

Integrated within Ask Vantage, Sapaad’s AI-powered revenue intelligence platform, the new solution has been developed to help restaurant operators identify and respond to operational issues in real time, before they begin affecting profits.

The launch aims to solve a long-standing challenge in the food service industry, delayed visibility into operational problems. Restaurants often discover issues such as discount misuse, stock shortages, void fraud, declining upsell performance, or labour inefficiencies only after they have already impacted business performance.

Unlike traditional restaurant intelligence systems that depend on delayed reports and disconnected systems, Sapaad Signals works on a live and connected data architecture built over the last 12 years. The platform continuously gathers data from POS transactions, inventory movement, labour schedules, promotions, and customer behaviour to generate alerts in under six seconds.

According to the company, early implementations of the system have helped restaurants recover up to 11% additional revenue through timely interventions during service hours.

Speaking on the launch, Vishnu Vardhan Madabhushi, Founder & CEO, Sapaad, said, “The restaurant industry has historically relied on retrospective reporting systems that identify problems only after losses have already occurred. By the time most operators identify a problem, the revenue is already lost. Every stockout, discount misuse, voided bill, and labour imbalance silently destroys margins during live service.

Sapaad Signals changes that permanently. We have built one of the industry’s first pre-loss intelligence systems for restaurants, a live operational command layer that detects revenue leakage as it happens and enables teams to act before profitability is impacted.

As restaurants scale across cloud kitchens, multi-brand formats, and high-growth markets, operational complexity is rising faster than ever. In an industry estimated to lose nearly INR 18,000 crore annually to preventable inefficiencies, real-time intelligence is no longer a competitive advantage, it is becoming essential infrastructure for survival and growth.”

The platform continuously tracks 18 EBITDA-critical KPIs across outlets and turns operational data into simple, actionable alerts. These alerts help managers quickly identify concerns such as unusual void activity, overlapping promotions affecting margins, stock shortages of popular menu items, rising food costs, and weaker upsell performance.

To simplify decision-making, Sapaad Signals categorises notifications using easy action states like “Act now”, “Ready to act”, and “Relax”, allowing teams to prioritise actions without depending on analysts or manual reporting.

The launch also reflects a larger shift towards connected technology ecosystems in the restaurant sector. Many businesses still operate through separate systems for billing, inventory, promotions, and workforce management, often limiting visibility and slowing down decision-making.

Sapaad said the architecture behind Signals became possible because its platform was designed as a fully unified commerce ecosystem from the start. Sapaad Signals is now available across India and international markets for all Ask Vantage subscribers and requires no additional hardware, setup, or integrations.