British fintech Revolut has quietly begun rolling out its services in India as part of a controlled beta program ahead of a broader launch, marking a significant milestone in its years-long effort to enter the country’s fast-growing digital payments market.

Revolut started taking signups for its India app earlier this year, and some users who joined the waitlist have been gaining access to its services over the past few weeks, TechCrunch has learned. The company confirmed the rollout and said a few thousand customers in India are already using the platform.

The rollout marks a significant milestone in Revolut’s years-long effort to enter India, a major digital payments market where the federal government-backed Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has transformed how consumers and businesses move money. UPI accounts for nearly half of global real-time payments transaction volume and processed a record 23.2 billion transactions worth ₹29.9 trillion (around $313.8 billion) in May, per Indian government data.

A Revolut spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company is currently “in the controlled onboarding of waitlisters” and that a beta version of its app, localized for Indian users, is available through the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store.

“This is being done in order to gather feedback on core product functioning and enhance the overall customer experience and the value proposition before opening up the platform for a larger audience,” the spokesperson said.

The rollout is currently limited to a small subset of the company’s around 450,000 waitlisted users.

Users in the beta program can access UPI payments, e-money wallets, domestic prepaid cards, multi-currency cards, virtual cards, and disposable cards, the company said. Revolut plans to add its Lifestyle and RevPoints offerings before expanding the rollout. Family, or joint, accounts — available in some of Revolut’s overseas markets — will not be offered in India because such products require a banking license, the company said.

Revolut has been building its India business since 2021 and hired fintech executive Paroma Chatterjee to lead its local operations. In 2022, the London-headquartered company acquired Arvog Forex to strengthen its regulatory presence in the country and offer remittance and multi-currency account services. It later secured a prepaid payment instrument (PPI) license from the Reserve Bank of India, allowing it to issue prepaid cards, support digital wallets, and integrate with the UPI network.

The company told TechCrunch that it plans to open the app to direct onboarding of all users in the “near future” but declined to provide a specific launch timeline. Chatterjee had previously said in a LinkedIn post that Revolut was targeting a full product launch in India in Q2.

Revolut is targeting India’s growing base of digitally savvy consumers as it seeks to challenge incumbent banks and fintech firms in one of the world’s most competitive financial services markets. The company has previously said it aims to serve more than 150 million “globally aspiring, digitally native” Indians aged between 25 and 45, with a goal of onboarding about 20 million users by 2030 and processing at least $7 billion in transactions.

Consumer interest in Revolut has been building ahead of its broader India launch. According to Sensor Tower estimates shared with TechCrunch, Revolut’s app has been downloaded nearly 820,000 times in India since it became available in app stores. More than a third of those downloads occurred in 2025 and the first months of 2026.

While Revolut’s largest markets by app downloads remain in Europe, led by France, the UK, Spain, Italy, and Germany, the company has increasingly looked to emerging markets for growth. Sensor Tower estimates downloads in Thailand and Vietnam grew 40% and 52%, respectively, in 2025, while downloads in Brazil surged 487% year over year to 1.8 million, highlighting the importance of markets such as India to its long-term expansion strategy.

As its traffic continues to climb, alternative search engine DuckDuckGo is leaning into anti-AI sentiment with the launch of new browser extensions that allow users to set its no-AI search experience, noai.duckduckgo.com, as their default search engine.

Once enabled, users will be directed to the company’DuckDuckGo’s AI-free search page, where there are no AI-assisted answers, no chat prompts, and fewer AI images in the search results, the company claims. The extensions are currently available for Chrome and Firefox users. Meanwhile, people who have switched to the DuckDuckGo web browser already have their AI settings preserved, even if they clear their browser history.

The company says the extensions are meant to help people have a consistent AI-free search experience — something that’s harder to come by these days, especially after Google announced its AI-first revamp of its search engine at its developer conference earlier in May.

Since then, traffic to DuckDuckGo has been booming. Last week, the company noted that web visits to its no-AI search page were up nearly 30% week-over-week, and its U.S. app installs were also up 18.1% week-over-week, with U.S. iOS app installs peaking at 69.9% week-over-week growth.

Those trends followed news that Google was overhauling its search box in the biggest change to its search engine in more than 25 years. Now, instead of returning links at the top of the page, Google will favor sending users into AI-generated search overviews, which are becoming more interactive experiences capable of creating visualizations, charts, graphs, or even mini apps, as needed. Follow-up questions from AI Overviews will push users into an AI Mode chat experience. The traditional “10 blue links” that defined Google in its earlier days are more of an afterthought, appearing below all this AI-fueled productivity.

But not everyone is on board with having AI made the default, which is why some are making the move to alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo, Kagi, and others.

DuckDuckGo says traffic to its no-AI search page was up threefold on Thursday, May 28, 2026 — a new high-water mark since Google’s search announcement — and the numbers are still climbing. The growth is not coming in spurts either, the company points out. Instead, visits are averaging roughly 84% above the baseline, suggesting a more sustained shift.

In addition to the new “no AI” search Chrome and Firefox extensions, DuckDuckGo will soon update its original DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera to offer controls for AI search settings, as well.

It’s worth noting that DuckDuckGo isn’t an anti-AI company. The company still offers its own AI chatbot with access to many popular models, and a subscription plan that provides access to the latest models and other tools, like a VPN service, identity theft restoration, and personal information removal services.

“Not in my backyard” is the rallying cry of citizens everywhere resisting projects proposed for their locality. Whether it’s affordable housing, a waste treatment plant, or a new data center, they may recognize the benefit of the activity. They just don’t want it near them. And the roots of that resistance differ from place to place. When it comes to the ongoing transition from fossil fuels to renewables, companies and policymakers need to know where, exactly, people are coming from.

The Italian island of Sardinia is a textbook example. As IEEE Spectrum’s power and energy editor Emily Waltz discovered when she traveled there last October, Sardinian opposition to wind and solar projects runs deep. It spurred a quarter of the voting population to queue up in public squares in 2024 to sign a petition banning all construction of renewable energy.

Waltz was surprised. She went there to see a promising new grid-scale energy storage system that uses domes inflated with carbon dioxide. While reporting on that project, she interviewed residents, engineers, activists, and professors about their attitudes toward climate change and the Italian government’s grand plans for renewable energy on the island. And Waltz soon learned of Sardinians’ profound antipathy toward renewable energy and its deep ties to a history of invasion, occupation, and exploitation stretching back 2,700 years.

It started with the Phoenicians and then extended through the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Iberians. Sardinia was absorbed into a newly unified Italy in 1861, and it became an autonomous region of Italy in 1948. The island’s population is justifiably suspicious of outsiders, including the Italian government. “When you’re in Sardinia, the weight of history—you can feel it like in the air,” Waltz told me. “And it gets passed down from one generation to the next.”

Now, Italy needs Sardinia to produce even more power to meet the country’s climate goals—something that Sardinians see as Rome’s problem, not theirs. “Sardinia already exports about 30 percent of its electricity. It’s not like they need more,” Waltz says. “So it’s hard to make the case to build, build, build.”

The result of Waltz’s old-fashioned shoe leather reporting is this month’s cover story. She notes that the Sardinians she talked to aren’t climate-change deniers, and they don’t object to renewables per se. They just don’t like the way corporations and Italian policymakers are trying to plug into Sardinia like it’s one giant battery rather than the home of an ancient and proud people.

“I think Sardinians would be more receptive to renewable projects if it was more of a ground-up, grassroots approach,” Waltz says. Indeed, this homegrown approach is already working in some places in Sardinia. She knows of more than 50 projects, called energy communities, where the residents are deploying renewables themselves. The idea also holds promise for other places struggling to get locals to buy into the renewable-energy transition.

The Sardinian experience is both a cautionary tale and a blueprint. Ignore the weight of history that communities carry and your project risks failure. Meet the people where they are and you might just get somewhere. The same lesson applies whether you’re in Sulawesi or sub-Saharan Africa. You just have to show up to learn it.