Rapido has grown to become one of India's largest ride-hailing service providers, putting Uber on notice.
Courtesy Rapido
Rapido has become one of the leading ride-hailing providers in India.
The startup was founded in 2015, two years after Uber first launched a service in the country.
Rapido's CEO said cheap rides and driver fees helped it pull ahead of competitors.
A startup has emerged as Uber's toughest rival in a market that CEO Dara Khosrowshahi called a "must-win," doing so with a fraction of Uber's global workforce.
Rapido is a Bengaluru-based startup founded in 2015 with no presence or brand awareness in North America. But in India, Rapido has grown to become one of the country's primary ride-hailing providers, with more than 70 million monthly active users and nearly 3 million drivers, putting its top rivals in the region, Uber and Ola, on notice.
"Ola used to be our main competitor," Khosrowshahi said on Nikhil Kamath's podcast last year. "I see now that the tougher competition in India is Rapido."
In an interview with Business Insider, Rapido CEO and cofounder Aravind Sanka said the key to gaining ground in India was building around the needs of the local market, prioritizing two-wheelers and auto-rickshaws over traditional cars, and adopting a different driver economics model in a country where riders are highly price sensitive.
"From an affordability point of view, a four-wheeler is the most premium in India, and then a two-wheeler and three-wheeler are most affordable," Sanka said. "We knew that India is a price-sensitive market and affordability has to be the key for ride-sharing compared to premium."
Uber entered India's market in 2013, two years before Rapido was founded, launching in Bengaluru with a traditional car-focused, ride-hailing model.
Sanka said Rapido took a different approach from day one, spending the first six years building the app around the two-wheeled platform before expanding into auto-rickshaws and cars.
The three-wheeled rickshaw is a popular mode of transportation in India.
Abhishek Chinnappa/Getty Images
The focus has shaped Rapido's approach to building the company. Sanka said the average cost of a two-wheeled ride is 60 to 70 cents, and that bikes and three-wheelers make up about 70% of total rides, forcing the company to operate with a lower-cost structure.
The startup also changed how it made money from drivers or "captains" as they're referred to on the app. Instead of taking a commission on each ride, the company charges a flat daily fee, regardless of how much a driver earns per ride.
Sanka said the model helped bring more drivers online. Rapido has nearly 3 million drivers on the app — up from 1 million about two-and-a-half years ago. Uber's head of India operations, Prabhjeet Singh, said last July that Uber had about 1.4 million drivers.
A Rapido spokesperson said the app has more than 70 million monthly active users. Sanka said the company has roughly 800 employees, which is dwarfed by Uber's 34,000-strong global workforce.
An Uber spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Rapido is not profitable yet, but its losses are shrinking. The company's operating revenue rose 44% in fiscal 2025, while its net loss narrowed 30%, The Economic Times reported, citing financial documents filed with India's Registrar of Companies.
Though one of the most populous countries in the world, Sanka estimated that less than 5% of its population uses ride-hailing. The CEO said a merger or consolidation with Uber is not in the cards at the moment.
"When penetration is low, and it is growing fast, that means the positions can change at any point in time," Sanka said. "There's no point of thinking about any kind of consolidation."
Greg Brockman gave $25 million to a political action committee.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
OpenAI's president has donated millions of dollars to a pro-AI political network.
The AI company said on Monday it has not donated to any super PACs or political campaigns.
The post comes as AI takes center stage in political debates, from regulation to data center construction.
OpenAI distanced itself from cofounder Greg Brockman's political donations in a Monday post.
The OpenAI president and his wife said in late December that they started making political contributions that year. The couple funneled $25 million to Leading the Future, a pro-AI political network funded by a who's who of Silicon Valley on both sides of the aisle.
LTF's primary super PAC had raised more than $50 million by the end of 2025, Business Insider previously reported. Frontier lab Perplexity donated $100,000, while venture capital firm Andressen Horowitz donated $25 million, per FEC filings.
"OpenAI does not direct the activities of LTF, or have visibility into their operations," OpenAI wrote on Monday.
The company said it has not donated to any super PACs or political campaigns, nor does it have an employee-funded PAC.
"If our approach changes in the future we will be transparent about it," the company said, calling for "thoughtful regulation" of AI.
"Groups that are advocating on AI should be clear about their policy views, be honest about whom they represent, and not use tactics like astroturfing that obscure the real choices facing policymakers and the public," OpenAI wrote.
OpenAI researcher Jason Wolfe said on X that he appreciated his employer's statement.
"Personally I really dislike a lot of things I've heard about LTF," he said, adding, "This is just a small step and people may still rightly be skeptical, but I hope we can earn trust through our actions going forward."
LTF did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
In late December, Brockman posted on X that he and his wife had started making political contributions, writing, "The United States must work closely with builders, researchers, and entrepreneurs to ensure AI is developed responsibly at home and that we remain globally competitive."
OpenAI's statement comes as AI regulation — of companies, of the technologies they build, and of the data centers that host their chips — takes center stage in local and national political debates. The industry has channeled millions of dollars into races this year.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said it's a great time to be a software company.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Jensen Huang gave software companies a reassuring pat on the back on Monday.
He said the agentic AI era is an "incredible time" to be a software company.
Software companies like Salesforce and Workday have seen their stocks fall on "Saaspocalyse" fears.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made an attempt to dispel fears of a "Saaspocalypse," saying it is an "incredible time" to be a software company.
Speaking at a keynote presentation at Computex, a tech show in Taiwan, Huang said the rise of agentic AI has led to major breakthroughs, including in tool use.
"A lot of people have said, 'Jensen, AI is coming. Agentic AI is coming. Therefore, all of the software companies are going to go out of business.' I said it's exactly the opposite," he said at the start of his speech on Monday.
Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can accomplish tasks with minimal human intervention. Huang said that because there will be many agents doing work, they will be using "more tools than ever."
"This is actually an incredible time to be a software company, but the software has to be presented to the agent in a way that the agent can use it," he added.
Huang's comments are an optimistic angle on what many have considered an existential crisis for software firms, where AI tools threaten the business models of companies like Salesforce and Workday. We at Business Insider have tried our hand at building alternatives to popular tools like Asana and Wix using AI, and have come up with usable web apps.
The fears have led to a sharp decline in software stocks; Atlassian, Salesforce, and SAP's shares have all fallen by more than 20% since the start of the year.
This is not the first time Huang has said that AI would keep software companies relevant. Speaking at a February Cisco AI event, he said that AI replacing software companies was "the most illogical thing in the world, and time will prove itself."
And AI leaders, such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have said that while software companies need to adapt, they will not be obsolete anytime soon.
Greg Lindgren co-owns 15 Romolo, The Cordial, Rye Cocktail Bar, and Rye on the Road.
Greg Lindgren
Greg Lindgren co-owns three bars in San Francisco. He's noticed the sobriety kick in tech.
"There's a herd mentality to tech, especially when so many people have arrived so recently," Lindgren said.
Lindgren said that companies aren't pulling back from bars at corporate events — but they want more mocktails.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Greg Lindgren, a 57-year-old bar operator from San Francisco. He co-owns 15 Romolo, The Cordial, Rye Cocktail Bar, and the events company Rye on the Road with Jon Gasparini. It's been edited for length and clarity.
In San Francisco, you throw a rock, and you hit a laptop.
We started in the industry at the adolescence of the 1.0 boom. I have friends who worked for Webvan. Over the years, we've worked for all of the household names in the PayPal Mafia that survived the first crash and created the second wave.
When we opened Rye, we went to Google ourselves. The first result was a Yelp review. This was 2006. The person who made the review was the sixth hire at Yelp. I recognized his name, because there's a lot of convergence between real-life social and tech.
We have a warehouse in SoMa. We're a half block away from where Twitter was founded. This building was a temporary place where Airbnb, pre-IPO, was building its business. We get mail for Brian Chesky.
We've had a front row seat. "Silicon Valley" is a documentary. It's a lot of fun to watch and be a part of it.
The trend toward abstaining from drinking has been ongoing for a while. Around the time that people started looking at alternative forms of eating, they were toying around with cutting back on alcohol.
It's been gaining momentum over the last few years. It's not just health, and it's not just trying to have that edge.
There's a new gold rush happening. The miners in the last year and a half are mostly young men. Some of them are abstaining from a health-maxxing standpoint. Other people just didn't drink; they're already of that generation.
There's a herd mentality to tech, especially when so many people have arrived so recently. Smart people adopt this lifestyle and say, "I need to signal to everyone around me that I have all the edge, and that we're not going to succumb to distraction." One of the things in that conversation is alcohol consumption.
Those same people are taking other things. It's more of an older generation, but people of the VC class are getting one-shotted on ayahuasca.
There are still groups that hit it hard. An example: young parents. When you have kids, you stop going to bars and restaurants, and you hunker down for a few years. Once their kids are preschoolers or elementary schoolers, those parents come roaring back. It's like they've been let out of prison.
The same thing holds true for various tech cultures. We work with a company that's in-person five days a week and is heavily sales-driven. They built a whole bar within their corporate headquarters, and we're the contract bar that services that. There's a social bonding aspect.
Mocktails are all the rage at tech events
More than a few years ago, we saw the writing on the wall, and that's when we went into mocktails.
We work with a company that's a household name. We've gone there on several occasions with beer, wine, and a cocktail available. We'll watch as the mocktail that we brought is the thing that everybody's drinking. We're happy to be there.
Everything is better and more professional by having a service like ours there, whether or not they're drinking alcohol at 4 in the afternoon. It helps with breaking the ice to have something in your hand. It's not going to be a cigarette, and you can only have so much caffeine.
The people who assemble these events look at reactions. It's similar to having a cool photo booth; it's something people remember.
The business model hasn't shifted. I can count on one hand the number of times we've been hired to do just non-alcoholic drinks. There has not been a reduction in price or a rejection of the offering as people change their event curation.
So far, companies are not fixating on: "Hey, we noticed that a lot of people are drinking less alcohol." They're asking: "Did we have a great event? Did we get everyone together, whether they drank sparkling water or an old-fashioned?"
That's what we see in the current landscape. It hasn't slowed our business down.
Dan Shipper, the CEO of media and AI software company Every, told Business Insider that he thinks people are underestimating Codex.
Alex Broadway/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images
Dan Shipper says his AI-focused company — Every — spent a lot of money on his token use.
AI reads and drafts his emails, he said. It's also helping the company create pitch decks.
He said Every believes it's building an employee model that looks like the future of business.
Dan Shipper says he doesn't write many of his routine emails.
Instead, the CEO of Every — an AI-focused media, software, and consulting company — said he uses OpenAI's Codex to read his inbox, check his calendar, propose meeting times, and draft responses.
The tool is not allowed to send emails without his approval, but Shipper said much of the scheduling correspondence around his Business Insider interview was generated by AI.
"All the words are pretty much Codex," Shipper said. He's considering changing the "From:" field in his email to indicate when messages are drafted with his AI agent's help.
His New York City-based business is built around AI. Shipper cofounded the company in 2020 with backing from Starting Line and Reid Hoffman. It writes its own technology newsletter, sells AI consulting and training services, and builds apps like Sparkle, a computer-file automation tool.
The firm also gets early access to models and tools from major AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, giving Shipper a close-up view of where the tech is heading.
That perspective has made him optimistic about how people will work in the future. And he thinks his business is structured like a company of the future.
That optimism is expensive.
Every's AI expenses
Extremely smart take on the tokenmaxxing panic and why it won’t last: https://t.co/Su1yOhAuL7
Shipper told Business Insider he spent about $13,000 on his personal Codex overages last month, one of the highest AI bills he could recall.
"I got some side eye from our COO, Brandon Gell, on that one," he said.
Asked how much larger that bill was compared with the same month last year, Shipper responded: "Way more. Way, way, way, way, way, way, way, more."
At Every, AI access is just part of the cost of employing people. All 27 full-time employees get the entry-level $20-a-month subscriptions, while technical workers get $200-a-month plans, and the company pays overages. Token budgets are akin to other employee costs, like health insurance or company-issued laptops, Shipper said.
Even with the high costs, nobody at Every has been told they're spending too much on tokens, he added.
"We've started to figure out how we will think about overages," he said. "As long as you don't spend so much money that we go bankrupt, we'll be fine."
AI changed how the company works
Every's spending shows how deeply embedded AI has become in its workflow. Shipper said the company once experimented with giving every employee their own AI agent, but moved away from that model because the agents required too much upkeep.
Instead, Every now uses a smaller number of agents that serve specific teams or the whole company. One of them, called Claudie, helps the consulting team draft initial slide decks, put together sales proposals, and track client to-dos by reading transcripts and updating the company's task manager.
Shipper said he does not see those tools as replacing Every's workers outright. Instead, he said that AI could push more people into manager-like roles earlier in their careers.
"Very few people actually get the opportunity to be managers, because managing humans is very expensive and risky," he said. "I think many, many more people are capable of that than we think."
Still, Shipper said AI has limits. As a writer, he said, the technology is useful for research, drafting, and editing, but it is not especially good at knowing what is interesting.
That is where he thinks humans still matter most: not in doing every task by hand, but in knowing what is worth doing.
Predictions for AI's future
Shipper thinks OpenAI , and its CEO Sam Altman, might have a trick up its sleeve.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Right now, Anthropic is all the rage.
The AI startup just launched its well-received update to its Opus model, leapfrogged OpenAI as the nation's most valuable AI company, and is racing toward its IPO.
Shipper is betting that OpenAI's Codex is better positioned than many people realize. He said Anthropic has "a ton of momentum," but predicted the narrative around OpenAI could shift over the next few months.
"What they're doing with Codex is incredibly impressive," he said.
Also, for anyone looking for help with their prompting skills, Shipper said he's still nice to the robots just in case they — you know — accidentally start to dominate us humans.
"I'm usually very nice, because you never know when they're going to take over the world," he said with a laugh.
Somewhere between taking a Zoox self-driving taxi down Las Vegas Boulevard, watching steroid-engorged swimmers in bodysuits shred through a pool at a Zoop-sponsored tournament, and partying with them and their billionaire handlers at the nightclub Zouk, it dawned on me that I had slipped into a parallel universe.
I was at the inaugural Enhanced Games, a three-sport event founded by a group of Silicon Valley techno-libertarians that asks one question: How far can you push athletic performance if you give athletes access to some of the most powerful performance-enhancing drugs known to humankind?
Cody Miller, before and after getting enhanced.
Ronda Churchill for BI
The competition, held in Sin City's Resorts World on May 24, had all the trappings of a traditional sporting event: referees, Olympic-regulation tracks, swimming pools, and weights. The one crucial difference was that the 42 athletes — most of them retired Olympians — were juiced with a suite of anabolic steroids, stimulants, human-growth-hormone, testosterone, and a slew of other drugs banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency and the International Olympic Committee. Enhanced — which is also a purveyor of many of these supplements — claims that while its athletes don't have to take performance-enhancing drugs, 90% are on at least one. When I asked eight athletes what they're on, though, each said a minor variation of I'm sorry, I'd prefer not to share my stack, it was personalized for me.
In the press stands, the German pharmaceutical billionaire and psychedelic research financier, Christian Angermayer, one of the event's cofounders, said he anticipated at least three to five world records would be broken before the end of the night. Angermayer, who at 48 still passes for late 30s, tells me he's on tesamorelin, GLP-1s, and TRT. He is the majority investor in Enhanced alongside Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr.
Enhanced Games billionaire cofounder Christian Angermayer speaking to the media ahead of the competition.
Ronda Churchill for BI
Enhanced's other founders include Aron D'Souza, a close associate of Thiel, and Maximilian Martin, an investment banker turned bitcoin entrepreneur. Together, they make up a close-knit clique that espouses the gospel of longevity, which can at times veer close to eugenics. D'Souza once told The New York Times that he hoped the company would usher in an era of "superhumans among us."
The games, which took an estimated $20 million to produce, predominantly served as a choreographed exhibition for Enhanced's supplements and drugs business. If a retired Olympian can get on a regimen of peptides, anabolic steroids, testosterone, and human-growth-hormone and look tighter, more ripped, and move faster than ever, what's stopping you?
Juan Solis competes in the mens snatch weighlifting event.
Ronda Churchill for BI
The event was also perfectly targeted for millennials. What's more encouraging to a generation coming to terms with their own evaporating youth than watching the bygone athletes of their cohort perform rejuvenated feats of derring-do? Between games, a DJ blasted millennial jockjams like "Seven Nation Army," "Harlem Shake," and "Party Rock Anthem." And the entire evening seemed designed to remind spectators that it's never been easier — and more compulsory — to deny the ravages of aging.
Unlike the rest of us, the athletes who take part in a performance-enhancing protocol do so under the supervision of Dr. Guido Pieles, a sports cardiologist. I asked Dr. Pieles if he would take the drugs that he gives the athletes. While there were "inherent risks," he said, "I think yes. Once we have a large enough trial, I would take it."
Thor Björnsson, best known for his role as The Mountain in "Game of Thrones," chalks up before a deadlift.
Ronda Churchill for BI
At the far end of the pale blue track was a billboard that encouraged people to "Live Enhanced — Because You Know There's More." Bryan Johnson, the nocturnal erection and vaginal-microbiome-measuring longevity influencer, was among the commentators for the program's main events. Thor Björnsson, best known for his role as The Mountain in "Game of Thrones" (in which he crushes Pedro Pascal's character with his bare hands), and a competitor in the men's deadlift challenge, walked around the arena in a black "I am Enhanced" T-shirt. Dylan Cooper, a retired two-time junior national champion, who scored a new personal best in the Men's snatch tournament praised Enhanced. "It's given me a second chance," he told the crowd.
The games have drawn some heavy criticism. Travis Tygart, CEO of the US Anti-Doping Agency, called the event a "dangerous clown show." The International Olympic Committee (IOC) called it "utterly irresponsible and immoral." World Aquatics, the governing body of professional swimming, banned its athletes and coaches from participating in the event. (In a post-game press conference, Brett Hawke, Enhanced Games' swim coach, boasted that his phone was "blowing up with all the best swimmers in the world," who now want to participate in the event.)
Swimmers dive into the pool during the men's 50-meter breaststroke.
Ronda Churchill for BI
To hear the company's executives talk about it, it's the Olympics that are acting in bad faith by giving competitors a moral shield to cheat. Angermayer derides the IOC as "corrupt" and "driving athletes into the shadows," forcing them to take performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) without doctor supervision while ordering their drugs from China. In contrast, the company argues, Enhanced is not only fairer than the Olympics but also, as Angermayer put it, the company's products make athletes healthier by "repairing the damage the sport is doing" to their bodies.
Throughout the games, Enhanced repeated the message that performance-enhancing drugs and supplements can be the key to longevity. This breakthrough, Martin argued, is "not just relevant for elite athletes," but also for younger athletes "preparing for their first marathon" or "the 65-year-old who needs more energy" to play with their grandkids.
Enhanced Games cofounder and CEO Maximilian Martin (olive suit) watches from the balcony.
Ronda Churchill for BI
"No matter who you are, there's a personalized protocol that can take you from who you are to who you want to be," the Enhanced CEO added.
Many in the sports-science community contest these claims. "There is no solid evidence that such protocols can reliably repair the damage associated with elite sports," Dr. Øyvind Sandbakk, a professor at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, tells me. Combining the drugs on offer — testosterone, human-growth-hormone, erythropoietin (EPOs), or stimulants — can create a "highly complex pharmacological environment with significant and often unpredictable health risks."
Boady Santavy during the mens snatch weightlifting event.
Ronda Churchill for BI
For the Enhanced athletes, the decision to take performance-enhancing drugs can come with its own moral quandaries. "I was terrified," said Ben Proud, a silver medalist in the 50-meter freestyle at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Like the other athletes, he started his performance-enhancing regimen in March at the ERTH hotel in Abu Dhabi, an elite wellness center that was once a resort for the armed forces of the United Arab Emirates. Under Iranian rocket fire and the supervision of Dr. Pieles, Proud received his first dose. "The first injection to me was very emotionally tricky to navigate," he said. "That was the day I went from the Ben Proud I knew to become a new person."
The money on offer is life-changing for athletes who make only $36,000 to $50,000 a year playing the officially sanctioned version of their sport. While Enhanced doesn't disclose what it pays its athletes annually, each said it was significantly more than what they were paid when they were clean, and prizes at the Games ranged from $250,000 for winning a competition to $1 million for breaking a world record.
"The first injection to me was very emotionally tricky to navigate," says Ben Proud, a swimmer.
Ronda Churchill for BI
"In theory, you'd have to win 23 championships to earn what you can in one night at the Enhanced Games," Proud told me, adding that "having financial security at the end of this ten-year journey is really important." When I asked Proud if he would have competed at Enhanced had the Olympics paid more, he answered candidly, "very possibly not."
Wes Kitts, a two-time Olympic weightlifter, told me that, besides competitions, he made ends meet by running a small gym in Knoxville, Tennessee, and doing personal training. Joining Enhanced "made it possible for me to own my home," he said.
Left: Cody Miller, upon winning the 50-meter breaststroke. Right: Wes Kitts chalks his hands before competing in the mens snatch event.
Ronda Churchill for BI
If the games' crowds are any indication, those worried about the moral hazard behind the tournament have little to fret about. As I scanned the stands throughout the event, I saw hundreds of empty seats in a stadium built for more than 2,000 invitees. The announcers' attempts to rile the crowd (a typical line went something like "Don't stop making noise until this lift is complete!") were met with only the most tepid of yowls.
The lackluster visual didn't deter Martin's enthusiasm. To hear him describe it, IRL attendees are beside the point. The company invited 181 influencers to document the tournament, and their posts, Enhanced boasts, collectively reach more than 375 million people across various social media platforms. The events themselves, Martin said, are purpose-built for modern online consumption: "Shorter than a minute, they all fit into an Instagram reel, TikTok post, etc."
Tristan Evelyn, the winner of the women's 100-meter sprint.
Ronda Churchill for BI
At the after-party, multiple attendees muttered forgivingly. "It's their first year," one said, while others suggested there would have been a bigger draw if Enhanced had lured in more household-name athletes. Responses on social media were similarly muted. The company's page has about 390,000 followers — far fewer than the 16 million that follow the official Olympics handle or the 2.2 million that follow streetbeefs_official, the official handle of an underground streetfighting competition in Virginia. That doesn't stop Martin from proclaiming after the tournament, "We've dominated the internet."
In the end, only one world record was unofficially smashed. Kristian Gkolomeev, a 32-year-old Greek athlete, swam the 50-meter freestyle in 20.81 seconds, wearing a banned polyurethane swimsuit while on PEDs. Though Gkolomeev has since changed his Instagram bio to "the fastest swimmer in history," Cameron McEvoy, who swam the event in 20.88 seconds in March, will remain the holder in official record books. Gkolomeev, however, is $1 million richer.
Martin bows to Kristian Gkolomeev, who swam the 50-meter freestyle in a world record-breaking 20.81 seconds.
Ronda Churchill for BI
As the sun set behind the Spring Mountains and the night's closing act The Killers took the stage, I felt myself giving in to Enhanced's advertising. Firmly in my mid-thirties, I am squarely in their demographic. My once-luscious hair, slowly slipping with every shower, is glued on only by the grace of Kirkland minoxidil. If you believe my Instagram feed, every year after 30, you lose 10% of your muscle mass. I am, apparently, the perfect candidate for TRT, sermorelin, and Viagra. If these shredded beasts could come out of retirement and beat 21 personal records, why shouldn't I become the homunculan he-man I'd always wanted to be? Of course, Enhanced's athletes also had an army of doctors, a litany of ultrasounds, x-rays, and blood tests to monitor every vital organ. More sobering to think about is how the company can possibly scale through a telehealth service and safely deliver similar care to the general public.
As Bryan Johnson walked off stage, changed into a baby blue pinstripe pajama, matching nightcap, and sunglasses, I found myself unconvinced. The night ended with a boyish-looking Brandon Flowers belting the chorus to "When You Were Young." At 44, the doesn't-drink-coffee Mormon strained to hit the high F-sharp. Though to his credit, he's probably unenhanced.
Tekendra Parmar is a former features editor at Business Insider. He has also worked at Rest of World, Time, Fortune, Harper's Magazine, and The Nation.
Recent Treasury selling reflects reserve management rather than a structural retreat from the dollar, Goldman Sachs says.
Agoes Rudianto/NurPhoto/Getty Images
The recent Treasury sell-off looks like routine reserve management, not a dollar exodus, Goldman Sachs says.
The oil-price surge from the US-Iran conflict pressured Asian currencies and fueled Treasury selling.
Despite foreign selling, Treasury markets remain resilient with deep liquidity and stable demand.
The recent Treasury sell-off has reignited concerns that global demand for US debt — and the dollar — may be weakening.
However, the selling wave looked broadly consistent with historical reserve-management behavior rather than a structural shift away from dollar assets, according to Goldman Sachs in a Wednesday note.
Higher oil prices tied to the US-Iran conflict have hurt energy-importing economies across Asia, increasing pressure on currencies and foreign reserves and contributing to Treasury selling across the region.
On Thursday, 10-year Treasury yields rose nearly 5 basis points to 4.5281% around 12 a.m. ET.
"FX intervention in a managed currency is typically a sign that policymakers intend to keep it tied to the Dollar," wrote Isabella Rosenberg, a strategist at the Bank.
Foreign holdings of US Treasurys slid in March, led by declines in holdings from Japan and China, official data showed.
A more serious threat to long-term Treasury demand would be evidence that countries with managed exchange rates were moving away from the greenback as a reserve anchor, reducing their structural need for dollar reserves, Rosenberg wrote.
That's because foreign central banks often sell Treasurys during periods of dollar strength to stabilize local currencies. That process can temporarily reduce Treasury holdings even while countries remain deeply tied to the US financial system.
More importantly, Goldman said the Treasury market has shown little sign of lasting stress despite the wave of foreign selling, with swap spreads and other indicators stabilizing after an initial shock in March.
Treasury demand is still supported by the depth and liquidity of US capital markets, as well as the lack of viable alternatives large enough to absorb global reserve flows at scale, Goldman said.
Assuming the conflict eventually eases, Goldman said renewed dollar weakness and lower market volatility would support foreign demand for Treasurys again.
