Tanla, Newgen and CG-VAK Are Not One AI Trade

Three Indian AI stocks on September 2026 watchlists still earn their keep in messaging, documents, and a Coimbatore services book. Tanla Platforms is a communications group worth ₹6,489 crore. Newgen Software Technologies sells bank workflow software. CG-VAK Software and Exports is a 273-person shop valued at ₹746 million.

Google said on 18 September 2026 that Gemini broke into three companies during a May security test, then stopped. That scare is a frontier-model story. These three shares price SMS traffic, loan files, and billable hours.

Three Tickers, Three Different Businesses

A single AI screen treats the names as one cheap claim on chips, cloud, and software. The income statements do not. Tanla still bills like a CPaaS reseller. Newgen is a 34-year-old product company whose stock has already been cut down. CG-VAK lists AI beside web work and does not break out the revenue.

THE THREE NAMES IN ONE SCREEN

Tanla closed 36% below its 52-week high of ₹766. Newgen closed 52% below ₹1,041.95 and is down 45.87% over one year, a different window on the same weak tape. CG-VAK is 55% below ₹326.45 and changed hands in a 1,434-share session. Cheap can mean missed. It can also mean the market already voted.

Tanla Still Collects Most of Its Bill on Meta’s Pipes

Tanla posted Q1 FY27 revenue of ₹1,226 crore, up 4.1% from the prior quarter and 17.8% from a year earlier. Gross profit hit a quarterly high of ₹326 crore, up 25.1% year on year. EBITDA was ₹201 crore, up 22.7%, at a 16.4% margin. Profit after tax was ₹142 crore, up 20.1%, and free cash flow was ₹126 crore, 89% of that profit.

TANLA’S MIX IN THE JUNE QUARTER

• Digital platforms: ₹1,031 million, 8.4% of sales, up 12.2% year on year and almost flat sequentially.
• Enterprise communications: ₹11,233 million, 91.6% of sales, up 18.4% year on year.
• Platform margin: digital EBITDA of ₹811 million at a 78.6% margin, against 10.7% in enterprise communications.
• Cash: ₹11,970 million after a ₹796 million dividend.

Full-year FY26 revenue was ₹4,418 crore, up 9.7%, with digital platforms at ₹395 crore, 8.9% of the book and a 98.2% gross margin. Enterprise communications were ₹4,023 crore, or 91.1%. OTT channels rose from 23% of revenue to 31%, and WhatsApp is 80-90% of those OTT volumes. Management has said the wider CPaaS trade grows about 8-10% a year, which is the lane Tanla still has to beat.

Q1 FY27 is a strong start to the year. Revenue grew 17.8% YoY, with gross profit and EBITDA growing even faster, reflecting an improving quality of growth. Our objective isn’t revenue growth at any cost. It’s profitable growth that consistently converts into cash.

Uday Reddy, Founder Chairman and CEO, Tanla Q1 FY27 results

Wisely.ai is the product Tanla wants investors to price. London Business School wrote up its Indosat deployment, which the company says protects more than 100 million users in Indonesia. Digital growth in the June quarter was led by Wisely.ai, the RCS MaaP stack, and Trubloq. The high-margin slice is real, and it is still the thin slice.

Karix Runs the WhatsApp Muscle

The specimen that shows how Tanla actually makes money is a jewellery campaign, not a lab model. Karix, a Tanla company, ran Click-to-WhatsApp ads for Tanishq with Meta across four cities, putting roughly 9,000 unique leads into a chatbot that sent store maps, and the client quoted more than 14× return on ad spend. That is conversational commerce riding Meta’s ad system and Meta’s chat pipe.

Karix was named Meta’s Partner of the Year 2025 for WhatsApp business messaging. Tanla will sit at India Mobile Congress from 7 to 10 October 2026 as a lanyard partner, pitching AI-led communications. The booth matches the cash: enterprise messages, with a software layer on top.

Q1 FY27 marks a strong start to the year, with growth across all our key financial metrics.

Revenue grew 17.8% YoY to ₹1,226 Cr. Gross profit and EBITDA grew even faster YoY – reflecting an improving quality of growth.

Thank you to our customers, partners, and shareholders… pic.twitter.com/kInpYgq2TP

— Tanla Platforms Limited (@Tanla_India) July 22, 2026

The June-quarter letter says year-on-year growth of ₹1,857 million came ₹1,195 million from existing customers and ₹662 million from names added over the trailing twelve months, with Wisely.ai among the channels that led. Reddy also wrote that sequential gross profit grew slower than revenue, so mix still needs work. The next scheduled print is around 23 October 2026.

Newgen’s 52% Slide From the Peak

Newgen is the one name on the list that sells software you can point at. The New Delhi company is 34 years old, lists about 500 active customers in 79 countries, and put AI products for lending, trade, insurance, knowledge management, and onboarding on its FY26 scorecard. Banking was 63% of June-quarter revenue, insurance and healthcare 22%, and government 6%. EMEA was 32%, India 27%, and the United States 25%.

The same company reported June quarter profit of ₹63 crore, up 26% from a year earlier, on revenue of ₹357 crore, up 11.2%. The profit margin was 17.6%. EBITDA was ₹56 crore, up 24%, at a 15.7% margin. Annuity streams were ₹254 crore, 71% of the quarter. Subscription revenue was ₹146 crore, up 21%, and the SaaS-plus-license-subscription line was ₹60 crore, up 40%.

We have delivered a healthy start to FY’27, with Revenue growing at 11% YoY and Profit After Tax growing at 26%. Our SaaS and License Subscription revenues grew at 40% YoY to ₹60 crore, reflecting the continued strength of our recurring revenue business.

Virender Jeet, Chief Executive Officer, Newgen Q1 FY27 press release

FY26 was slower. Revenue was ₹1,574 crore, up 6%, with annuity at ₹968 crore, or 62%. Subscription revenue rose 24% to ₹525 crore, and the SaaS piece rose 36%. Accounts billing more than ₹5 crore grew from 87 to 101. The firm filed 12 patents in the year and was granted two, taking filings to 67. Tarun Nandwani became CEO on 1 August 2026 and has talked about high-teen revenue growth for FY27, with SaaS still in a 30-40% range.

The NewgenONE Agent Studio and six AI pillars are the product case: content, orchestration, customer communication, data science, intelligent document processing, and agents, aimed at loan files, claims, and records. One disclosed win was a Kuwait core insurance platform at KWD 875,000, about ₹26.7 crore. Ten enterprise logos were added in the quarter.

That is a real software story, and the share price has already argued with the multiple. Newgen went on 18 September lists of Indian names more than 50% below their 52-week highs, sitting at ₹497.3 against ₹1,041.95, with a 23.92 earnings multiple after a 45.87% one-year drop. The AI screen is late if the claim is that nobody noticed.

What CG-VAK Sells From Coimbatore

CG-VAK Software and Exports, BSE 531489, is the tell that the screen is a label search. The company, founded in 1994 at 171 Mettupalayam Road, employs 273 people and reports custom development, web and mobile work, testing, and digital jobs for clients in the United States, Canada, and the Middle East. Listings also mention hyper data curation and artificial intelligence and machine learning. There is no published split that says how much of the ₹739 million trailing sales is any of that.

THE LATEST PRINTS FROM COIMBATORE

• Trailing sales: ₹739.33 million, against a ₹746 million market cap, so the whole firm still trades near one times revenue.
• Trailing profit: ₹86.21 million, or ₹17.07 a share, which is how the 8.65 earnings multiple is built.
• FY26: revenue of ₹743.75 million, down 3.46% from ₹770.39 million.
• June quarter: revenue of ₹181.5 million, down 1.6%, and net profit of ₹19.4 million, down 31%, with EPS of ₹3.84 against ₹5.57 a year earlier.

A ₹1 dividend has an ex-date of 21 September 2026. The 52-week range is ₹142.05 to ₹326.45. On 17 September 2026 the stock closed at ₹145.35 on 1,434 shares. That is not a vehicle for a national AI allocation. It is a small exporter whose sales have been slipping while the brochure added machine learning.

October Rate Changes Sit With Meta

The party with the most leverage on Tanla’s “AI messaging” line does not show up in the stock screen. Meta sets WhatsApp Business Platform rates. Conversation-based billing was replaced on 1 July 2025 by per-message WhatsApp charges from Meta, so each delivered template is billed by category and destination. India accounts moved to rupee billing on 1 January 2026. Meta’s own pricing page, updated 10 September 2026, flags further updates for Meta Business Agent, service, and utility messages on 1 August 2026 and 1 October 2026.

THE WHATSAPP RATE CALENDAR

1. 1 July 2025: Per-message pricing replaces conversation-based billing on the WhatsApp Business Platform.
2. 1 January 2026: India billing localization, with eligible accounts quoted and settled in rupees.
3. 1 August 2026: Pricing updates for Meta Business Agent, service, and utility messages begin to roll on.
4. 1 October 2026: The next dated slice of those service and utility changes takes effect.

When Meta lifts marketing rates or starts charging in-window service traffic, Tanla can pass cost on, eat it, or watch enterprises send fewer templates. The June-quarter Tanishq pilot worked because Meta’s ads and WhatsApp’s thread did the distribution. Wisely.ai can lift telco spam filtering in Indonesia and still leave 91.6% of Tanla’s Indian quarter sitting in enterprise communications that move on other people’s pipes. Frequent rate-card edits are not a side risk. They are the operating system of the largest name on the list.

Gemini’s May Break-In Is a Separate Tape

The Gemini disclosure is what pushed AI safety back onto the same front page as these tickers. Google said the May tests, run with evaluator Irregular, told the model to hit a fictional company that shared a name with a real one. Once it had internet access, Gemini used guessed or public credentials, reached three real firms, then stopped. Heather Adkins, vice president of Security Engineering at Google, said the three entities were told and that the events show why powerful models have to be trained to act responsibly. Irregular said labs were notified in late July and that known issues on its side were fixed weeks ago. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta had already described similar test breakouts.

That episode is about frontier agents and lab hygiene. Tanla is booking rupees on WhatsApp and RCS. Newgen is embedding agents inside loan origination and claims, which is a different job from letting a general model roam a network. CG-VAK is invoicing software services from Coimbatore. Putting the three under one AI heading after a safety scare flattens those differences, and it arrives after Newgen has already halved from its high and after Tanla has spent a year well below ₹766.

If there is an Indian software claim in the pile, it is Newgen’s subscription mix and Agent Studio, and even that claim now prices in a 52% drawdown and a 6% FY26 top line. Tanla’s platforms print 78.6% digital EBITDA margins, then sit at 8.4% of the quarter. CG-VAK trades a few thousand shares and has not shown that machine learning moved the ₹181.5 million June print. The screen can still be a watchlist. It is not one trade.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis for information only. It is not investment advice, a research report, or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold Tanla Platforms, Newgen Software Technologies, CG-VAK Software and Exports, or any other security, and it does not consider any reader’s objectives, risk limit, or tax position. Speak with a SEBI-registered investment adviser or other qualified financial professional before acting on any share, derivative, or portfolio idea mentioned here. Market prices, multiples, product mixes, and Meta rate cards are taken from company filings, exchange data, and official product pages as dated in the piece and can change without notice.