Eternal used its Q2 FY27 shareholder letter this week to announce Dark.ai, a chatbot that the company says it is building to launch globally by the end of 2026. Founder and now vice chairman Deepinder Goyal made an unusually absolute claim about it: “Dark uses fine-tuned frontier open-weight models, running inside our own infrastructure. End-to-end encryption. We cannot read your conversations, even if we are forced to.”
Goyal’s stated case against the rest of the market is specific. Turning off model training on ChatGPT or Gemini, he argues, doesn’t resolve data retention, legal requests, abuse reviews, human audits or third-party logging — and that uncertainty keeps people from discussing sensitive personal matters or confidential business research with AI tools at all. He’s positioning Dark for “power users – founders, researchers, scientists, enterprises and governments – who want to keep their thoughts private, because privacy is essential for competitiveness.” The product runs fine-tuned open-weight models on Eternal’s own infrastructure, with an encrypted memory layer that lets users carry context across sessions on their own terms. It has been running internally for several months. Eternal hasn’t released a launch date, pricing or availability.
The venture is quite a diversion for a company that built its fortune and reputation by moving food and groceries. But then, most companies with non-AI businesses are using the wealth to get into the AI game by using existing resources and massive capital influx. Eternal’s encryption promise though, needs independent audit before anyone should take it at face value — something the company has not said it will provide.
Eternal’s own CFO wasn’t selling certainty either. On the earnings call that accompanied the letter, Akshant Goyal called Dark a “zero one bet”: it either becomes, in his words, “a global business” that creates substantial shareholder value, or it gets shut down. Asked whether Dark sits inside Eternal or as one of Goyal’s outside ventures, Akshant Goyal was direct: “Dark.ai is definitely in Eternal. I think anything in this letter, safe to assume it’s part of Eternal.” That matters, because Eternal’s results in the same letter were soft — net profit rose 92.3% year-on-year to ₹125 crore but missed analyst estimates, and shares fell 2.45% after the call as investors weighed heavier reinvestment and rising costs.
The pattern is consistent with how Goyal operates. Since leaving the CEO role, he has personally bankrolled an aerospace startup, a longevity-research venture and a brain-monitoring wearable. Dark breaks from that pattern in one respect: it sits on Eternal’s balance sheet and inside its public disclosures, not in Goyal’s personal portfolio, which means public shareholders are funding this particular bet whether or not it has anything to do with food delivery.
Nothing about Dark’s privacy architecture has been verified by anyone outside the company. Eternal hasn’t said who would audit the encryption, and it hasn’t addressed how “even if we are forced to” survives contact with an actual Indian court order — a country whose government has pushed for exceptional access to encrypted data before. Until that gets tested, Dark is a promise in a shareholder letter from a company with no history of building or defending consumer-facing cryptography.