India's flagship motor show Auto Expo 2023 kicked off on Wednesday with the global unveiling of Suzuki Motor Corporation's concept electric SUV 'eVX' which is slated to hit the market by 2025. The company's Indian arm Maruti Suzuki India is among the major manufacturers participating in the show that has returned after three years. The Concept eVX is a mid-size electric SUV concept designed and developed by Suzuki Motor Corporation (SMC), Japan. It will be powered by a 60 kWh battery pack offering up to 550 km of driving range on single charge.
US hedge fund Tiger Global and Japanese investment giant SoftBank have trimmed their investments in Indian start-ups by over a third - from $3.8 billion in the second half of 2021 to a mere $1.08 billion in H1 2022, according to data from Venture Intelligence. While SoftBank's investments in India dropped from $1.9 billion in H2 2021 by more than a fifth to only $0.33 billion in H1 2022, that of Tiger Global fell from $1.92 to $0.74 billion in the same period. Private equity (PE) fund trackers point out that this year most of the deals that Tiger Global has invested in are in the early stage (up to series D), and only a few are in the series E and above.
Google on Friday said it is deferring the deadline for developers in India to integrate with its Play billing system from March 2022 to October next year. In October last year, the company had announced March 31, 2022 as the deadline for developers in India to integrate with Play's billing system. A Google spokesperson on Friday said the extension has been done in view of the changes to India's recurring digital payments guidelines.
'For all of us at Amazon, it is 'Bharat first'.' 'We are keeping the Indian customer at the centre of what we are doing.'
India is currently home to 52 unicorn startups and one of the fastest-growing startup ecosystems.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the India-US Startup Konnect and share his vision on 'Start up India, Stand up India' as part of his US visit later this month.
Fintech and venture capital firms such as Recur Club, Razorpay and Trifecta Capital have come to the aid of homegrown start-ups caught in the crossfire of the Silicon Valley Bank fiasco. Alternative funding platform Recur Club said it was allocating $15 million to all Indian founders affected by the crisis. It will not charge any platform fee for the same.
Falling valuations, slowing funding rounds and faltering investor sentiment seem to have prompted many start-ups to lay off employees in a bid to conserve cash. The latest to do so is SoftBank-backed Cars24, a leading e-commerce platform for pre-owned vehicles, which has laid off over 600 staff, according to sources in the know. The move, they said, is aimed at conserving cash amid cautious investor sentiment and a slowdown in funding.
The university's academic council in a meeting on Friday had passed a motion for the removal of the chapter titled Modern Indian Political Thought.
Will open radio access network technology (O-RAN) disrupt the way 5G networks roll out in the country? After all, it promises to offer a substantially lower capital cost, enables the choice of an array of vendors, and provides more network flexibility - all very important for telcos who expect to invest over Rs 60,000 crore to roll out a pan-India 5G network and that's without spectrum costs. But more importantly, it counters the stranglehold of global telecom gear makers such as Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung over telcos to whom they sell propriety technology and bundled hardware and software.
With the help of technology and a billion citizens, two engineering students are on a mission to make India clean.
Akasa Air, which took to the skies two months ago, will allow domesticated dogs and cats in cabin as well as cargo from November and will also be starting new routes in the coming weeks. The airline, which is "well capitalised", plans to start international services in the second half of 2023 once it has a fleet of 20 planes. Currently, the carrier has 6 aircraft and will have a total of 18 planes by the end of March next year.
Mansi said she was "inspired by the honest governance of Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal" and therefore chose to join the AAP.
Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella on Tuesday said there is a tremendous momentum in cloud adoption, as he termed cloud a "big game changer". Nadella, who is currently in India, addressed Microsoft Future Ready Leadership Summit in Mumbai on Tuesday. He is also scheduled to visit Delhi and Bengaluru this week, and will be meeting key customers, startups, developers, educators and students during his India visit.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday unveiled a Rs 39.45 lakh crore Budget with a view to fire up the key engines of the economy to sustain a world-beating recovery from the pandemic. This was Sitharaman's fourth Budget. While the taxpayers were left in the lurch, once again, was she able to cheer Corporate India?
Adani Defence & Aerospace has entered into definitive agreements for acquiring 50 per cent equity stake in agricultural drone startup General Aeronautics for an undisclosed amount. Bengaluru-based General Aeronautics specialises in developing robotic drones to offer tech-enabled crop protection services, crop health monitoring, precision farming and yield monitoring services using artificial intelligence and data analytics.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch the much-awaited 5G services in India on October 1, 2022, an official release said on Friday. According to the release, 5G to be launched by the Prime Minister in select cities, will progressively cover the entire country over the next couple of years. The cumulative economic impact of 5G on India is estimated to reach $450 billion by 2035. Capable of supporting ultra-high-speed internet services, the fifth generation or 5G is expected to unleash new economic opportunities and societal benefits, serving as a transformational force for Indian society.
'Yesterday, I was at a seed meeting where we gave outright grants up to Rs 20 lakhs or loans up to Rs 50 lakhs for new start-ups under 2 years.'
Indian telecom operators have surpassed the three- year 5G network rollout target given to them within six months and now the government is making efforts to enhance adoption of 5G applications across various key segments, a senior government official said in Barcelona. Department of Telecom Additional Secretary VL Kantha Rao told PTI at "India Evening" event on the sidelines of Mobile World Congress 2023 that the government has hosted over 50 companies at the India pavilion and the delegation is here to showcase indigenously-developed 4G and 5G technology stack. "When the spectrum was allocated to telecom service providers for 5G rollout, we gave a minimum rollout obligation saying that within one year they have to cover a few cities within three years, a few towns and so on and so forth.
How many of the apps downloaded in India deliver the GPT technology they say they are?
Unemployment rate in the country has zoomed to a high of 8.3 per cent in December, the highest in 2022, according to data from Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). The unemployment rate during November was at 8 per cent, while in September it was the lowest at 6.43 per cent and was at the second highest level during the year at 8.28 per cent in August, the CMIE data stated. While the urban unemployment rate was at 10 per cent during the last month of 2022, rural joblessness stood at 7.5 per cent during December.
'An armed helicopter equipped with counter-drone systems will provide the airborne counter-drone capability and flexibility needed to protect India's critical assets.'
La Nina, construction worsen air quality; spike in respiratory ailments.
An entrepreneur-friendly environment in India could lead to the next Microsoft or Google emerging from domestic shores.
Education topped the table with nearly $1.755 billion as against $379 million last year, followed by real estate which received $754 million.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday said that the country's economic growth is picking up pace again and the domestic industry needs to enhance its risk-taking appetite. Noting the recent reforms taken by the government, the Prime Minister said that bringing reforms is a matter of conviction for his government, which is ready to take all risks in the national interest. "We have taken bold decisions. Reforms continued even during pandemic. "The government is doing reforms not out of compulsion but out of conviction," he said while addressing the CII's annual meeting.
Stating that recent agriculture reforms have opened new opportunities, the RBI Governor said the farm sector is emerging as a bright spot.
Earlier, Holachef had raised a seed fund of Rs 2 crore or Rs 20 million from India Quotient in February 2015.
Private equity investments into domestic companies fell sharply year-on-year by 42 per cent to $23.3 billion in 2022, which is the lowest since 2019, when it was $15.8 billion, according to an industry report. The numbers reflect the overall funding winter that the startup space in particular, and the overall foreign investments in general have been witnessing since the Ukraine war began last February. Private equity investment inflows into the country fell by a sharp 42 per cent in 2022 from last year to $23.3 billion -- the lowest annual inflows since 2019 when it was a low $15.8 billion, but still relatively elevated compared to historical levels, said Elaine Tan, a senior analyst at Refinitiv, the LSEG business arm that provides financial markets data and insights.
'At the heart of the strategic relationship between our countries are economic ties.'
Tech giant Microsoft on Wednesday launched a new programme Microsoft AI Innovate for nurturing and scaling start-ups that are leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI). The 10-week initiative will support start-ups in India leveraging AI technologies, helping them scale operations, drive innovation, and build industry expertise. Both B2B and B2C start-ups from various industries, including financial services, healthcare, education, agriculture, space, manufacturing and logistics, retail, and e-commerce can participate in the quarterly cohorts of this programme.
Businesses of various scales can improve productivity and affordability of their products and services by building tech intensity, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said. Nadella noted that organisations globally are undergoing digital transformation amid the COVID pandemic, and that trends like hybrid work, hyperconnected business and multi-cloud environments require "a boundaryless digital ecosystem where trust between different parties needs to be established in real-time". "Digital technology is a powerful deflationary force in an inflationary economy. Businesses - small and large - can improve their productivity as well as the affordability of their products and services by building tech intensity," he said.
High-level intelligence collection will no longer be the preserve of government agencies alone, says Pranjal Sharma.
These start-ups are different from the ones that have made it big in India.
Citing India's commitment to deep economic reforms and ease of doing business, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asserted on Monday that this is the best time to invest in the country as policy-making is focussed on the needs for the next 25 years for a 'clean and green' as well as 'sustainable and reliable' growth period. In his special address to the World Economic Forum's online Davos Agenda 2022 summit, Modi underlined a host of reform measures undertaken by his government to stress that it has worked to reduce the administration's interference in business by deregulating many sectors and to clear the way for free trade agreements with different countries. India was once associated with "license raaj", he noted and highlighted the measures, including reduction of corporate tax to boost business and doing away with over 25,000 compliance requirements.
National Security Advisor Ajit Doval will hold crucial talks with the top US leadership, including his counterpart Jake Sullivan, on the first high-level dialogue on Initiative for Critical and Emerging Technologies (iCET).
About 120 start-ups, mostly e-commerce ones, have signed up on Hirees platform to recruit candidates who are actively seeking jobs.
For a segment that thrives on promise more than performance, the country's start-up ecosystem is refusing to get carried away by the funding this calendar year. This has created the highest level of uninvested venture capital in seven years as investors wait for corrections in the working and - more importantly - valuation of start-ups while looking for cockroaches instead of unicorns. "Investors are now keen to invest in companies that have good top and bottom lines.
As a venture partner, DVP said that Neemuchwala would be bringing deep technology expertise and invaluable experience of building businesses.
Tech grads from BITS Pilani identify a problem and then use technology to solve it. The Visit story.
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