On a cloudy Monday this month, Mohammed Irshad flew from Kochi to Gurugram to attend an exclusive investor networking event. Among a handful of founders selected for the event, Irshad was to pitch his peer-to-peer learning start-up Notespaedia for funding in front of top venture capital investors such as AngelBay, Elevation Capital, and Inflection Point Ventures. He failed to woo them, but the feisty entrepreneur was determined to continue his hunt.
No one is disputing that the e-commerce market is growing dramatically in India
Koo has so far raised $4.1 mn in Series A funding from existing investors Accel, Kalaari Capital, Blume Ventures and 3one4 Capital.
E-commerce major Amazon on Wednesday said it will acquire Prione Business Services - its joint venture firm with Catamaran, subject to requisite regulatory approvals. Prione Business Services was formed in 2014 and was coming up for renewal on May 19, 2022. In August this year, Amazon and NR Narayana Murthy's Catamaran announced that they will not continue their JV beyond May 2022. The two parties had not disclosed the reason behind the decision.
The IPL will get underway from September 19 in the UAE, moved out of India due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Tata group has proposed to acquire more than 60 per cent stake in online grocery platform BigBasket, according to a filing, as the conglomerate seeks to expand in the fast-growing e-commerce space. The group plans to buy up to 64.3 per cent stake in Supermarket Grocery Supplies Pvt Ltd (SGS) through a combination of primary and secondary acquisitions, a filing with the Competition Commission of India (CCI) showed. The parties to the proposed deal are Tata Digital Ltd (TDL), SGS and Innovative Retail Concepts Pvt Ltd (IRC) -- which is engaged in B2C (Business to Consumer) sales through www.bigbasket.com and related mobile applications.
Close to $18 billion that Reliance Jio and Reliance Retail mopped up from a slew of private equity transactions in 2020 has pushed up the money inflows through this route by 108 per cent to $33.8 billion, according to an industry report. As per the data collated by Refinitiv, private equity investments increased 108 per cent in 2020 over the previous year, with the number of deals jumping from 665 in 2019 to 791 in 2020 at $33.8 billion, despite the pandemic. In 2019, total PE deals stood at $16.2 billion. Most of the fund inflows were in the third quarter, fetching $24 billion, which, however, tapered off in Q4 to just about $4.57 billion, as per the data from the agency that tracks financial transactions at a global level.
Chinese e-commerce giant planning to enter India this year, will take on global e-retailer
172 firms participated in the final placement process.
Mobile device maker Realme has overtaken South Korean giant Samsung to grab the second spot in the branded smartphone market, with 18 per cent volume share in October this year, revealed Counterpoint Research. Its rival Samsung ended October with 16 per cent share. Xiaomi (including its brand POCO) was at 20 per cent; Vivo at 13 per cent. The ascent brings Realme closer to its ambition to reach the No. 1 berth by 2022 when it hopes to sell over 40 million smartphones annually.
Over the last 12 months, thanks to bold bets by venture capital firms like Sequoia, SoftBank Vision Fund, and foreign strategic investors like Naspers, pipeline of start-ups with potential to achieve $1 bn in valuation is at an all-time high.
It comes with dual core processor and 2GB RAM.
No longer an in-house task; hiring legal eagles is now becoming norm for M&As, fundraising
Everyday consumerables, such as grocery and order-in food items are the key buyout sector, analysts say, and a major reason for kirana stores' digitisation push.
In spite of the mega IPO of Alibaba, Flipkart-Myntra is not thinking of a public offering at this point
Recipients of these damaged mementos have been given the option to either seek a refund of their bid amount or get a replacement for these broken items.
Online biggies and global retail giants are working on being omnipresent in both the virtual and the real world to see what helps them get the numbers, says Karan Choudhury.
Bob van Dijk, chief executive officer of Naspers, is now betting on companies in food tech, payments, travel and other consumer sectors to tap the potential of the Indian market.
Paytm's secondary share sale gave an opportunity to its employees - both former and current - to liquidate their vested Esops and earn around Rs 500 crore in total.
In a short span of time, with the help of Amazon, Cloudtail was able to devise a model that could protect it from the vagaries of online retail business.
Live commerce, quick commerce, group buying, WhatsApp commerce, dukaantech have made their mark.
Categories such as lifestyle, food and electronics accounted for over 1,350 sellers across the country last year.
India is the next major breeding ground for start-ups.
According to EY's private equity deal tracker, Brookfield-Reliance Jio's $ 3.7 billion deal is the largest ever PE/VC deal in India, surpassing the $ 2.5 billion investment made by Softbank in Flipkart in 2017.
The Centre has slapped as many as 148 notices on e-commerce players in the past three months for not complying with the mandatory display of the 'country of origin' tag on products sold. "Of the 148 notices, 56 have compounded it (the offence) and paid up around Rs 34 lakh," a senior official told Business Standard. "Every product has to display the country of origin, along with other basic information," the official added. In the case of e-commerce companies, these details have to be clearly displayed on their portals.
JM Financial, Axis Bank, and Bank of America have been roped in as the bankers to run the mandate, say sources.
Credit card spends jumped 57 per cent year-on-year (YoY) in September, aided by the festive season. According to the latest Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data, in September, credit card spends totalled Rs 80,477.18 crore compared to Rs 77,981 crore in August, thereby registering a 3.2 per cent growth sequentially, despite the high base. In the corresponding period last year, credit card spend was to the tune of Rs 51,356.68 crore.
147 domestic and international recruiters -- including Ola, Amazon, Flipkart and Xiaomi -- hired all 460 graduates.
Flipkart co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, who were ranked 86th last year dropped out of the list
Fintech unicorn Razorpay has raised $375 million in the Series F round of funding at a $7.5-billion valuation, making it India's second-most valuable start-up in this space, after Paytm. The company valuation has surged over seven times in 15 months, helping it push Walmart-owned digital payments firm PhonePe to the third spot on the country's most-valuable fintech list. Razorpay's latest round of fundraising was led by Lone Pine Capital, Alkeon Capital, and TCV.
Jio Platforms is expected to use its 388 million mobile phone subscribers as the cornerstone of an e-commerce and digital services business to rival Amazon and Walmart's Flipkart.
Vinai Kumar Saxena's current job as lieutenant governor of an Opposition-ruled state will raise the bar -- not just for him, but also for the Aam Aadmi Party government, which never says no to a fight with the representative of the central government in India's capital.
Apart from making your purchases on these platforms expensive, it will also mean sellers will have to face the brunt of reduced cash flows amid already low margins for some. Experts said the proposal, which will take effect on April 1, 2020, and will be inserted as a new section in the Income Tax Act, is expected to affect the working capital of e-commerce companies and reduce cash flows for e-sellers.
Modi will get the maximum chunk of the session time.
Flipkart and Myntra, together, post higher sales than Amazon
USISPF slammed government's move and alleged that the amendments announced were without any consultation and are akin to changing rules in the middle of the game.
So what's up? Why are so many promoters heading for the door? It cannot be that all of them lost their appetite for a good fight at the same time.And if Naresh Goyal of Jet Airways and Subhash Chandra of Zee Entertainment do bow out, will it be seen as chickening out when the going got tough or the entrepreneurial instinct of surviving to fight another battle waned, wonders Shailesh Dobhal.
With 16 start-ups gaining unicorn status in 2021, India's tally has touched the 50 mark. The newest entrant to this list include Pune-based MindTickle, which is close to finalising a $100-million funding round from Softbank's Vision Fund 2, taking the company's valuation to $1.1 billion.
The development comes amid a growing clamour for the boycott of Chinese products in India, combined with the government's push for Aatmanirbhar Bharat.
