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.
Online pharmacy platform Tata 1mg turned a unicorn after raising close to $40 million in a funding round led by Tata Digital, media reports said. The company was yet to comment on the valuations till the time of going to press. 1mg has raised $230.8 million across 16 rounds, including this one.
This, Byju, was the time to apply the business lens, treat your company as a business, run your company as a business. Instead, you splurged, observes Suveen Sinha.
If you are a budding developer and interested in Web3, chances are that you will be headed to one of India's largest-ever meetings of Web3 developers, being held by Polygon, a Web3 platform. The company's ongoing "Web3: Made in India Tour" is expected to see close to 4,000 developers coming together at the inaugural Polygon Connect event in Bengaluru on December 1. The event highlights the growing dominance of Web3 developers from India, as well as the sector's rising interest to investors, who continue to invest in startups despite a funds crunch.
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.
Recently, Slice, a payment app, acquired a 5 per cent stake in North East Small Finance (NESF) for $3.42 million - the first such deal by a fintech in a small finance bank. Slice (valued at $1.5 billion, and backed by Tiger Global, Blume Ventures and Axis Bank) will technically get a toehold in a scheduled commercial bank if NESF were to get a licence to morph into one down the line Such a transition is well within the banking regulator's declared framework. The transaction has to be seen in a larger context.
In absolute numbers, India had only 211 start-ups compared to 970 in the US.
In January, Visa's chief executive officer, Al Kelly, said during an earnings call that "there's been a burst of the balloon in valuations in the fintech world". Noting that the trend of lower valuations "is a helpful characteristic of the current environment", he added: "We will look for capabilities and management teams that will bring more value to Visa than we can bring ourselves." Data from KPMG's Pulse of Fintech H2'22 shows that global fintech investment - via mergers and acquisitions (M&As), private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) firms - at $164.1 billion in 2022, was down 31 per cent over the year before. Indian fintechs held up better during this timeframe, attracting $6 billion, or a fall of 24 per cent.
Indian start-ups raised issues, such as blockages in international wire transfers, disruptions due to threshold limits on withdrawals, lack of communication from US agencies, and the need for preferential access to credit, in a meeting with the government over the fallout of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, minister of state for electronics and information technology, held a virtual meeting with over 450 members from start-ups, venture capitalists, and investors who have been directly affected by the closure of SVB. He assured them that the IT ministry would put together a list of suggestions and give it to the finance minister on behalf of start-ups.
'I've been backing businesses in the e-commerce space because they enable goods and services to reach people who could never have been catered to in this manner before.'
A few days back, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman urged the start-up community and public to deal in cryptocurrency with caution because everything that was floating around was not currency. In the first week of August, the country's top nine crypto exchange platforms were summoned by the Directorate of Enforcement (ED) in Hyderabad. The exchanges were questioned for money laundering, especially over a number of Indian non-banking financial companies and their fintech partners for predatory lending practices in violation of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) guidelines and by using tele-callers who misuse personal data and use abusive language to extort high interest rates from the loan takers.
This is Tata's seventh investment this year.
Ratan Tata invested about $299,000 during the first six months of 2016.
While the redeployment of talent from companies that have shut down into other start-ups is a great move, some say the gesture is gaining more visibility than the actual companies
Mobile payments alone gathered close to $1.51 billion in the year 2017 through 13 rounds of funding, according to data compiled by Tracxn
Set up by three former NDTV executives, the company is targeting premium restaurants in Delhi-NCR
The company, which is a leading player in the Indian wearables market, is backed by angel investors like Shriram Nene and his wife and Bollywood actress Madhuri Dixit Nene and WhatApp's Neeraj Arora
Continuing his investment spree in India's hot start-ups, Ratan Tata on Friday invested in Kyazoonga.
By facilitating instant changes on both Android and iOS apps, this platform allows mobile developers to fix bugs without user drop-offs or uninstalls. Abhishek Jejani reports.
These start-ups include high-growth companies such as Ola, Paytm, Lenskart, UrbanClap and Urban Ladder. Nearly half of these have gone on to raise follow-on funding, a key measure of success for start-ups. A few have become unicorns, the term for start-ups valued at $1 billion or more.
The deal brings the two start-up stalwarts - Bansal and Ola co-founder and chief executive officer Bhavish Aggarwal - together in the backdrop of growing foreign control in this space.
The idea that technology and startups with newer business models will not disrupt traditional businesses has been thrown out the window.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the policy last month.
Over the past two years, Tata has invested in over 20 start-ups
Sequoia Capital might emerge as leading global investor in start-up space in the country, as funds from other sources dry up.
The family office category was up 38 per cent, led by names such as Ratan Tata, Ronnie Screwvala and various Infosys co-founders.
Deal values have been falling steadily since May this year, when it touched a high of $851 million.
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