1st unicorn of 2021;Bangalore as the world's fastest-growing tech hub;Lost Password ever??;Amazon Academy for JEE;$1 billion for Aakash Educational Services Ltd ;.....continue

Jan 17, 2021

Hi , Shubham Shekhar here,

Welcome all to the weekly compilation of wonderful tech and related news.

Also Including the best tweet/thread/infographic of the week. Do read and engage.

Here is Your weekly dose,

Bangalore, the world's fastest-growing tech hub

Bangalore has emerged as the world's fastest-growing mature tech ecosystem since 2016, followed by the European cities of London, Munich, Berlin and Paris.
Bengaluru startups saw total funding worth $24 Bn across 1,700 funding deals in the past six years.
Dealroom.co data analysed by London & Partners – the Mayor of London’s international trade and investment agency – reveals that investment in the Karnataka capital of Bengaluru grew 5.4 times from $1.3 billion in 2016 to $7.2 billion in 2020, with the Maharashtra capital of Mumbai growing 1.7 times from $0.7 billion to $1.2 billion in the same period.
Bengaluru also topped the list of Indian startup hubs in terms of the amount of seed funding as well as the deal count. Startups based in the city accounted for 33% of all seed funding deals for Indian startups between 2014-20.

India’s first unicorn of 2021 : Digit Insurance

Five-year-old insurance tech start-up Digit Insurance is India’s first unicorn of 2021, has hit a valuation of over $1.9 billion after it closed a fresh funding round from existing investors including A91 Partners, Faering Capital, and TVS Capita.
The startup was founded by Kamesh Goyal in 2016 and is backed by Canadian billionaire Prem Watsa’s Fairfax group.
According to the startup, it grew by 31.9 percent between April and December of 2020, earning a premium of $186 million. It claims to have a customer base of 1.5 crores.
Digit Insurance’s portfolio covers health, travel, property, and even mobile insurance, a segment not typically covered by major players. The start-up leverages cloud and AI technology to settle claims digitally through smartphone self-inspections and audio verifications.
In 2020, the startup was also listed in the global Fintech 250 list by CB Insights, being the only Indian company to do so.

Last 2 chances to correctly guess the password or lose $220 million

Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer,the former chief technology officer of Ripple Labs, living in San Francisco, told The New York Times this week that he had two chances left to guess his password to a hard drive that holds the keys to his wallet with $220 million worth of bitcoins.
He forgot the password to his IronKey, a secure hard drive with the keys to his wallet. IronKey gives users 10 guesses to get their password right before encrypting the hard drive's contents.
"There are no organisations or a centralised body that has the power, or a master key, to access all or any of this data, unless the key is specifically shared with them. Hence, if you forget the password to your crypto wallet, there is no company or helpline that can help reset it or give you back access to it the way a standard financial institution or bank would," the report said.
Elsewhere, a UK man who threw away a laptop hard drive containing bitcoin he believes is now worth close to $300 million wants his council to let him search for it in landfill.
James Howells had 7,500 bitcoins, on the hard drive, which he mistakenly threw away in 2013.

Amazon India launched Amazon Academy to help students prepare for the JEE

Amazon enters into the $180-billion education sector, to take on top players like Byju’s, Unacademy, Vedantu, and traditional brick and mortar institutions.
The online preparation offering will equip students with in-depth knowledge and practice routines required for the JEE, through the curated learning material, live lectures and comprehensive assessments in Math, Physics and Chemistry, it said in a statement.
The beta version of Amazon Academy will be available free of cost on the web and the Google Play store, it added.
“Amazon Academy aims to bring high quality, affordable education to all, starting with those preparing for engineering entrance examinations. Our mission is to help students achieve their outcomes while also empowering educators and content partners reach millions of students," said Amol Gurwara, Director, Education at Amazon India.
"Our primary focus has been on content quality, deep learning analytics and student experience. This launch will help engineering aspirants prepare better and achieve the winning edge in JEE,” he added.
In addition to the JEE, those preparing for BITSAT, VITEEE, SRMJEEE, and MET exams will also benefit from the quality content resources available. The content is currently available for free and will continue to be for the next few months, the statement added.

$1 Billion for brick and mortar test prep leader Aakash Educational Services Ltd

This will be the seventh acquisition for Byju’s and will be the biggest edtech deals in the world.
The Indian edtech giant will be looking to close the deal “in the next two or three months” for close to $1 Bn, according to a Bloomberg report, which quoted unnamed sources. Later, Aakash confirmed the same in a press statement.
The Bloomberg report claimed that the AESL CEO Aakash Chaudhry (son of founder J.C. Chaudhry) and the Chaudhry family would completely exit the business while Blackstone would swap a portion of its 37.5% equity in Aakash for a stake in BYJU’S.
AESL runs the Aakash Institute that has 200+ physical coaching centres across 130 cities for providing engineering and medical test prep services for classes 10-12 students.

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Karkhana.io raises $1.5 million, Udaan raises big

A B2B on-demand manufacturing platform startup founded in 2018 aims to digitise and streamline manufacturing industry.
Karkhana.io aims to use this funding round to scale its business operations and expand market reach.
Karkhana.io’s manufacturing capabilities encompass 3D printing, sheet metal work, CNC machining and injection moulding.
Business-to-business marketplace Udaan has raised $280 million from new and existing investors.
Udaan has overall raised $1.15 billion to date, is now valued at more than $3.1 billion.
Udaan, co-founded by three former Flipkart executives, is solving this problem by connecting small retailers with wholesalers and traders. The startup today serves more than 3 million retailers and small and medium-sized businesses.
Their clientele includes big players like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Boat Lifestyle, Micromax, HP, LG, ITC, HUL and P&G.

Nissan NA source code leaked due to default admin:admin credentials.

Multiple code repositories from Nissan North America became public this week after the company left an exposed Git server protected with default access credentials.
The entire collection is around 20 gigabytes large and contains source code for mobile apps and various tools used by Nissan internally for diagnostics, client acquisition, market research, or NissanConnect services.
Nissan Canada previously suffered a data breach in 2017.
Tillie Kottmann who retains a repository of leaked source code from various sources analysed the Nissan data,posted the summary of the leak
- Nissan NA Mobile apps
- Parts of the ASIST Diagnostic System software
- Dealer Business Systems/Dealer Portal
- Nissan internal core movie library
- Nissan/Infiniti NCAR/ICAR services
- Client acquisition and retention tools
- Sale/market research tools and data
- Various marketing tools
- Vehicle logistics portal
- Vehicle connected services/Nissan connect things
- Various other backends and internal tools