BITS Pilani final year undergrad's Pepper raises INR 31.6crores,Another Unicorn for India;Tread, Bigbasket eyes big funds....continue

Oct 18, 2020

Hi , Shubham Shekhar here,

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

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

Here is Your weekly dose,

Fintech Startup Razorpay latest entry to the Unicorn Club

Unicorn def: to describe a privately held startup company with a value of over $1 billion.

Neobank def : an online-only financial institutions that are similar to banks

Razorpay now has five million merchants compared to 1 million in 2019.
While its payment gateway remains a core business, it has been expanding in lending and neo-banking services.
With this, in 2020, three unicorns have emerged in fintech (Pine Labs, Zerodha and Razorpay), one in software (Postman), one in ed-tech (Unacademy) and one in the beauty space (Nykaa) and another (FirstCry).
The company is also India’s first operational neobank to have attained unicorn status.
“We serve international brands including the likes of Facebook, Google and Wikipedia, national enterprises like Jio, Zerodha and Hotstar, recent upstarts like Khatabook, OkCredit or Meesho along with a multitude of SMEs and freelancers.”, the company mentioned in their blog post.

Nobel Prize 2020 in Economic Sciences

Pepper content raises INR 31.6 Crores($4.2 million) series A funding led by Lightspeed India

Started by Anirudh Singla,currently a final year undergrad from BITS Pilani in october 2017.
currently serves 400+ clients such as Amazon and Swiggy,Max Bupa, PayTM, Edelweiss, Apollo Hospitals,Adobe and Cerner.
also led by a fantastic set of angels across India and Silicon Valley like:

Digital fitness startup TREAD raises $1.1million seed funding

Founded by Dinesh Godara,in July 2020,previously Founded Wifistudy, which got acquired by Unacademy
Amount was raised in Pre-Seed round from a clutch of angel investors and VC firms.
Investors participating in the round included Unacademy founders Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, and Hemesh Singh; Udaan Co-founder Sujeet Kumar; CRED Founder Kunal Shah; Citruspay Founder Amrish Rau; MPL founders Sai Srinivas and Shubh Malhotra; Jupiter Founder Jitendra Gupta; and RedBus founder Phanindra Sama, among others.
The startup claims to have 1.1 million subscribers on YouTube, and another five lakh plus followers on Instagram.

Tatas picks Bigbasket for their online groceries push

As per media sources, they described it as a “strategic” relationship, with the conglomerate potentially acquiring a 20 per cent stake and two board seats.
Big Basket operates in 26 Indian cities. It turned profitable during the Covid-19 pandemic and expects to almost double its revenue to $1bn in the financial year ending March 2021.
It is believed to be negotiating a fresh round of funding with new investors, of $400 million and the backing of the Tatas would be timely.

JIO first mobile service provider to cross 400 million customers mark in India

added an industry leading 3.55 million users in the month of July
Jio had some 87.8 million inactive users,continued to be higher than its rivals Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea, according to latest data released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India(TRAI).
"In the next three years, Jio will connect half a billion mobile customers, a billion smart sensors and 50 million home and business establishments:," said Ambani at the 43rd AGM of the oil to telecom major.

Mindtickle, a SaaS platform eyes $600million valuation after $100million infuse from Softbank

Founded in 2011 by Krishna Depura, Nishant Mungali, Mohit Garg and Deepak Diwakar,The Pune and San Francisco-based company focuses on improving the sales function in businesses.
It also also offers solutions for on-boarding, micro-learning, skills development and coaching to companies that have been using legacy learning management systems (LMS).
MindTickle clientele includes United Colors of Benetton, Dabur, Symantec, Phillips, Micro Focus, DexCom, Ola Cabs, Cloudera and Nutanix, among others.

Flipkart to re-launch its mobiles with MarQ brand with approval from Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS).

The company entered this segment in 2017 with the launch of its own mobile, Billion Capture+ under the brand Billion.
In 2018, Flipkart’s private label MarQ had launched air conditioners and smart televisions under its private label MarQ
Besides washing machines and ACs, MarQ might also roll out products like sound bars and premium speakers.

Thread of the week-

Delta 4 Theory of Kunal Shah( Founder- Cred)

Click on the image to continue.

That’s all for this week. Will now be hitting your inbox next week.

Your Weekly Dose