Top 12 Indian Startup News This Week

Highlights for this week

• Microsoft enlarges its technical spectrum to accelerate 18 Indian Startups in 12 months
• Goldman Sachs invested $15 Mn into Indian fintech startup ZestMoney
• Amazon collaborating with Indian farmers to deliver the Farm-to-Fork Model

Microsoft will leverage its technical expertise and global enterprise clients to help specific Indian Startup for a year. The Startups mainly focus on the areas of fintech, blockchain, health tech, and IoT. This program will help startups to explore emerging technology and tap into new markets.

Goldman Sachs, one of the world's largest trading banks headquartered in New York has plowed a capital of $15 Mn in an Indian Fintech Startup ZestMoney. The company is looking forward to developing a market and to build a credit-worthy profile to access credit in terms of loans irrespective of their creditworthiness.

Amazon has collaborated with Indian farmers to develop a sustainable Farm-to-Table model of delivering fresh produce through its grocery delivering chain Amazon Fresh and Amazon Pantry. The company had invested $35 Mn in Amazon Retail India Pvt Ltd. to increase the sale of groceries, household, and other food products to occupy half of the Indian market by 2023.

The Indian Startup Ecosystem (Game of Profit-Loss)

• PhonePe attained 5 Bn UPI transactions marking a 5X growth, key role players Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities
• Swiggy encountered a loss of INR 2,364 Cr, increasing six-fold than the previous financial year 2018
• Lenskart managed to close $275 Mn funding from SoftBank Vision Fund

This week was pretty much promising for the Indian Startups as some companies managed to bag hefty funding while others were busy covering up the losses.

The financial year of 2019 was excellent for PhonePe as it was able to register a 401% hike and 175 Million active users which increased the revenue currently evaluating over $7 Bn. No wonder this profit has its flipside because the company also reported a loss of 1904.72 Cr as expenditure on advertising and promotion adds up to 85% of total expense.

Swiggy' initial years were comparatively good as the company saw an enhancement in revenue from Rs 732 Cr to Rs 1297 Cr but 2019 appeared with some decent increase in expenditure such as Employee expenses which stood around Rs 544 Cr, Marketing and Advertising expenditure of Rs 778 Cr increasing six-fold and delivery cost being highest among all with a whopping amount of Rs 1,594 Cr.

Lenskart managed to close a big deal with the Japanese group Softbank. The $275 Mn funding was provided from Softbank Vision Fund-II making Lenskart the first one from India and second globally to bag the investment and now the company is evaluated at $1.5 Billion making it Unicorn from its second vision fund.

#Databreaching, the trend of Facebook

Being surrounded by scandals of data breaching the previous year was not enough for Facebook as the trend continued in 2019 with 49 million Instagram users and 419 million Facebook users with some more spice adding to the year-end with another data breach of 267 million Facebook users.

Security researcher Bob Diachenko has said that the personal data of millions of users were left exposed online on a database without any password or security and could be possibly used for SMS spamming and phishing. So make sure to check the settings of your social media profile making visibility part changed to 'friends' or 'only me' for more security.

The Effect of Burning protest against CAA

The internet shutdown has been done in the country many times in the past years but the national capital never faced any difficulties in terms of the internet.

On Thursday, the widespread protests led to a stage that made Delhi Police take serious actions passing orders under section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure to shut down mobile services in several parts of the city.The Internet shutdown also took place in Assam as the Guwahati High Court prevailed the order to Administration for lifting internet shutdown in the city.

The order was imposed on Dec 11 as a response to protest against CAA and followed a deadline of 5 pm but the citizens were not able to access the internet services well past 8 pm.A report published by The Hindu in the last week said that the internet has been shut down by the administration in more than eight states of the entire country.

Meanwhile, the Union territory of Jammu and Kashmir has entered its 138th day of internet shut down this Thursday marking longest such type of period in India ever.

Continuously Advancing Automobile Sector

• Google Maps can now search for EV Charging Stations by plugs type
• Dunzo and Throttle approved for test flights in Bengaluru from the month February

Google maps had introduced EV charger functionality in the month of October last year. Later, came the feature that shows whether a charging station is currently in use. Now, the latest add-on is the ability to check the suitable charging station based on the plug points.

The need for this arises as all the electric vehicles have different types of plugs, for example, Nissan and Mitsubishi use CHAdeMO, Tesla uses its proprietary plug type and BMW and VW use CCS plug. The setting is given below:

Google Maps > Settings > Electric Vehicle Settings >Your Plugs > Choose and save

Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has finally waved green flags to the Hyperlocal delivery platform Dunzo and drone maker Throttle Aerospace Systems' to perform flight tests of their autonomous drones in identified Airspaces outside Bengaluru.

Their long-range drone experiment will likely begin in the second half of February 2020. Currently, Throttle Aerospace systems' is working on maximizing the drone-based delivering solutions.

The main goal of the company or we can say the future vision is to scale up the system of drone-based organ transport delivering a solution.

Bengaluru Startups, India's Silicon Valley produces country's youngest Billionaires

The Hurun India Rich List has named Bengaluru the Billionaire's capital of India's Millennials. The Silicon Valley of India has given the youngest billionaires who are aged under 40.

The Rich List has reported that 10 out of 17 self-made Billionaires are from Bengaluru alone. Apart from the Richie Richs hailing from Mumbai across ages, the Billionaire Boys Club of Bengaluru consists Zerodha's Nithin Kamath and Flipkart's Sachin and Binny Bansal and many other executives of unicorn giants such as Byju's Riju Ravindran and his wife, Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal and CTO Ankit Bhati and youngest of them all OYO's Ritesh Agarwal with net worth of INR 7,500 Crores.