Startup Digest: Centre likely to call meeting with e-pharma Cos, Musk says Twitter is roughly breaking even & more

Elon Musk said that he did not know "what exactly happened" when Twitter took down content related to a documentary critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this year, adding that some rules related to social media content were "quite strict" in India.

In January, India ordered the blocking of a BBC documentary which questioned Modi's leadership during the 2002 Gujarat riots, saying that even sharing of any clips via social media was barred.

The government had issued orders to Twitter to block over 50 tweets linking to the video of the documentary, Kanchan Gupta, an adviser to the government, had said, as per Reuters. While the BBC had not aired the documentary in India, the video was uploaded on some YouTube channels, Gupta had said.

"I am not aware of this particular situation... don't know what exactly happened with some content situation in India," Musk said in an interview with the BBC broadcast live on Twitter Spaces, when asked if the site took down some content at the behest of the Indian government. "The rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict and we can't go beyond the laws of the country," he said.

SaaS platform VideoVerse has acquired US-based artificial intelligence powered content creation and social media distribution firm Reely.ai for an undisclosed sum.

The acquisition will help VideoVerse enhance its existing capabilities and better serve its customers in the gaming and esports sectors, where the demand for AI-driven content creation and distribution continues to grow, a statement said.

The video editing platform has already started integrating Reely.ai's technology into its existing suite of solutions. The company said it will provide advanced tools to players, streamers, and content creators looking to develop, share, and extend the reach of high-quality video content.

VerSe Innovation, the parent company of news aggregator Dailyhunt and short video platform Josh, has reversed the pay cuts it announced for employees in November and expanded the ESOP pool, as per a Moneycontrol report.

In a town hall on April 11, Umang Bedi, co-founder of VerSe, said that the company would be reversing these pay cuts starting next month as the macroeconomic situation is now looking much better, the report added. Bedi also told employees that the company will be expanding its ESOP pool and will be giving incentives to employees based on their performance for FY23 or the previous financial year.

The company had laid off about 150 employees in November and announced salary cuts of up to 11 percent for employees earning more than Rs 10 lakh.

Online stockbroker Zerodha will partner with wealth management company smallcase for their upcoming mutual fund business, Nithin Kamath, founder and chief executive officer at Zerodha, confirmed the same on Twitter.

While awaiting final approval of our AMC (mutual fund), we asked if we should build it ourselves or collaborate. Given the 6+ years of experience that small case has in building investment products, it made perfect sense to create a joint venture to build the AMC, he said in his tweet.

Notbaly, Zerodha had gotten an in-principal approval for launching mutual fund business in September 2021. Commenting on the development, Vasanth Kamath- CEO and founder at smallcase said, "Very excited to partner with Zerodha to help introduce a new generation of investors to mutual funds. The upcoming AMC will be a joint venture between Zerodha and smallcase and will use learnings and shared values from both companies to build an enduring fund house."

Walmart-owned Flipkart has entered into a business deal with supply chain solutions provider Ensologic for the development of ecommerce giant’s private label brand

The expected business volume for this partnership is estimated to be about Rs 1,000 crore in FY24. As part of this deal, the two entities will identify innovative products through their research teams and further develop them for their customers, a statement said.

"Flipkart has eight supply chain facilities including fulfillment and sortation centers across Tamil Nadu, including Chennai, Coimbatore and Hosur, which help in connecting sellers to the pan-India consumer base while delivering growth opportunities for the state," the company said in a statement.

Content to commerce conglomerate The Good Glamm Group has partnered with ecommerce enabler GoKwik to expand cash-on-delivery (COD) serviceability pan India and minimise the risk of return to origin (RTO or non-deliverable orders).

The Good Glamm Group which has brands such as MyGlamm, The Moms Co, St Botanica, among others claims to deal with multimillion transactions every day, a majority of which is COD.

GoKwik will use its solutions to ensure RTO protection and unlock further growth potential for the brand and will also help the startup expand its COD serviceability deeper into tier three and four cities and remote towns of the country, a statement said.

Diagnostics chain Molbio Diagnostics which has developed Truenat RT-PCR platform has collaborated with medtech startup SigTuple to build next generation AI enabled portable devices for many routine but critical diagnostic tests.

These devices will enable testing to be performed at the point-of-care – a doctor’s chamber, a public health centre, or an emergency room of a hospital – without having to send samples to central laboratories, a statement said.

Molbio and SigTuple will work on the development of AI powered, battery operated, portable devices for many diagnostic tests in the fields of Hematology, Biochemistry, Electrochemistry and others. The testing process will be simplified, and will not require a trained laboratory technician to perform the tests. Accurate, laboratory-quality test results will be available to the patient within a few minutes.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk said that the social media company is "roughly breaking even," as most of its advertisers have returned and its aggressive cost-cutting efforts have started bearing fruit after massive layoffs.

Musk, in an interview with BBC broadcast live on Twitter Spaces, said Twitter has about 1,500 employees now, a sharp decline from "just under 8,000 staff members" it had before he took it over in October.

He added Twitter was in a $3 billion negative cash flow situation and had to take drastic actions, referring to its large-scale layoffs.

SoftBank Group Chief Executive Masayoshi Son will officially agree with Nasdaq this week to list British chip designer Arm, the Financial Times said.

Arm, whose technology underpins the global smartphone industry and is used in supercomputers, said in March it would pursue a U.S.-only listing this year, ending speculation about a primary or secondary listing in the UK.

In June, Son said that Nasdaq was a favourite exchange for listing Arm, one of the sprawling conglomerate's prize assets.

The Biden administration said it is seeking public comments on potential accountability measures for artificial intelligence (AI) systems as questions loom about its impact on national security and education.

ChatGPT, an AI program that recently grabbed the public's attention for its ability to write answers quickly to a wide range of queries, in particular has attracted U.S. lawmakers' attention as it has grown to be the fastest-growing consumer application in history with more than 100 million monthly active users.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a Commerce Department agency that advises the White House on telecommunications and information policy, wants input as there is "growing regulatory interest" in an AI "accountability mechanism."

OpenAI, the firm behind chatbot sensation ChatGPT, said that it would offer up to $20,000 to users reporting vulnerabilities in its artificial intelligence systems.

OpenAI Bug Bounty program, which went live on Tuesday, will offer rewards to people based on the severity of the bugs they report, with rewards starting from $200 per vulnerability.

According to details on bug bounty platform Bugcrowd, OpenAI has invited researchers to review certain functionality of ChatGPT and the framework of how OpenAI systems communicate and share data with third-party applications.

The software that underpins the second-biggest crypto coin ether is due for a software upgrade that will give investors access to more than $30 billion of the digital tokens.

Known as Shapella, the latest upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain will enable investors to redeem an offshoot of ether tokens that they have deposited in return for interest on the blockchain network over the past three years.

Such so-called "staked ether" tokens currently account for about 15% of all ether tokens, according to data firm Dune Analytics, and are worth some $31 billion. The upgrade is due for around 2230 GMT, according to a tweet by Tim Beiko of the Ethereum Foundation, a body that speaks for the Ethereum network.

The U.S. arm of cryptocurrency exchange Binance said it will remove digital asset tokens TRON and Spell from its trading platform, sending the prices of both down sharply on Wednesday.

Binance.US said the move was the result of a periodic review and that factors it regularly considers can include trading volume and liquidity, changes in a token's risk profile or evidence of fraud or unethical conduct, among others.

The TRON token fell nearly 5 percent against the U.S. dollar after the announcement, which was posted on Twitter and the Binance.US website, while the much smaller Spell token fell more than 5 percent, based on data from CoinMarketCap.