Startup Digest: Ohmium raises $250M, PhonePe may waive off ZestMoney’s debt, Uber expands 'Reserve' option & more

Early-stage investor Real Time Angel Fund (RTAF) has marked the second close of its maiden fund at Rs 125 crore. The Sebi-registered sector agnostic angel fund also said that it has increased the total corpus of the fund to Rs 510 Cr.

The VC fund received SEBI licence in July 2022 and announced its first close in August last year. The fund's investments span across sectors like healthtech, fintech, agritech, personal care, artificial intelligence, SaaS, and consumer technology. It has backed 10 startups including online marketplace MyMandi and SaaS platform TransportSimple.

According to the firm, these startups have attracted investments from around 300 investors. They also receive strategic support, mentorship, and access to its extensive network of industry experts.

HerKey (formerly JobsForHer), a career engagement platform for women in India, has bagged $4 million in a funding round led by Kalaari, 360 ONE Asset, earlier known as IIFL Asset Management (IIFL AMC), and angel investors.

The platform seeks to address the gender gap in the Indian workforce, where only 20% of women participate in the labor force, compared to 60% in China and 55% in the United States, a statement said.

The company claims to have serviced over 3.5 million women across India and plans to impact 30 million women's careers in India.

Niro, a consumer-lending platform has raised $11 million in a Series A round of funding which was a mix of equity ($8.5million) and debt ($2.5million).

The equity round was led by Elevar Equity, GMO Venture Partners, Rebright Partners, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance VC, and others. Venture debt was funded by Innoven Capital.

With this fresh funds, Niro plans to expand its partner footprint, product offerings, risk analytics capabilities and bolster its technology layer.

The company claims to have disbursed over Rs 300 crores of loans across 200+ cities in India and has a monthly origination run rate of over Rs 60 crores.

Nkure Therapeutics, an NK cell therapy company, has raised undisclosed capital in its Pre–Series A round led by Endiya Partners, Kotak Investment Advisors, Featherlite and angel investors.

The firm said it will use the investments to complete its manufacturing protocols and complete its preclinical studies for its planned IND submission.

The startup claims to have successfully developed an NK cell platform at laboratory scale coupled with agreements with CDMOs in India and the US. It has also secured exclusive licenses to a specialized CAR and related technologies to enable allogenic cell therapy, the first of its kind in India.

The funding winter turned India’s early-stage startups into investor favourites as growth and late-stage tech companies struggled to demonstrate solid metrics to qualify for further investments amid a global liquidity crunch. Going by an InnoVen Capital report, this trend led to overcooking of valuations with bigger deal sizes in the seed-to-Series A rounds in India.

“One out of two investors believe that early-stage companies were overvalued in 2022”, said the report, which spoke with 20 early-bird investors, including Blume Ventures, Better Capital, Omnivore, IAN Fund, Kae Capital, India Quotient and WaterBridge Ventures.

Respondents highlighted that higher activity levels in seed stage by large established venture capital firms (including Tier-1 VC seed programs) have driven up valuations and blurred the lines between Seed and Series A. Some of the Tier-1 VCs who run seed programs—Sequoia (Surge) and Accel (Atoms)—were among the top-5 most active early-stage investors in India last year.

After PhonePe pulled back from acquiring lending startup ZestMoney citing concerns raised during due diligence, the digital payments major is looking to strike a commercial agreement with the lending firm in lieu of an $18 million loan it had handed out to the cash-strapped company, the Economic Times reported.

As per the report, ZestMoney is also in discussions to raise separate equity capital from some of its existing investors, however, those talks are preliminary.

PhonePe’s move to purchase ZestMoney’s technology stack and hire 150 of the startup’s staff would help it expedite the launch of its own lending business, the report added.

Ride-hailing app Uber has announced the expansion of 'Reserve' facility across six more cities in India, giving riders an option to pre-book their rides 30 minutes to 90 days ahead of their travel.

Uber Reserve will now be available for cash payments offering riders access to pre-booked rides, it said in a statement.

The six new cities added are Kochi, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow and Guwahati.

Pilani Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development (PIED) Society, the technology business incubator at BITS Pilani that helps entrepreneurs curate the future of innovation, has collaborated with Microsoft to set up an incubation cell at the institute.

As a part of this collaboration, PIED and Microsoft have signed an MoU to foster startups and support entrepreneurs be future ready. The initiative is aimed at building the right skills and creating employment and entrepreneurship opportunities for entrepreneurs and start-ups at PIED Society with Microsoft’s skilling, certification, and mentorship support.

With this collaboration, startups at PIED Society will get exclusive access to Microsoft leadership and expert guidance, Azure influencers, and other start-up founders that can help to accelerate their growth. Along with this, the initiative will focus on providing access to Microsoft products and resources to students as well as educators with access to Azure community program and ongoing developer campaigns.

Online fashion brand Beyoung said it has clocked Rs 100 crore in revenue in the FY22-23. The brand aims to hit Rs 150 crore in FY23-24.

“Our primary focus has always been to provide affordable and trendy clothing for both men and women, and this milestone is a testament to our commitment to this goal,” said Shivam Soni, founder, and CEO, Beyoung.

The brand is looking expand its product offerings to include more categories and will also focus on increasing its omnichannel presence by opening more offline stores in this financial year.

Zerund, a Guwahati-based manufacturer of sustainable bricks, said it has clocked 410 percent in revenue year-on-year for FY22-23.

As per the company, it has sold 40,00,000 bricks to date, providing an eco-friendly solution to the construction industry, and has a very aggressive plan for this fiscal of taking this number to more than 80,00,000 bricks.

The firm added it is currently witnessing a Month-on-Month (MoM) growth rate of 20 percent. Last year, the company said it recycled over 1500+ tons of plastic waste and 10,000+ tons of industrial waste to manufacture its sustainable bricks.

EV startup Simple Energy has announced the launch of its electric two wheeler, Simple ONE on May 23, 2023, in Bengaluru.

The scooter, announced in 2021, was to be delivered in 2022 but was subsequently delayed to comply with new battery safety regulations.

“With the official confirmation on the launch of Simple ONE, we would also like to announce that we are the first OEM to comply with the Automotive Industry Standards (AIS) 156 amendment 3 that ensures greater battery safety. Simple ONE is now faster, improved on aesthetics, on battery systems and powertrains and offers unmatched safety,” said Suhas Rajkumar, Founder & CEO, Simple Energy.

Borzo, an intercity delivery service has expanded its services to eight new cities in India. With the addition of Amritsar, Guwahati, Jodhpur, Kota, Lucknow, Udaipur and Dehradun in its delivery fold, Borzo now caters to 22 cities in India.

With this move, the company aims to strengthen its hyperlocal delivery initiatives. Borzo intends to increase the volume of deliveries in India by 4X within the next two years with this expansion and believes hyperlocal will help achieve this target.

“While we will continue to focus on our core segment SMB and Enterprise, hyperlocal will allow us to penetrate a large pool of untapped customers in smart Tier II cities. Hyperlocal deliveries are not a new phenomena for us as we were performing deliveries in this segment, however our increased focus on this segment is part of our larger global strategy,” said Eugene Panfilov, General Manager, Borzo, India.

Microsoft beat Wall Street's estimates for quarterly revenue and profit on, driven by growth in its cloud computing and Office productivity software businesses, and the company said artificial intelligence products were stimulating sales.

Microsoft revenue rose 7% to $52.9 billion in the quarter ended March, inching past analyst estimates of $51.02 billion, according to Refinitiv.

Alphabet reported a slight dip in first-quarter ad sales from a year earlier to $54.55 billion, which nonetheless beat analyst estimates of $53.71 billion. It was the third such decline for the company since it went public in 2004, but was the second in a row following a fourth-quarter ad sales drop of 3.6%.

Those results and Microsoft's helped boost shares of Amazon, another major cloud operator, 4.8% in afterhours trading.

Twitter said it required users to take down over 6.5 million pieces of content in the first half of 2022, before the social media platform was taken over by billionaire Elon Musk, a 29% increase from the second half of 2021.

Twitter disclosed the number of content removals in a blog post on the same day the European Union said the social media platform would be among 19 tech companies subject to new landmark rules that require them to share data with authorities, do more to tackle disinformation and conduct external and independent auditing.

Failure to comply with the rules - some of the world's strictest regulations on online platforms - could result in fines of up to 6% of global revenue or even a ban from operating in the EU, according to the European Commission's website.

E-commerce and tech giant Alibaba's cloud computing division will cut prices for its products and services by up to 50% starting Wednesday, stepping up efforts to fight for a bigger slice of China's cloud market amid rising competition.

According to Alibaba Cloud's website, prices for elastic computing services - the ability to quickly expand or decrease processing - using Arm and Intel-based chips will drop by 15% to 20%, while services using Nvidia's V100 and T4 graphics processing units will drop between 41% to 47%.

The price cuts are one way for the company to attract more customers, said Zhang Yi, who tracks China's cloud computing sector at research firm Canalys, though their actual impact will depend on the specific services clients buy.

Britain will block Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of "Call of Duty" maker Activision Blizzard over its concerns it would hinder competition in cloud gaming, dealing an unexpected blow to the biggest-ever deal in gaming.

The country's antitrust regulator said on Wednesday that Microsoft's commitment to offer access to Activision's multi-billion dollar "Call of Duty" franchise to leading cloud gaming platforms would not effectively remedy its concerns.

Microsoft's president Brad Smith said in a statement the company remained fully committed to the acquisition and would appeal the decision, while Activision said it would "work aggressively" with Microsoft to reverse it.

Montana Governor Greg Gianforte is seeking to broaden a bill that will ban not just TikTok, but other social media applications that provide certain data to foreign adversaries, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Earlier this month, Montana lawmakers passed a bill, known as SB 419, to ban TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, from operating in the state.

TikTok as well as Apple and Google, which operate mobile app stores, would face fines if they violate the ban, should the bill become law.

OpenAI is introducing what one employee called an "incognito mode" for its hit chatbot ChatGPT that does not save users’ conversation history or use it to improve its artificial intelligence, the company said.

The San Francisco-based startup also said it planned a "ChatGPT Business" subscription with additional data controls.

The move comes as scrutiny has grown over how ChatGPT and other chatbots it inspired manage hundreds of millions of users’ data, commonly used to improve, or "train", AI.