Startup Digest: Apple to sell made-in-India iPhones on launch day: Report, US takes on Google in much-anticipated antitrust trial & more

Fintech platform Razorpay has acquired digital invoicing and customer engagement startup BillMe. The partnership aims at empowering businesses with a hybrid model to engage better with end consumers, according to a release.

“We will together enable a large base of offline retail brands to enjoy the best of both worlds, grow faster, and get seamless access to omnichannel payment solutions,” Razorpay Managing Director and Co-founder Shashank Kumar said.

This is the fintech's eighth acquisition, and first since its foray into omnichannel payments with the acquisition of end-to-end digital payments company Ezetap in August 2022.

Lenskart-backed House of brands startup Neso Brands, has acquired a stake in Le Petit Lunetier, an omnichannel eyewear brand based in Paris, for $4 million. The percentage of the acquired stake remains undisclosed.

The equity investment will be used to accelerate Le Petit Lunetier’s retail expansion and solidify its brand presence in Europe, as well as introduce the brand to Lenskart’s core markets in Asia and the Middle East, a statement said.

Neso CEO and co-founder Bjorn Bergstrom and fellow co-founder Peyush Bansal – who is also the CEO of Lenskart Group – will join the board of Le Petit Lunetier.

Social tech platform 1Bridge had acquired technology assets of eSamudaay, a startup that creates local ecommerce networks in smaller towns.

With this deal, the company aims to bring rural micro-entrepreneurs on a platform integrated with Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), to enable seamless digital commerce. ESamudaay’s co-founder and CTO Ravinder Singh Mahori has transitioned to 1Bridge as CTO.

1Bridge also announced an equity funding of Rs 4 crore from C4D Partners, Sudhanva Dhananjaya Family Office and other angel investors in a bridge round, as a run-up to its larger Series A capital raise of Rs 40 crore.

Temasek-backed venture capital firm Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India has raised $541 million in its fifth fund. The VC firm has exceeded the target size of $450 million for the VVSEAI Fund V, which is 80 percent larger than the $305 million fourth fund it raised in 2019.

The new fund has come on the heels of strong cash-on-cash returns from its portfolio. Vertex’s exits include Grab, FirstCry, XpressBees, and Recko, among several others, a statement said.

The fund corpus includes a dedicated co-investment envelope of $50 million for partnering with the parent fund in women-led startups.

Global vertical SaaS logistics platform, Kale has bagged $30 million in its Series B funding round led by Creaegis Advisors LLP, a digital and tech focused private equity fund.

According to the company, the fresh capital will be used for scaling-up and deployment of Kale’s new-age Cargo Community Systems in key geographies such as North America and Europe, facilitating seamless, and paperless cross-border trade.

Prior to this, Kale had earlier raised a $5 million Series A investment from Inflexor Ventures in 2021.

Decentralised crypto exchange (DEX) Brine Fi has raised $16.5 million in its Series A funding round led by Pantera Capital, at a post-money valuation of $100 million.

The round also saw participation from Elevation Capital, Starkware, Spartan Group, Goodwater Capital, Upsparks Ventures, Protofund Ventures and angel investors.

The fresh investment comes weeks after Brine Fi debuted its orderbook platform which, is processing monthly volumes of $300 million and is ranked among the top 10 DEXs globally, the firm said in a statement.

Hygiene and wellness brand Pee Safe on Tuesday said it has raised $3 million as part of a funding round led by pharmaceutical company Natco Pharma and Rainmatter Health, supported by Zerodha founders Nithin Kamath and Nikhil Kamath.

Alkemi Growth Capital, an existing investor, also participated in the round. The company has partially closed the Series B round, receiving $3 million out of the total round size of $6 million.

“This funding will accelerate our expansion efforts and establish us as the leading brand in the rapidly growing intimate wellness sector,” said Pee Safe Founder and CEO Vikas Bagaria.

Wogom, a cloud-based platform for the distribution and retailer ecosystem, has raised $1.9 million in a funding round from a clutch of undisclosed family offices and angel investors.

As per the firm, the money was raised in 2 tranches – $600,000 a couple of months earlier and $1.3 million in the current round.

The funding will be used for market expansion beyond Gujarat, investment in its technology stack as well and product development, the startup said in a statement.

Online food delivery platform Swiggy has launched ‘Learning Station’, a digital learning academy to support restaurant partner growth.

Integrated into the Swiggy partner app, Learning Station provides a wide variety of courses tailored to support restaurant partners in their journey. The content is curated to meet the specific learning needs of restaurant partners at different stages of their engagement with Swiggy, a statement said.

It delivers short, simple, engaging, and easy-to-understand content in audio-visual formats. This content focuses on utilizing tech tools, leveraging data for business growth, and mastering various aspects of restaurant operations, it added.

Healthcare AI company Qure.ai has announced 510(k) FDA clearance for its AI-enabled chest X-ray solution – qXR, under two critical findings.

According to the company, qXR has now been cleared to triage pneumothorax (PTX) and pleural effusion (PE), which present severe challenges in emergency rooms and intensive care units (ICUs). The newest clearance is an addition to the firm’s existing FDA-cleared product portfolio that includes qXR-BT for breathing tube placement, qER for emergency room head CT scans, and qER-Quant for head CT quantification software.

Designed to integrate seamlessly into current healthcare pathways, qXR can improve ICU & ER workflows, furthering Qure’s mission to expedite and enhance patient care, it added.

Apple plans to make the India-built iPhone 15 available in the South Asian country and some other regions on the global sales debut day, Bloomberg News reported. While the vast majority of iPhone 15s will come from China, that would be the first time a latest generation, India-assembled device is available on the first day of sale.

Apple is set to introduce the iPhone 15, updated watches and AirPods at a gala event at its US headquarters. Sales of new products begin typically around 10 days after the unveiling.

The iPhone made up more than half of Apple's $394.3 billion in sales last year, but it faces new challenges with selling in China, the Cupertino, California firm's third-largest market. Apple's latest phones are expected to have new charging ports, titanium cases and cameras, but their debut at its Apple Park headquarters will come as the Chinese government has expanded some restrictions on using iPhones.

The United States will argue on Tuesday that Google did not play by the rules in its efforts to dominate online search, as a trial seen as a battle for the soul of the internet gets underway before a federal judge in Washington.

The US Justice Department is expected to detail how Google paid billions of dollars annually to device makers like Apple, wireless companies like AT&T and browser makers like Mozilla to keep Google's search engine atop the leader board.

Google in its defense will argue that its overwhelmingly high market share is not because it broke the law, but because it is a fast, effective search engine. It is also free. Consumers, Google's lawyers will argue, can delete the Google app from their devices or simply type Microsoft's Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo into a browser to use an alternative search engine. They will argue that consumers stick with Google because they rely on it to answer questions and are not disappointed.

EU antitrust regulators are asking Microsoft's rivals and customers whether they are affected by the US tech giant's remedies to try to secure the UK competition agency's approval for its $69 billion buy of Activision Blizzard, as per a Reuters report.

Microsoft last month offered to sell its cloud streaming rights to Ubisoft Entertainment after the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) blocked the biggest gaming deal in history.

The European Commission had cleared the deal in May after Microsoft agreed to license popular Activision games such as "Call of Duty" to rival game streaming platforms. The EU offer did not include the Ubisoft deal.

Adobe, IBM, Nvidia and five other firms have signed President Joe Biden's voluntary commitments governing artificial intelligence, which requires steps such as watermarking AI-generated content, the White House said.

The original commitments, which were announced in July, were aimed at ensuring that AI's considerable power was not used for destructive purposes. Google, OpenAI and OpenAI partner Microsoft signed onto the commitments in July.

"The president has been clear: harness the benefits of AI, manage the risks, and move fast – very fast," White House chief of staff Jeff Zients said in a statement. "And we are doing just that by partnering with the private sector and pulling every lever we have to get this done."

A group of US authors, including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, has sued OpenAI in federal court in San Francisco, accusing the Microsoft-backed program of misusing their writing to train its popular artificial intelligence-powered chatbot ChatGPT.

Chabon, playwright David Henry Hwang and authors Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder and Ayelet Waldman said in their lawsuit on Friday that OpenAI copied their works without permission to teach ChatGPT to respond to human text prompts.

The lawsuit is at least the third proposed copyright-infringement class action filed by authors against Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Companies, including Microsoft, Meta Platforms and Stability AI, have also been sued by copyright owners over the use of their work in AI training.

TikTok has officially rolled out its e-commerce business in the United States after months of testing, according to a blog post on Tuesday, as its Chinese-owner ByteDance looks to capitalize on the popularity of the social media app.

TikTok is bringing online shopping through a series of features on its main app and is hoping to replicate the success of Asian platforms Shein and PDD Holdings' Temu.

TikTok's more than 150 million users in the US will now be able to see videos and live streams with links to purchase items on their feed, as it offers tools to content creators, brands, and merchants to create shoppable content.

New Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu has told staff the tech giant's two main strategic focuses going forward will be "user first" and "AI-driven", according to an internal letter reviewed by Reuters.

Wu, who sent the letter on Tuesday, his third day in the top job, also said Alibaba would focus on promoting young employees, specifically citing those born after 1985, to form the core of its business management teams within the next four years.

The new CEO, one of Alibaba Group's founders and long-time lieutenant of former chief Jack Ma, is laying out his strategic priorities at a key moment for Alibaba, which is undergoing the biggest organisational restructure of its 24-year history.

Silicon Valley battery startup Lyten has raised $200 million in new funding as it looks to scale up manufacturing of lithium-sulfur EV batteries, lightweight composites and sensors.

The latest funding, led by venture capital firm Prime Movers Lab, takes the total equity investment in Lyten to more than $410 million.

The company in May received an investment from Stellantis to help the carmaker simplify its supply chain and pursue greener technology for EVs.