Startup Digest: Ashneer Grover resigns as BharatPe MD & Director, BigBasket completes 5.8 Cr deliveries in 2021, & Google, Meta face penalties in Russia

Here are the top headlines from the startup space.

Ashneer Grover has resigned as Managing Director and Director of the Board of fintech firm BharatPe on Tuesday, March 1.

Embroiled in a boardroom battle after a spate of controversies, Grover's resignation comes days after the services of his wife Madhuri Jain Grover as head of controls were terminated on allegations of misappropriation of funds.

In a scathing letter of resignation to the board, Ashneer wrote, "I write this with a heavy heart as today I am being forced to bid adieu to a company of which I am a founder. I say with my head held high that today this company stands as a leader in the fintech world. Since the beginning of 2022, unfortunately, I’ve been embroiled in baseless and targeted attacks on me and my family by a few individuals who are ready not only to harm me and my reputation but also harm the reputation of the company, which ostensibly they are trying to protect."

Writing further in the resignation letter, Grover said, "From being celebrated as the face of Indian entrepreneurship and an inspiration to the Indian youth to build their own businesses, I am now wasting myself fighting a long, lonely battle against my own investors and management. Unfortunately, in this battle, the management has lost of what is actually at stake — BharatPe."

Earlier, Grover had lost an arbitration that he had filed against the company's investigation against him, with an emergency arbitrator holding that there was no ground to stop governance review at the fintech firm.

Infibeam Avenues, a listed fintech company, has acquired the payments-focused Uvik Technologies for Rs 75 crore in a cash and stock deal. Venture capital fund Season Two Ventures will get an exit through the deal, as per a statement.

Uvik is in the contactless payments space and has developed a technology that converts any smartphone into a payment device.

Bengaluru-based Uvik's co-founder and chief executive Rahul Hirve termed the deal as a strategic step for the company which will drive growth to the next level.

Tata Group-owned etailer BigBasket has announced that it completed 5.8 crore deliveries to the family of over 3 crore basketeers, and added 65 lakh new members to it in 2021.

The startup said this year it would be entering Tier 3 and 4 markets and making available products to customers through order-from-app-and-pick-up-at-the-store option.

Releasing its 2021 performance report, the company claimed it received 120 orders and onboarded 15 new customers every minute. The BigBasket users availed discounts worth Rs 2200 crores and 3.7 crores free home deliveries, it said.

The firm also forayed into offline retail with its integrated Fresho brand outlets. “We are aiming to expand our online portal’s coverage as well as the physical retail network to bring these regions under our coverage in 2022 and beyond,” said TK Balakumar, COO, BigBasket.

Through its Diversity & Inclusion initiative, the number of women working with the company has doubled from 2000 to 4000 in the last 18 months.

BigBasket also claims to have employed close to 700 differently abled people in their warehouses.

Handcrafted and customised foods brand, Nutreat Life has made its debut in the offline retail market with the opening of its first brick-and-mortar store in Bengaluru.

The store introduces the ‘Café Shop’ concept, wherein, people can hang out and have a hands-on experience with the products as well as shop all the healthy options available at Nutreat Store. The store is around 230 sq feet in area and has a seating area of about 8 people, it said in a statement.

As part of an expansion strategy to develop phygital channels and propel growth, the company intends to open more than 10 offline stores across India by the financial year 2023.

“After receiving a great response from Bangalore, Vizag and Mumbai, we have set a goal of doubling the number of stores by the end of this year,” said Jyothi Sri Pappu, Founder, Nutreat Life.

Rooter, a game streaming and Esports platform, has partnered with Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) team, Orange Rock Esports (OR Esports), as its official broadcast partner.

The two will join forces to offer Esports fans uninterrupted access to the hottest BGMI action. As sponsors, Rooter will also support exclusive streaming of their gaming events/tournaments on the platform and have its logo presence on all OR Esports merchandise and associated handles, the company said in a statement.

The deal will see each of OR Esports' BGMI roster of professional players, spanning multiple domestic esports titles, stream their gaming events on Rooter, starting March 1.

“OR Esports has already taken the Indian BGMI space by storm with their fiercely talented, playfully unpredictable crew of content creators, and living legends of Esports. Teaming up with them will help us build a fun, massive, and competitive community of streamers and influencers on our platform,” said Piyush Kumar, Founder, and CEO of Rooter.

AI-based advanced hiring platform, Instahyre, has announced its plans to grow to 3X in employee strength and increase revenue by 4X in the next year.

The expansion will be a part of the company’s strategic move to onboard 20,000 accounts from enterprises to mid-market SMBs, serving a candidate base of 80-90 million, it said.

Instahyre is a platform for technology and non-technology hiring for internet companies. It has launched pilots with Amazon, Walmart, Cargill, Freshworks and several enterprises and 120+ companies for 700+ drives to test its technology.

Hesa, a technology-enabled rural commerce platform, said it will onboard over 1.5 lakh microlevel entrepreneurs by the end of 2022.

The rural-tech startup will empower entrepreneurs across Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka and plans to expand into five additional States.

Hesaathis onboarded at Hesa will be in charge of the supply chain at a local level, facilitating village level mapping, surveys, campaigns, and promotions for the company’s brand partners, it said in a statement.

Hesaathis also help rural consumers with everyday transactions on the platform like utility bill payments, buying and selling of products across sectors and more

Established in 2020, the company today enables over 30,000 microlevel entrepreneurs (Hesaathi), allowing them to earn Rs 8,000 to Rs 12,000 income monthly.

The private equity and venture capital industry have become an increasingly significant part of economic activity across the world, yet female representation in the alternative investment industry continues to be amongst the lowest.

This issue is becoming more urgent in Asian markets, where the number of companies with PE/VC funding has risen sharply and will continue to do so in the next several years, as per a report released by WinPE in partnership with Boston Consulting Group.

Limited Partners (LPs) have also started asking questions about diversity, with many requiring periodic reporting on DEI from General Partners (GPs), the report added.

Titled, Closing the Gender Gap in Investing – how Indian PE/VC firms can bridge the diversity divide, the study claims that the representation of women in PE/VC firms grew from 16% in 2018 to 25% in 2021.

90% of women feel safe in voicing their opinion at work and 80% say they feel valued and heard, it added.

As per the report, initiatives to promote gender diversity broadly targets four areas:

Culture: Flexible working hours/locations and support for equal maternity/paternity benefits were rated as highly effective interventions by the women surveyed and offered by over half the firms surveyed. However, women need senior role models to feel more comfortable taking advantage of these initiatives and policies.

Recruitment: Increasing focus on recruiting women via a variety of initiatives was perceived to be highly effective.  Firms that are making progress in this dimension are doing so by widening the ‘top of the funnel’ – i.e., increasing the number of women they interview for entry-level roles, and widening the aperture to hire women laterally from adjacent industries for mid-to-senior level roles.

Advancement: According to the firms surveyed, the top reason for attrition of women was a life event such as maternity, with working hours and company culture not far behind. Active talent management for high-potential women and a conscious focus were cited as highly effective interventions to retain and support the advancement of women

Leadership: It is important to offer senior role models to women (within/ outside the geo or business) and it is critical for senior men to champion and jointly drive the gender diversity agenda within their firms.

Enhancing customer experience is the top business driver for Indian financial services organisations to implement AI.

A report by PwC-FICCI showed that 82 percent of the survey respondents say that they have deployed chatbots to make customer servicing easy.

65 percent of them have deployed fraud detection AI engines, making it the second most common use case in the FS industry, followed by 56 percent who have deployed virtual assistants, it added.

Improving productivity (57 percent) and increasing revenue (56 percent) were the other main goals for adopting AI.

34 percent of respondents said they had independent centres of excellence for AI-led innovation, followed by 21 percent who listed business units as the drivers of AI implementation in their organisations.

Google and Meta Platforms are among internet companies facing possible punitive measures in Russia after failing to open local offices and take other measures required by a communications law.

Russian legislation signed by President Vladimir Putin has obliged foreign social media companies with more than 500,000 daily users to open local offices since July 2021 or be subject to restrictions as severe as outright bans.

In November, state communications regulator Roskomnadzor listed 13 companies it wanted to set up officially on Russian soil and last month said it would start imposing restrictions by the end of February.

Ahead of Monday's deadline, only a few had complied. Russia's invasion of Ukraine last week has added to pressure on Western businesses to push back on Putin in any way possible.

The new rules also require companies to register with Russian communications regulator Roskomnadzor and have a system for fielding user complaints.

Netflix said that in the current circumstances it has no plans to add state-run channels to its Russian service, despite a regulation that would require the streaming service to distribute state-backed channels, Reuters reported.

"Given the current situation, we have no plans to add these channels to our service," said a Netflix spokesman in a statement, referring to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Politico first reported that Netflix, which launched its service in Russia in October 2020, would fall under the new Russian regulations requiring compliance on March 1.

The regulations, overseen by Russia's communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, require audiovisual services with more than 100,000 subscribers in that country to distribute 20 free-to-air news, sports and entertainment channels.

YouTube is blocking channels connected to Russian state-backed media outlets RT and Sputnik across Europe effective immediately, due to the situation in Ukraine, the company operated by Google, said.

"It'll take time for our systems to fully ramp up. Our teams continue to monitor the situation around the clock to take swift action," a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement seen by Reuters.

The company's actions follow that of Facebook parent Meta Platforms, which on Monday said it will restrict access to television network RT and news agency Sputnik on its platforms across the European Union.

Twitter has also said that it would label tweets containing contents from the Russian state-controlled media and reduce their visibility.

Ukraine said it had received donated Starlink satellite internet terminals from SpaceX, but an internet security researcher warned these could become Russian targets.

"Starlink — here. Thanks, @elonmusk," Ukraine's vice prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, tweeted, days after asking SpaceX's billionaire chief executive officer Elon Musk for help. Fedorov's tweet included a picture of the back of a military-looking truck, loaded with terminals.

Musk tweeted back, "You are most welcome".

The terminals look like home satellite television dishes and can provide relatively fast internet service, by residential standards, by connecting to a fleet of satellites in low orbit, as per Reuters.

Musk said on Saturday that Starlink is available in Ukraine and SpaceX is sending more terminals to the country, whose internet has been disrupted due to the Russian invasion.

The billionaire founder of gaming giant Nexon, Kim Jung-ju, has died at the age of 54, Reuters reported.

Tokyo-listed Nexon was founded by Kim in 1994 and became one of the biggest game developers and publishers, with hit online games such as MapleStory and KartRider.

"Kim Jung-ju, the director of NXC and founder of Nexon, passed away in the United States late last month," the company said. It said Kim "had been receiving treatment for depression and it seemed to have worsened recently" but did not elaborate on the cause of death.

Chinese search engine giant Baidu beat quarterly revenue Wall Street estimates on Tuesday powered by growth in its artificial intelligence (AI) cloud business.

Revenue grew to 33.09 billion yuan ($5.24 billion) for the fourth quarter to Dec. 31, beating the 32.22 billion forecast by analysts, IBES data from Refinitiv Eikon showed.

Revenue from Baidu's core businesses, which include search engine and AI cloud services, rose 12% to 25.98 billion yuan.

Advertising revenue grew 1% to 19.1 billion yuan, while non-ad revenue, mainly driven by AI cloud, jumped 63% to 6.9 billion yuan.

Baidu has also been doubling down on self-driving vehicles by leveraging the company's capabilities in artificial intelligence as it looks for alternative revenue streams to maintain its blistering pace of growth.