Startup Digest: Delhivery may delay planned IPO, Curefoods merges with Maverix, Ola to invest $100 mn in setting-up an automotive design centre in UK

Cloud kitchen aggregator Curefood has announced its merger with Maverix,a foodtech player. Following the merger, Curefoods’ market presence will increase to 125 kitchens across 12 cities catering to over 10 cuisines.

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It will also get brands from Maverix such as the Great Indian Khichdi – one of India’s largest khichdi brands, Canteen Central – a multi-cuisine quick snack brand and Home Plate – an affordable home food offering, the firm said in a statement.

Maverix operates over 50 outlets across Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. This merger is a significant step for Curefoods in continuation of its mission to build a powerhouse of food brands in India that will cater to varying consumer demands across geographies, said the company in a statement.

"At Curefoods we are on an ambitious path to build the strongest food brands in the market with a digital-first strategy. Maverix is one such company with significant experience and market know-how and has also created stellar food brands that are recognized and loved in key markets.

Together, we now have the largest manufacturing capability in the fresh food space. We are confident that our combined growth and stronger-than-ever platform will numerously benefit our consumers on their quest for the best food options in India,” said Ankit Nagori, founder, Curefoods.

Curefoods recently had acquired 5 food brands – Juno’s Pizza, Cupcake Noggins, Iceberg, Nomad Pizzas, and White Kitchens. It also closed a funding round raising $62 million from Iron Pillar, Chiratae Ventures, Sixteenth Street, Accel Partners, and Binny Bansal.

Japanese home medical support company Human Life Management has acquired a 100 percent stake in-home healthcare platform Care24. HLM has been a prime investor in Care24 for the past two years and claims to hold multiple businesses in healthcare and other sectors. Care24 will extend its robust service delivery and agile technology platform for HLM and will cater to the evolving healthcare needs of the customers, the company said in a statement.

Post the deal, HLM and Care24 will closely work together to scale and strengthen medical service offerings in India and additionally expand to other southeast countries like Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia using HLM’s medical expertise and Care24’s software development and technology capabilities, the firm added.

HLM also plans to roll out additional medical services for Care24 in India, including end-of-life care, critical care at home, family doctor subscription service, doctor on call, care plan execution, and doctor training, as well as training materials.

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While Care24 will expand its service offerings across multiple states in India, HLM and Care24 will begin operations internationally under the label of "Care24 international", in aforesaid countries through a JV with a local medical service provider.

Mobility giant Ola has announced the setting up of a global centre for advanced engineering and vehicle design in Coventry, the UK with an investment of $100 million. The development comes just two days after the company teased an image of an electric concept car.

According to the company, Ola Electric will invest more than $100 million over the next 5 years into the state-of-the-art centre and will employ over 200 designers and automotive engineers. The centre will also partner with a world-class education and research institutions in the UK to collaborate on technology research and development, the company added.

"Ola Futurefoundry will enable us to tap into the fantastic automotive design and engineering talent in the UK to create the next generation of electric vehicles. Futurefoundry will work in close collaboration with our headquarters in Bangalore, India to help us build the future of mobility as we make EVs affordable across the world," Bhavish Aggarwal, founder & CEO, Ola said.

Ola Electric recently raised over $200 million (about Rs 1,490.5 crore) from Tekne Private Ventures, Alpine Opportunity Fund, Edelweiss and others, valuing the electric vehicle maker at $5 billion.

Fintech company for merchants BharatPe said it has witnessed 200 percent growth in annualised transaction value to $4 billion (about Rs 30,078 crore) from its POS business over the last 12 months. The Point of Sale (POS) business - BharatSwipe - now contributes about 25 percent to the overall payments Transaction Processed Value (TPV) of the company, a statement said.

BharatPe has ramped up the reach of its POS business by 25X to over 250 cities in the last 12 months and since the launch in the second half of 2020, the company has deployed more than 1.25 lakh BharatSwipe machines across offline shops, it added.

"The phenomenal growth can be attributed to the expansion of the company's POS business in non-metro cities, with more than 50 percent of BharatSwipe machines being deployed in tier II/tier III towns and cities since 2021,” the company’s statement said.

In August last year, BharatPe announced a strategic partnership with Axis Bank. As a part of the association, Axis Bank became the acquiring bank for BharatPe's POS business and enables the acceptance of credit and debit cards for merchants associated with BharatPe.

BharatPe will continue to ramp up strategic partnerships with banks, financial institutions, and brands with the objective of enhancing the customer experience on its POS devices, the statement said. The company targets to reach $30 billion TPV on payments through both QR and Swipe by March 2023, it added.

Kunal Shah-led fintech platform CRED app has introduced CRED Store, which will be a zero-commission platform. The listing fees for onboarding and commissions from any sale will be waived off for all brand partners in the platform, said the company in a statement.

In addition, the CRED Store will offer features like exclusive bank offers and benefits for members, engaging fun and social formats. For instance, auctions, leaderboards will also be introduced to help brands create better engagement, the firm added.

CRED Store, which was piloted in 2020, is a curated, member-exclusive selection of products and experiences at special prices. The company said that the store has a presence of more than 600 Indian D2C and global brands and over 5,000 products.

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CRED also plans to help the brands and will work with partners to provide them insights that will help them grow their business. Some of the brands which are present on the app include The Man Company, Man Matters, The Moms Co, Pee Safe among others.

The company currently claims to have over 9.5 million users. CRED has raised over $700 million so far and is backed by marquee investors like Tiger Global, DST Global, Sofina, Dragoneer Investment Corp and Steadfast Capital management to name a few.

US-based CommerceIQ, an e-commerce management platform has announced its foray into India in a bid to capitalize on the growing $5 trillion global e-commerce boom. To service the Indian market, CommerceIQ has tweaked its algorithmic components to optimally respond to shoppers’ behavior on local retailers like Amazon and added support for local websites like Flipkart.

The company is also building out its customer success, sales, and marketing team in-country to support the expansion, it said in a statement. As per the company, augmented by the pandemic, the Indian e-commerce industry is set to expand by 84% to reach $111 billion by 2024.

“It is our mission to help our customers capture their consumers at the point of purchase, regardless of geography or retail channel. The Indian e-commerce market is exploding, and we intend to deliver the same results to regional operators here as we have for our customers based in the US. Whether in India or elsewhere, the challenges are the same – keeping up with the world of algorithmic retail through retail-aware, automated decision-making,” said Guru Hariharan, CEO, and Founder of CommerceIQ.

Based in California, CommerceIQ has raised $81 million to date and has over 2500 brands that use its technology daily to increase the share of voice, pump up incremental sales and enhance profitability. The technology behind CommerceIQ’s platform has been developed out of CommerceIQ’s Bengaluru facilities. CommerceIQ supports global brands such as Kellogg’s, Mondelez International, Nestle, Whirlpool, and Colgate, Johnson & Johnson, and others in adopting algorithmic retail.

GetSetUp, a virtual community for older adults has launched a GetSetUp Startup Accelerator Programme. Anyone above 55 years of age with a business idea in food, arts and crafts, apparel and accessories, or coaching categories can apply, the company said in a statement. The GetSetUp community has over 4 million monthly members in 160 countries, including a million from India.

GetSetUp will select 20 participants for the programme and participants will partake in a demo day to present their final business or service to a team of three experts. Two business ideas will be selected for financial support at the end of the programme, it added.

For the first cohort of entrepreneurs in 2022, GetSetUp is accepting applicants in four categories — food and food-related businesses, training and coaching ideas, apparel and accessories business ideas (like starting an online store), and arts and crafts.

School edtech unicorn Lead has elevated chief commercial officer Ritwik Khare as the chief operation officer (COO) of the firm. This move comes after Khare helped achieve a series of successes towards driving sales and spearheading the revenue function of the company, it said in a statement.

In his new role, Ritwik will take the lead in providing a unified customer experience to LEAD’s partner schools and ensure to deliver learning outcomes for students by bringing in synergy between the company’s Academic Excellence and Commercial teams, the edtech major added.

Edtech startup Geekster to upskill 1000+ aspirants in next two quarters

Geekster, an edtech startup focused on providing technical education to aspirants is targeting to upskill over 1,000 students in the next two quarters under Full Stack Web Development Programme.

The brand has so far already trained close to 300 aspirants under the course. Over 250+ aspirants out of the total trained, have already got placed with reputed corporates, the firm said in a statement.

The company recently expanded its manpower by 50 percent. The new target from the brand comes in line with the recent hiring, wherein now it is aiming to upskill a larger batch.

Mithila Palkar has been roped in as the brand ambassador of vegan & cruelty-free beauty and personal care brand Plum. The actresses will appear in the brand's campaigns across digital media.

On being the brand's first ambassador, Palkar said, "I deeply resonate with the philosophy of the brand and their unique approach towards creating products which are truly good for your skin. In Plum, I have found my partner, which provides an authentic, dependable, efficacious, and delightful experience in skincare."

Sound-based proximity communication and payments service provider ToneTag has collaborated with Elocity, an electric vehicle (EV) charging solutions platform. Through this strategic partnership, EV drivers with any mobile phone can now pay easily at Elocity HIEVTM and ToneTag enabled EV charging stations, irrespective of their location or network availability, the company said in a statement.

ToneTag claims to have completed over 52 million consumer transactions and this strategic partnership with Elocity, will contribute hugely to speeding EV adoption. The technology will be especially beneficial in rural areas and underground parking garages where online payments and network connectivity are challenging. This technology will be first offered in the Indian EV charging market and quickly scaled globally, the firm added.

Job and professional networking platform apna.co, said it became India’s biggest ‘breakout app’ in the business category in 2021, referring to a recent report by mobile data and analytics platform App Annie.

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apna.co achieved the highest absolute growth by downloads in 2021, according to the report by the mobile app analytics firm. The State of Mobile 2022 report highlights job-seeking to be among the top category for mobile users around the world.

As per the report, apna achieved 17.8 million more downloads in 2021 than it did in 2020. The platform is the most downloaded app globally after Whatsapp Business in the business category. In 2021 alone apna enabled more than 250 million interviews and professional conversations. The platform also expanded its presence to 50 plus cities in India.

On average, apna users spent more than 1.2 million hours per week (all users combined) on the platform looking for jobs, engaging in peer-to-peer professional conversations, creating content, and building their networks, the report added. Currently, apna has more than 22 million users, 2,00,000 plus employer partners and has been enabling 18 million interviews and 35 million professional conversations monthly.

Ride-hailing apps like Uber, Ola and Rapido collect extensive information about their users. On average, these apps collect 14 data points per user and 30 percent of them use it for "Third-Party advertising", according to a study conducted by cybersecurity company Surfshark.

The report highlighted that while SoftBank-backed Ola is at the sixth position in the global data-hungriness ranking with a total of 18 data points collected, Indian bike-taxi aggregator Rapido collects the least amount of data in the ranking.

The data showed GrabTaxi, Yandex Go, and Uber as the most data-hungry carpooling apps in the world. GrabTaxi ranks 1st on the list and collects 27 out of 32 possible data points listed by Apple, including contact, financial, location information, and user content (photos, video, audio, etc.).

Widely popular in Central Asia and countries like Russia, second on the list is Yandex Go, followed by the most popular ride-hailing app across most of the world, Uber. Together with Lyft (ranks 7th), Uber is the only ride-hailing app that additionally collects sensitive user information, which might include race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, childbirth information, and even biometric data, the study claimed.

The company that owns the WeTransfer file service is cancelling its initial public offering (IPO), Europe's first prominent tech flotation of the year, citing volatile market conditions, Reuters reported.

WeRock, best known for the WeTransfer file transfer service, had planned a Jan. 28 flotation on Amsterdam's Euronext that would have valued the company at between 629 million and 716 million euros ($714 million-813 million).

It said in a statement that it had made the decision to cancel the listing "despite substantial investor interest". It will continue "pursuing our strategy and continuing our growth trajectory", chief executive Gordon Willoughby added. Before cancelling its listing, which was to have included both a primary and secondary share offer, WeRock had slightly scaled back ambitions for the valuation of a part of it.

Facebook unit WhatsApp has been given until the end of February to explain changes to its privacy policy and whether this complies with EU consumer protection laws after complaints from consumer groups, Reuters reported.

The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) and eight of its members took their grievances to the EU executive and the European network of consumer authorities, saying WhatsApp was unfairly pressuring users to accept its new privacy policy which allows it to share some data with Facebook and other group firms.

EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders said he shared the worries and has asked WhatsApp to clarify the policy and if it complies with EU consumer protection law. "WhatsApp has until the end of February to come back to us with concrete commitments on how they will address our concerns," he said in a statement.

Areas of concern include whether the company provides sufficient information about its new terms of service and if its notifications prompting users to accept the new terms and privacy policy are fair. The Commission said it was also concerned about the exchange of users' personal data between WhatsApp and third parties or other Facebook/Meta companies.

"We look forward to explaining to the European Commission how we protect our users' privacy in compliance with our obligations under EU law," a WhatsApp spokesperson said.

Facebook has secured EU antitrust approval for its acquisition of US customer service startup Kustomer after agreeing to provide rivals free access to its messaging channels for 10 years.

The European Commission said the pledge addressed competition concerns. Reuters reported last month that the world's largest social network would gain conditional EU clearance for the deal.

"Our decision today will ensure that innovative rivals and new entrants in the customer relationship management software market can effectively compete," EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.

Kustomer, which sells CRM software to businesses so they can communicate with consumers by phone, email, text messages, WhatsApp, Instagram and other channels, would help Facebook scale up its instant messaging app WhatsApp, which has seen usage soar during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Apple is planning a new service that will allow small businesses to accept payments directly on their iPhones without any extra hardware such as Square's payment terminals, Bloomberg News reported.

Currently, retailers can accept payments on an iPhone by using payment terminals connected to their iOS devices through Bluetooth, a method used by Block’s Square payment systems.

The new feature turns the iPhone itself into a payment terminal and will let merchants accept payments with the tap of a credit card or another iPhone onto the back of their device, the report added.

Apple has been working on the new feature since around 2020, the report said, when it paid about $100 million for Mobeewave, a Canadian startup, that developed technology for smartphones to accept payments with the tap of a credit card.

The system will likely use the iPhone's near field communications chip currently used for Apple Pay, the report said, adding that the feature may roll out through a software update in the coming months.

The company has been beefing up its fintech services. It launched its own credit card with Goldman Sachs in 2019 and is reportedly working on a "buy, pay later" service.

Tesla has forecast that vehicle deliveries would comfortably grow by more than 50% year-over-year in 2022 despite persistent supply chain issues that it expects to be alleviated only next year, Reuters reported.

The upbeat outlook from CEO Elon Musk came after the world's most valuable automaker posted record quarterly revenue that beat Wall Street expectations. But the cautious note about supply chain woes showed that even Tesla cannot avoid the shortages that were pitfalls for many larger automakers last year.

Tesla, which produced a few cars at its Berlin and Texas factories last year, said scaling up production there would depend on supply chain headwinds and the successful introduction of new technologies.

Musk said that Tesla would not roll out new models this year but hopefully would launch its Cybertruck, Semi and Roadster next year. Tesla said it is not currently working on a $25,000 model that Musk promised in 2020 would launch in three years.

Revenue rose to $17.72 billion in the fourth quarter, above analyst estimates for $16.57 billion, according to IBES data from Refinitiv. Tesla has fared better than most automakers in managing supply chain issues by using less scarce chips and quickly re-writing software. The automaker last quarter handed over a record number of vehicles to customers despite supply chain headwinds.

"We still expect to be partly or primarily chip limited this year," Musk said during a conference call, saying that chip limitations should be alleviated next year.

He said Tesla's volume growth would comfortably exceed 50% from last year, meaning that Tesla expects to deliver more than 1.4 million vehicles this year.

Tesla said the goal would be achievable even with current factories at Fremont, California, and Shanghai. Tesla said its Texas factory will this quarter deliver its first vehicles equipped with its next-generation 4680 batteries made in California as planned.

Musk said he expected Tesla's vehicles to achieve full self-driving capability this year. Currently humans are required to sit behind the wheel to drive the car if needed.

Renault and Nissan will work more closely together to make electric cars, they said on Thursday, as they detailed a $26 billion investment plan over the next five years to stay competitive in the switch to cleaner driving.

As per Reuters, the two-decade-old alliance, which also includes Mitsubishi Motors, said it would increase the number of common platforms for electric vehicles (EV) to five from four. They will build a combined EV line-up of 35 vehicles by 2030, the companies said, adding that by 2026 four-fifths of their models would share common platforms, up from 60 percent now.

Asked whether the EV spending plan was enough, given it is only around half what Germany's Volkswagen AG plans to invest in the technology, Renault Chief Financial Officer Clotilde Delbos said it was "sufficient," given the alliance's past experience in making EVs.

CoinTracker, which tracks consumers' cryptocurrency taxes and portfolios has raised $100 million in funding from a slew of institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals, as per a Reuters report. The investment puts the company's valuation at $1.3 billion.

The funding round was led by venture capital firm Accel, according to a statement from CoinTracker, with investors such as Initialized Capital, General Catalyst, Y Combinator Accuity, and Seven Seven Six, the venture firm of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, also participating.

The funds will be used to expand the company's personnel, maintain coverage of exchanges, blockchains, and other crypto sectors, as well as to scale customer support and content, CoinTracker said in its statement.

Fireblocks, a digital asset infrastructure provider has raised $550 million from institutional investors, making it one of the largest financing rounds in the cryptocurrency sector in the last few years.

The latest investment valued the company at $8 billion. The funding was led by D1 Capital Partners and Spark Capital, with participation from investors such as General Atlantic, Altimeter, Index Ventures, and CapitalG, Alphabet's growth fund.

"We're going to use the capital for further investment into new use cases in the digital asset space such as decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens, gaming, entertainment, and music," Michael Shaulov, Fireblocks chief executive officer told Reuters in a phone interview.