STARTUP DIGEST: Here're top updates of the day

This is the second large investment by Silver Lake in a Reliance Industries subsidiary after investing $1.35 billion or Rs. 10,200 crore in Jio Platforms for a 2.08 percent stake in two tranches earlier this year.

The central government has clarified on its move to ban popular online multiplayer battle royale game PUB-G and 117 other mobile applications.

Government sources tell CNBC-TV18 that the decision to ban PUB-G or for that matter other apps was not based solely on their beneficial ownership. The clarification came after South Korea-based PUB-G Corporation, in a bid to resurrect its fortunes in India decided to no longer authorise the franchise to China-based Tencent Games.

Dailyhunt, a local language content discovery platform officially jumped onto the short-video app bandwagon and announced the launch of its app 'Josh’ on September 9. During 45 days of its beta phase, Dailyhunt claimed that Josh roped in over 200 A-rated exclusive creators and 4 music labels which include the likes of T-Series, Sony, Zee Music and Divo Music.

Exclusive creators include TikTok’s biggest names like Faisal Shaikh (Mr Faisu) and his Team 07 pals, Sameeksha Sud and her Teen Tigada counterparts, Bhavin Bhanushali and Vishal Pandey.

Video Customer Experience Platform Hippo Video raises $4.5m in Series A round led by Alpha Wave Incubation and Exfinity Venture Partners. Existing investors Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, and KAE Capital also participated in this round.

This latest round of funds will be used to propel the company to expand its GTM teams as well as ramp up the engineering team. As part of this investment from AWI, Hippo Video will expand its presence to Abu Dhabi and use the Emirate as a strong global base for international expansion while also targeting the GCC, MENA, and other global markets. Hippo Video also plans to build a world-class team of data scientists, product managers, and engineers located in Abu Dhabi.

Health-tech company ConnectedH raises an undisclosed seed amount in funding from venture capital First Cheque, Rohit MA, Founder, Cloudnine Hospitals, PointOne Capital and other investors.

The other investors in the funding round include Ajeet Singh Kushwaha (Founder, Seekify); Ankur Pahwa (Partner, E&Y); Anurag Mehrotra (President & MD, Ford India); Bharanidharan Viswanathan & Nitin Mathur (Founders of 91mobiles); Harsh Pokharna and Gaurav Kumar (Co-Founders, Okcredit); Kishore Ganji; Kunal Khatter (Managing Director, AdvantEdge in personal capacity); Sprout Investments; Umang Kumar (Founder, Gaadi.com); and Vivek Shah (MD, Investment Banking, Haitong).

The funding will be used to expand the brand’s geographical presence and integrate it deeper into the diagnostics ecosystem. It will also be used to widen their value offerings for diagnostic centers thereby making them a one-stop solution for all their marketing and operations needs.

Full stack platform for buying and selling used cars Spinny will offer its women employees 12 days of Menstrual Leave. The startup has modified its HR policies to cover Work from Home and Family Adoption.

Regarding the Work From Home policy, Spinny had declared WFH until 31 December 2020 except for staff members that are involved in field operations. The venture claims, for field operations teams, all sanitization and social distancing norms are undertaken to ensure safety during home test drives and home deliveries – the latter equally important in offering safe experiences for customers.

Ecommerce platform flipkart has on boarded over 50,000 kiranas partners in preparation for the festive season and the Big Billion Days. The homegrown e-commerce player has expanded its kirana onboarding program to make deliveries to customers in more than 850 cities.

The kirana program has been further expanded to remote and far away cities across the country including places such as Tinsukia (Assam), Agartala (Tripura) and Kannur (Kerala) and number of kiranas joining the program have doubled since last year

Data access infra company Hasura raises $25 million in series B funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners (US) with participation from existing investors Vertex Ventures US, Nexus Venture Partners, Strive VC and SAP.iO Fund and new angel investors including John Thomspon, the current chairman of Microsoft.

With this new funding Hasura plans to accelerate its hiring and investment in its open source and commercial product development to support users.

Hasura now supports three of the most popular database technologies as it has added GraphQL support for MySQL and early access support for SQL Server to its existing support for PostgreSQL.

SoftBank Group Corp shaved off $13 billion from its market capitalisation as investors fret about the conglomerate’s exposure to sliding U.S. tech stocks.The fall takes SoftBank’s share decline to 10% since sources told Reuters and other media late last week that the Japanese company made big bets on equity derivatives tied to tech firms.

Apple, on September 8, announced that it would be hosting an online-only event on September 15. The Apple event on September 15 has been titled 'Time Flies', where we can expect the Apple Watch Series 6 launch alongside the much-rumoured iPad Air. Although unlikely, Apple could also surprise us and give more details on the iPhone 12 launch event.

The 'Time Flies' Apple Event on September 15 is scheduled to begin at 10 am PDT/ 10.30 pm IST. Like always, viewers can watch the Apple event on the company’s official website and on its YouTube channel.

Google has rolled out Android 11 to Pixel devices. The latest Android 11 has received a bunch of new features focusing on improving the user experience while ensuring better privacy standards.

Google has also made the Android 11 preview update available for select Oppo, Realme, OnePlus and Xiaomi devices.

The new version of Android is host to a lot of new features with the focus primarily being on conversations, privacy, and media controls.

Android 11 is also bringing chat bubbles, something similar to Facebook Messenger.