Startup Digest: Koo says laid off 15 employees: Report, Flipkart launches hotel booking feature & Matrimony.com launches app for LGBTQIA+ community

Homegrown micro-blogging platform Koo said that it has laid off 15 employees, or 5 percent of its workforce, and not 40 as earlier reported in the media.

In a fresh statement to IANS, the Twitter rival said that 15 positions "have been made redundant or removed due to performance issues".

"This is completely aligned with the industry standards of hiring and retrenchment. At the same time, Koo continues to hire talent in its monetisation, product and engineering team,” a company spokesperson told IANS. The additional hires, said Koo, will help it gear up for the next phase of growth and monetisation.

Ecommerce marketplace Flipkart has forayed into the hospitality sector with the launch of a new hotel-booking feature — Flipkart Hotels — on its platform to bolster its offerings in the travel sector.

The platform said Flipkart Hotels will allow customers to book hotel rooms across 3 lakh domestic and international hotels. Backed by Cleartrip's API, Flipkart Hotels will benefit from Cleartrip's deep understanding of travel customers and sectors.

"With Flipkart Hotels, we are strengthening our commitment to provide a better experience and superior service to our customers across metros and beyond tiers. With our banking partner's financial offerings, the customers will unlock great value in this segment and enhance Flipkart's capabilities as a preferred one-stop shop for the travel booking needs of Indian customers," said Adarsh Menon, Senior Vice President, Flipkart.

The company said, with the launch of hotel services, it aims to offer its customers a host of affordable benefits, including flexible travel and booking-related policies, easy EMI options, among others to make travel affordable, and budget-friendly options, among others.

Payments aggregator Paytm distributed 6 million loans during July-August 2022, it said in its business update. On a year-on-year basis, that growth translates to 246 percent. The value of these loans stood at Rs 4,517 crore ($568 million), a growth of 484 percent from last year.

Merchant payments volumes or gross merchandise value (GMV) for the two months grew 72 percent year-on-year to Rs 2.10 lakh crore or $26 billion. Paytm defines GMV as the value of total payments made to merchants through app transactions or payment instruments or solutions.

The company's Super App continues to see increased engagement levels, according to the company. The average monthly transacting user or MTU for the two months grew 40 percent from last year to 78.8 million.

Startup ecosystem enabler T-Hub has signed an agreement with SucSEED Indovation, a venture capital angel fund, to promote innovation, increase funding and assess investment options for deep tech startups.

The two entities will collaborate to mentor, promote, incubate, and help deep tech startups by holding masterclasses and workshops, a statement said.

“The Indian deep-tech ecosystem has matured significantly in recent years. However, to keep up the momentum, these startups require funds and strong mentorship, and together with SucSEED, we will unlock scaling opportunities for them. T-Hub, through these partnerships, envisions making the connection and fundraising easy for startups and investors,” said Mahankali Srinivas Rao, CEO, T-Hub.

Depending on company performance, T-Hub startups will stand a chance to raise funds from the SucSEED Indovation Fund and join its portfolio list. In addition, these portfolio startups will be given access to scale with the help of credible VCs and family offices, increasing their investment opportunities.

Indian matchmaking site Matrimony.com has launched a new app catering to the members of the LGBTQIA+ community, as it expands to cover a bigger section of the society, Reuters reported.

The company is looking at an addressable market of around 11 million to 13 million for the app, Rainbowluv, it said in a statement, although there is no official data on the LGBT+ population in India.

"When it comes to serious matchmaking, the LGBTQIA+ community has been largely underserved and we wanted to provide a safe and trusted platform for them," Chief Marketing Officer Arjun Bhatia said.

The app includes more than 45 gender identities, 122 orientation tags and 48 pronouns, and would require members to register with government issued identity cards to ensure safety, the company said.

Agritech firm Cropin, has announced the launch of Cropin Cloud, an intelligent cloud platform, enabling agri-businesses, development agencies, governments, and allied industries to accelerate digital transformation across their business value chain.

As per the firm, Cropin Cloud can be used by agribusinesses of all sizes. It has three sub-platforms that allow farmers and other stakeholders in the food value chain to access tools for earth observation, remote sensing and data and machine learning to help them better manage crops and harvests.

“Crops are copiously diversified, and the digital solutions required to monitor them need hyper-tuning. Cropin Cloud combines the power of a diverse set of advanced technologies, agronomy knowledge, data science and artificial intelligence. The platform offers a complete set of agriculture-specific capabilities to accelerate business growth and bring about rapid and far-reaching digital transformation in the agri-ecosystem,” said Vijay Nelson, Chief Product Officer, Cropin.

Agritech startup Ninjacart has formed an advisory board comprising of industry veterans and experts. Members of the advisory board include J Satyanarayana, former IT Secretary, Government of India; Prakash Bakshi, former Chairman of NABARD; Anand Sinha, former Deputy Governor of RBI; and Nandakumar, former Secretary of Food and Agriculture, Government of India.

The advisory board will offer guidance leveraging their expertise in the fields of agriculture, supply chain design, public policy, finance, ecosystem building, and technology. They will support Ninjacart's efforts to improve its efficiency, contribute to the development of infrastructure, and broaden its horizons to engage with institutions and stakeholders, a statement said.

It will also provide assistance in developing long-term strategies and anticipate challenges along the path and suggest mitigation measures to avoid them.

Jobs and professional networking platform Apna.co witnessed a 132 percent rise in the number of women users, compared to last year, with most of them looking for remote jobs.

Founded in 2019, Apna.co has over 5.1 million women registered on its platform. The company has recorded a 56 percent rise in the number of job applications by women compared to last year. In the last eight months, the platform has seen a 2X rise in women applying for remote jobs.

"This data is likely to increase in the coming months, especially with more remote working job opportunities available locally," it said in a statement.

Apna.co said that lesser commute time was the primary motivator for women looking for remote jobs, with flexible working hours, which allowed them to manage work at home as well as pursue alternate forms of income generation including taking tuitions/creches from home.

The jobs platform also said that there had been an increase in women applying for job roles such as drivers, delivery partners, backend engineers, aircraft repair, among others.

“The flexibility and the convenience brought by remote working has the potential to inspire more professionals to join the workforce, further accelerating the economic engine of the country," Manas Singh, Chief Business Officer at Apna.co, said.

Over 52 percent of gig workers or contract employees feel that their work environment makes it challenging for them to upskill or find new job opportunities, according to the report by CIIE.CO, a startup platform built at Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad. The most young respondents increasingly look towards gig economy platforms for their first jobs, it added.

However, over 52 percent of gig workers said the gig working environment makes it difficult to upskill or find new job opportunities, it added. The report further analysed that gigs offered by platforms initially hook individuals with the opportunity of short-term income but keep them employed for prolonged periods of time in a career without a long-term growth trajectory.

"Only about one in three individuals we spoke to had clear plans for shifting jobs in the near future. This was despite the vast majority reportedly working overtime in their current shifts and having no resources for up-skilling at the jobs they held," said the report. This skills gap, however, has another significant impact on the long-term growth of the economy, the report said, adding the data has revealed that platforms today are increasingly becoming the source of a first job for young graduates leaving university.

The report further said that 50 percent of platform workers today find their jobs through traditional referral networks despite 80 percent having internet access.

Crypto investment product firm 21.co, the parent of 21Shares, has raised $25 million in a funding round led by Marshall Wace that valued the company at $2 billion, as per a Reuters report.

Collab+Currency, Quiet Ventures, ETFS Capital and Valor Equity Partners also invested in the funding round.

"With this round of financing, 21.co will continue to drive rapid, targeted growth through first-of-their-kind products, key market expansions and strategic talent acquisitions," 21.co said in a statement. The post-money valuation makes 21.co "Switzerland's largest crypto unicorn," the company said.

Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, will automatically convert user balances and new deposits of the stablecoins USD Coin, Pax Dollar and True USD into its own stablecoin, Binance USD, Reuters reported. The move is intended to enhance liquidity and capital efficiency for users, Binance said in a statement.

Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency designed to maintain a constant value, for example through a 1:1 US dollar peg. They play a crucial role in facilitating crypto trading, and allow traders to store idle crypto cash without converting it back into fiat currency.

Binance said it will stop trading on spot pairs which include USD Coin, Pax Dollar and True USD, although users will still be able to withdraw funds in the form of these stablecoins. The conversion of users' holdings will take place on September 29, Binance said.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk again hit out at Twitter, saying 90 percent of the comments on his tweets are actually bots or spam replies.

Musk shared screenshots of replies by the fake Twitter account of Changpeng Zhao, Founder and CEO of leading crypto exchange Binance.

"And 90% of my comments are bots," he said in a tweet. A follower asked Musk: "Do you think the number of likes you get has a similar proportion of bots vs humans at 90%?"

Earlier this month, Musk went after the Parag Agrawal-led platform after a top cybersecurity expert claimed that as high as eight in 10 Twitter accounts are fake.

Dan Woods, Global Head of Intelligence at cybersecurity company F5, told The Australian that more than 80 percent of Twitter accounts are probably bots — a massive claim as Twitter says only 5 percent of its users are bots/spams.

"Sure sounds higher than 5 percent," tweeted Musk, along with tagging the news article. "On a $/bot basis, this deal is awesome," he added.

Brazil's government on Tuesday ordered Apple to stop selling iPhones without a battery charger in the country, claiming that the company provides an incomplete product to consumers, Reuters reported.

The Justice Ministry fined Apple 12.275 million reais ($2.38 million) and ordered the cancellation of the sale of the iPhone 12 and newer models, in addition to suspending the sale of any iPhone model that does not come with a power charger.

In the order, published in the country's official gazette, the ministry argued that the iPhone was lacking a essential component in a "deliberate discriminatory practice against consumers".

The authorities rejected Apple's argument that the practice had the purpose of reducing carbon emissions saying that there is no evidence of environmental protection from selling the smartphone without a charger.