Startup Digest: Swiggy plans to go public around festive season, Canva acquires Affinity Design & more

Micro-lending platform Aye Finance has secured debt funding of Rs 137 crore from IIV Mikrofinanzfonds and another private fund managed by Invest in Visions, a German impact investment and portfolio management firm. The funding round also saw support from Agents For Impact (AFI).

The fresh capital will be used by the company to enhance its capacity to offer key financial assistance to underserved MSMEs throughout India.

“This new funding will allow us to reach out to a larger population of micro enterprises and offer them innovative financial products designed to meet the diverse needs of MSMEs. We are confident that this will enable us to empower even more entrepreneurs and unlock their full potential, ultimately contributing to job creation and economic prosperity across the country,” said Krishan Gopal, CFO, Aye Finance.

Tech-enabled franchised grocery retail startup, SuperK, has raised $6 million in a Series A round of funding led by Blume Ventures. The funding round also saw participation from Silver Needle Ventures, Veltis Capital, Atrium Angels, and some angel investors and syndicates.

As per the company, the fresh funding will be used for investing in technology infrastructure, hiring, and scaling the platform to connect digital native brands with SuperK customers.

SuperK is currently operating in over 80 Tier 3 and beyond towns of Andhra Pradesh serving 5 lakh+ families over the last four years. A SuperK store is set up for every 25k population, a ratio that allows the creation of a high density of stores in every district. The startup is operationally profitable in the oldest region with just one town of Kadapa having more than 22 stores and holding more than 12% market share in a town of 4.5 lakhs in population, a statement said.

Recur Club, a startup that enables companies to raise capital in a non-dilutive manner, in partnership with fintech unicorn InCred, aims to disburse Rs 300 crores to early and mid-stage startups in 2024.

As per a statement, this is aimed at bridging the funding gap for early and mid-stage startups in India. Till 2023, InCred and Recur Club have together disbursed more than Rs 200 crores as debt capital.

With a target of Rs 300 crores for 2024, the funding will be primarily directed across diverse sectors such as SaaS, Tech Services, B2B Marketplaces, D2C, and Logistics, among others, the statement added.

HealthQuad, a healthcare-focused venture capital fund, has completely exited from the Asian Institute of Nephrology and Urology (AINU), a single-speciality hospital network dedicated to urology and nephrology, with a 4x return on its investment.

The exit came as part of acquisition of AINU by Asian Healthcare Holdings, a single-specialty healthcare platform, backed by TPG Growth and GIC, for Rs 600 crore in September last year.

This also marks the fourth exit for HealthQuad’s Fund-I portfolio of Rs 75 crore, raised in 2016.

Unicommerce, an e-commerce enablement SaaS startup, has announced the launch of its pilot project, UniGPT — a generative AI platform.

UniGPT will help address the concerns of e-commerce sellers and provide assistance to businesses by answering their questions related to e-commerce selling and help sellers understand how they can leverage technology, a statement said.

“We are thrilled to launch a pilot of our first AI-enabled platform, UniGPT.  It's our initiative to empower businesses with a deeper understanding of technology for informed decision-making. The platform will also assist in facilitating faster resolutions of queries for our existing sellers. UniGPT marks another stride in our ongoing commitment to offer comprehensive technology-powered support to businesses,” said Kapil Makhija, MD and CEO of Unicommerce.

Food delivery platform Swiggy has launched a new initiative — “She The Change- From Vision to Venture" — in a bid to acknowledge and celebrate the contribution of food delivery platforms in fostering and stimulating women's entrepreneurship in the country.

Inaugurated by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, the initiative commemorates nearly a decade of Swiggy working with women entrepreneurs and puts a spotlight on both budding and established women entrepreneurs in the Food & Beverage (F&B) industry, a statement said.

Women entrepreneurs in the F&B sector from across the country were facilitated by Finance Minister at the event. The on-demand delivery firm said it has more than 50,000 women-run restaurants on its platform. As per Swiggy, it is estimated that these entrepreneurs are generating approximately three hundred thousand jobs, as each restaurant employs an average of six direct employees.

Canva has acquired the Affinity suite of creative software popular with Mac users, securing its biggest acquisition to date in an effort to compete with Adobe.

The deal, which is a mix of cash and stock, is valued at “several hundred million pounds,” Canva cofounder and chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht said in an interview with Bloomberg.

Joining Canva is the entire 90-person team of Nottingham, UK-based Serif, the startup responsible for Affinity’s portfolio of photo-editing, publishing and illustration software.

Adam Neumann has submitted a bid of more than $500 million to buy back WeWork, the office-sharing company he co-founded and propelled to a $47 billion valuation before it fell into bankruptcy, Reuters reported.

It's not clear how Neumann is planning to line up financing for his bid. Last month, Neumann's lawyers sent a letter to WeWork, saying he was exploring a joint bid for the company with Daniel Loeb's hedge fund Third Point and other investors.

Neumann has said that in addition to amount he is bidding for WeWork, he would also invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the company, according to a Financial Times report.

Videogame retailer GameStop said it had cut an unspecified number of jobs to reduce costs and reported lower fourth-quarter revenue amid rising competition from e-commerce firms and weak consumer spending in an uncertain economy.

GameStop's recent cost-reduction measures also included an exit from its operations in Ireland, Switzerland and Austria.

GameStop's fourth-quarter revenue of $1.79 billion was lower than last year's $2.23 billion, as it also grappled with stiff competition from Amazon and Ebay.

The EU called on Facebook, TikTok and other tech titans to crack down on deepfakes and other AI-generated content by using clear labels ahead of Europe-wide polls in June, according to an AFP report.

The recommendation is part of a raft of guidelines published under a landmark content law by the European Commission for digital giants to tackle risks to elections including disinformation.

In the new guidelines, the commission said the largest platforms "should assess and mitigate specific risks linked to AI, for example by clearly labelling content generated by AI (such as deepfakes)".

Elon Musk has said artificial intelligence startup xAI's chatbot, Grok, will be enabled for all premium subscribers of social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

He announced it in a post on X, without revealing any more details. Previously, the chatbot was available only to Premium+ subscribers.

As more advertisers move away from the microblogging platform, the billionaire has stressed reducing the company's reliance on advertising and has turned his focus to more attractive subscription plans.

Chinese e-commerce vendors that want to sell products on TikTok Shop in the U.S. as an alternative to Amazon are upset by moves they say the short video app has made to tighten enforcement of its rules for overseas sellers opening shops on the platform.

Chinese-owned TikTok, which faces the threat of having to divest its U.S. operations or be banned, has in recent weeks taken a harder stance toward enforcing its internal rules, according to five Chinese vendors on the site and an industry association that represents 3,000 Chinese stores selling products online.

TikTok is requiring that U.S. entities registered by sellers be 51% U.S. owned and chaired by an U.S. passport holder, said the vendors and Winnie Wang, executive chairman of the Shenzhen Cross Border E-Commerce Association, China's largest sellers group based in the manufacturing hub.