Startup Digest: Top startup stories of the day

Here are the top startup stories of the day.

Walmart will triple its exports of goods from India to $10 billion each year by 2027. The new export commitment is expected to provide a significant boost to micro, small and medium sized enterprises (MSMEs) in India, alongside ongoing efforts such as the Flipkart Samarth and Walmart Vriddhi supplier development programs. The expansion in sourcing will include helping develop hundreds of new suppliers in categories such as food, pharmaceuticals, consumables, health & wellness, and general merchandise, along with apparel, homeware and other key Indian export categories.

Food delivery platform, Swiggy to bring over 36,000 street food vendors online under the Prime Minister Street Vendor’s AtmaNibhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi) Scheme. With this partnership Swiggy will expand its Street Food Vendors program to 125 cities. This follows a successful pilot that Swiggy initiated with the ministry of housing & urban affairs (MoHUA) in the cities of Ahmedabad, Varanasi, Chennai, Delhi and Indore, through which Swiggy has already on boarded over 300 street vendors on its platform. By updating the Swiggy app, customers in Ahmedabad, Chennai, Delhi, Indore and Varanasi can easily find "Street Vendor" under the restaurant category. The app homepage also has banners that lead users directly to a range of street vendor listings.

India’s two biggest food-delivery startups Swiggy and Zomato are cleaning up their act, hitching a ride on electric vehicles as companies across the world face the heat over carbon emissions and climate change. The two rivals plan to switch at least 10 percent of their delivery fleets, mostly two-wheelers, to electric in 2021 and are in talks with electric scooter and bike aggregators like Zypp, Spinny and eBikeGo, source have told Moneycontrol. The move comes amid the government's push for electric vehicles (EVs), growth of support infrastructure and the expected cost benefits in the long run.

Agri supply chain startup WayCool Foods, has raised $7.8 million in debt from Samunnati, RBL Bank, and InnoVen Capital. This follows the earlier debt financing round of $5.5 million which was guaranteed by United States International Development Finance Corporation (USIDFC) and financed by IndusInd Bank in June2020. The funds will be utilised for meeting working capital needs and to boost automation in the existing distribution centres and warehouses. WayCool Foods plans to achieve 70 percent digital and mechanical automation across all distribution units by mid-2021, in turn improving process flow, efficiency, and eliminating error-prone mundane activities.

Facebook India net profits more than doubled to Rs 136 crore for the year ending March 31, 2020 compared to the same period last year. In FY19, net profits stood at Rs 65.31 crore. The company follows April-March as its financial year. For FY20, the India arm of the social media’s revenues saw a 43 percent increase in FY20 to Rs 1,277 crore as opposed to Rs 893 crore in FY19, according to the financial data accessed by Tofler, a business intelligence platform.

Facebook could be forced to sell its prized assets WhatsApp and Instagram after the US Federal Trade Commission and nearly every US state filed lawsuits against the social media company, saying it used a “buy or bury” strategy to snap up rivals and keep smaller competitors at bay.

The complaints accuse Facebook of buying up rivals, focusing specifically on its previous acquisitions of photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and messaging app WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014.

France’s data privacy watchdog has handed out its biggest ever fine of 100 million euros ($121 million) to Alphabet’s Google for breaching the country’s rules on online advertising trackers (cookies). The CNIL had also fined e-commerce giant Amazon 35 million euros for breaking the same rules,

The regulator found the companies’ French websites didn’t seek the prior consent of visitors before advertising cookies - small pieces of data stored while navigating on the Web - were saved on computers, it said in a statement.

Google and Amazon also failed to provide clear information to internet users about how the firms intended to make use of such online trackers and how visitors to their French websites could refuse any use of the cookies, the watchdog said.

The SoftBank Vision Fund has taken its share of lumps over the past year, but it can count its DoorDash investment as a huge success. The $100 billion Vision Fund invested in DoorDash four times, pumping $680 million into the company in Series D, F, G and H rounds. Based on DoorDash’s Wednesday opening price of $182 per share, that investment is now worth $11.5 billion — an almost 17x gain.