Startup Digest: Uber likely to sell stake in Zomato, upGrad acquires Exampur & US crypto firm Nomad hit by $190M theft

Meanwhile, Uber said in its earnings announcement on Tuesday that it had booked an unrealised gain (loss) of $707 million in the first half of 2022 on account of its Zomato holdings.

Zomato shares gained over 18 percent on Tuesday after the company reported its earnings for the first quarter of financial year 2023 with a sharp decline in losses as both cost as well as revenue showed improvement. The stock, which has fallen about 60 percent from its debut price, was trading 17.31 percent higher at Rs 54.40 per share on BSE at 1:17 PM.

The food delivery aggregator reported a consolidated revenue of Rs 1,1413 crore for the first quarter, sharply up by 67 percent from Rs 844.4 crore reported during the same quarter last year. The revenue was up 16.68 percent on a quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) basis. The company narrowed its consolidated loss to Rs 185.7 crore in the June quarter compared to Rs 356.2 crore in losses last year and Rs 359.7 crore during the last quarter. The EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation loss was at Rs 307 crore against Rs 376.5 crore last year and 449.7 crore last quarter.

Edtech unicorn upGrad has acquired Exampur, a test-prep provider for government jobs, for an undisclosed sum.

Noida-based learning platform Exampur aims to reach Rs 70 crore (nearly $7.5 million) in revenue this fiscal. The platform said it has a user base of over 10 million students.

Exampur offers over 200 test-prep courses for government jobs where most of the content is delivered through its YouTube channels for the UPSC, SSC, defence, banking, teaching and other state-level government jobs.

Cumulatively, Exampur has a growing subscriber base of over 12 million, with an average viewership of 2.5 million students. 90 percent paid users of Exampur are from tier 2, 3 and 4 markets, a statement said.

This marks Upgrad’s third acquisition in a month. On July 22, it also acquired online learning platform Harappa Education at a value of Rs 300 crore.

Previously, upGrad Rekrut, a subsidiary of the edtech unicorn, acquired recruitment and staffing firm Wolves India but did not disclose the deal amount.

Edtech unicorn Unacademy has suspended contracts of some of its doubt-solving NEET and IIT-JEE educators, Moneycontrol reported. On July 31 both sets of educators (IIT-JEE and NEET) got emails stating that their contracts were suspended for a minimum period of six months, the report added.

"It means that their services are not required for six months starting August and they will not get paid during the period. Suspension of contract for six months is equivalent to that they are out of the system," a source told Moneycontrol.

In the mail, Unacademy told the educators that it has made 'strategic changes' to its customised learning solutions and owing to the change it will 'significantly' reduce doubt solving on its platform.

Educators will receive their balance payments for their services till July 31 by August 31, the mail said. Moneycontrol has viewed a copy of the email.

Over 22 lakh Indian accounts were banned by Meta-owned WhatsApp, while 632 grievance reports were received by the messaging platform in June 2022, according to its compliance report.

This is the highest number of accounts banned in 2022.

In the report, the messaging platform said 2,210,000 Indian accounts were banned on WhatsApp during the period. An Indian account is identified via a +91 phone number, it added.

WhatsApp said it has received 632 user reports, spanning account support (123), ban appeal (426), other support (32), product support (35), and safety (16) during June 2022.

During this period, 64 accounts were "actioned" under the ban appeal category based on the reports received. WhatsApp explained that "Accounts Actioned" denotes reports where it took remedial action.

Twitter, which is fighting a legal battle with the Indian government over content blocking orders, banned more than 43,140 accounts of Indian users in June over violation of its guidelines, the microblogging platform said in its monthly compliance report.

Twitter said it purged 40,982 accounts for child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity and similar content and banned 2,158 accounts for promoting terrorism.

The microblogging platform received 724 grievances in the country through its local grievance mechanism between May 26 to June 25 and took action on 122 complaints.

Oracle has started to lay off employees in the United States, The Information reported, citing a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

The publication in July reported that Oracle was considering cutting thousands of jobs in its global workforce after targeting cost cuts of up to $1 billion.

The company had about 143,000 full-time employees as of May 31, according to its latest annual report.

The layoffs at Oracle will affect employees at its offices in the San Francisco Bay Area, Monday's report said, but it did not mention the number of employees affected. The report also said layoffs in Canada, India and parts of Europe were expected in the coming weeks and months.

Agritech-focused VC firm Omnivore announces the sale of Eruvaka, an IOT-based agricultural tech startup to Dutch aquafeed firm Nutreco. As per Omnivore, this is the largest exit to date in the Indian agritech space.

Based in Vijayawada, Eruvaka develops cloud-based aquaculture pond management solutions, including real-time monitoring and smart feeders.

Nutreco acquired a majority stake in Eruvaka which will enable Skretting, its aquaculture business, to deliver on-farm software and smart equipment to shrimp farmers globally.

Omnivore first invested in Eruvaka in 2013. The firm claims to have been profitable since FY18-19 and has delivered 168.5 percent compound annual revenue growth since FY17-18.

Lumos Labs, an innovation management firm, has launched ‘The Hatch Web3 Accelerator for Hedera’ inviting Indian Web3 startups to grow at scale with Hedera’s distributed ledger services.

Launched in partnership with The HBAR Foundation, which supports the creation of Web3 communities built on the Hedera network, the accelerator program will comprise of two cohorts of five months each.

The programme aims to encourage and empower innovators in the Web 3.0 space to scale their blockchain and distributed ledger solutions, and to augment awareness and adoption of Hedera technology within the Indian developer community. Finalists from each cohort will be eligible to receive grants from a pool of $150,000 each from the HBAR Foundation, along with mentorship and go-to-market guidance, a statement said.

D2C startup Melorra has launched three more experience centres in just a month, taking its total retail stores count to 15. The brand is aiming to open 350 experience centres pan India.

The jewellery brand claims to have clocked 200 percent CAGR in the two years of the pandemic. It is looking to touch $1 billion in turnover by 2026 apart from expanding its network of branded outlets all over India in the next few years.

“We have recently launched 3 new centres now and will soon be opening 350 more experience centres in the times to come. We are on our way to becoming the largest Daily wear jewellery company in India,” said Saroja Yeramilli, Founder and CEO, Melorra.

Uber reported a second-quarter loss but beat analyst estimates for revenue and posted $382 million in free cash flow for the first time ever.

The company reported a net loss of $2.6 billion for the second quarter, $1.7 billion of which was attributed to investments and a revaluation of stakes in Aurora, Grab and Zomato.

But CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a prepared statement that Uber continues to benefit from an increase in on-demand transportation and a shift in spending from retail to services.

The company reported adjusted EBITDA of $364 million, ahead of the $240 million to $270 million range it provided in the first quarter. Gross bookings of $29.1 billion were up 33 percent year-over-year and in line with its forecast of $28.5 billion to $29.5 billion.

Its mobility segment reported $3.55 billion in revenue, compared with delivery’s $2.69 billion. Uber’s freight segment delivered $1.83 billion in revenue for the quarter.

France, Italy and Spain are stepping up pressure on the European Commission to come up with legislation that ensures Big Tech firms partly finance telecoms infrastructure in the bloc, a document reviewed showed.

This was the first time the three governments have expressed their joint position on the issue.

EU regulators said in May they were analysing the question of whether tech giants Google, Meta and Netflix should shoulder some of the costs of upgrading telecoms networks.

In a joint paper, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, the three governments said the six largest content providers accounted for 55 percent of internet traffic. "This generates specific costs for European telecom operators in terms of capacity, at a time they are already hugely investing in the most costly parts of the networks with 5G and Fiber-To-The-Home," the document said.

It urged that European telecom networks and large online content providers pay fair shares of network costs.

Hedge fund Greenlight Capital said it took a new stake in Twitter last month as the social media company sued to force Elon Musk to buy the company even as the billionaire entrepreneur said he has changed his mind about the deal.

Greenlight founder David Einhorn wrote to investors that his hedge fund had taken the position, paying an average $37.24 for the stock, according to the letter seen by Reuters.

"At this price there is a $17 per share of upside if TWTR prevails in court and we believe about $17 per share of downside, if the deal breaks. So we are getting 50-50 odds on something that should happen 95%+ of the time," the letter said.

Einhorn, whose firm gained 8.4 percent during the second quarter while the S&P500 index tumbled 16 percent, has a long history with Musk after betting, for years, that electric car maker Tesla's stock would drop. The two men have often sparred on Twitter.

Apple is dropping its mask mandate for corporate employees at most locations, the Verge reported, citing an internal memo.

This comes even as COVID-19 infections in the United States have been on the rise with the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of the Omicron variant accounting for more than 90 percent of infections, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Don't hesitate to continue wearing a face mask if you feel more comfortable doing so," the report quoted Apple as saying in the internal email. "Also, please respect every individual's decision to wear a mask or not."

Apple was sued by French app developers that accused the iPhone maker of violating US antitrust law by overcharging them to use its app store, Reuters reported.

The plaintiffs in the proposed class action include Société du Figaro, which develops the Figaro news app; L'Équipe 24/24, which develops the L'Équipe sports news and streaming app, and Le Geste, an association of French content providers.

According to the complaint filed in the federal court in Oakland, California, Apple has abused its monopoly power over app distribution on iOS-based mobile devices by mandating only one app store for those devices.

The plaintiffs said this has enabled the Cupertino, California-based company to charge "supracompetitive" 30 percent commissions for 14 years, as well as $99 annual fees to app developers, while stifling innovation and consumer choice.

US crypto firm Nomad has been hit by a $190 million theft, blockchain researchers said, the latest such heist to hit the digital asset sector this year.

Nomad said in a tweet that it was "aware of the incident" and was currently investigating without giving further details or the value of the theft.

Crypto analytics firm PeckShield told Reuters $190 million worth of users' cryptocurrencies were stolen, including ether and the stablecoin USDC. Other blockchain researchers put the figure at over $150 million.

The heist targeted Nomad's "bridge" - a tool which allows users to transfer tokens between blockchains.