Startup Digest: Zomato loses $1.1Bn market value after Blinkit deal, Ola Electric HR director quits, Udaan fires 160-180 employees & Microsoft faces investor call to publish global tax affairs

Here are the top headlines from the startup space.

Zomato lost about $1.1 billion of market value in two days after the food-delivery platform announced the acquisition of loss-making quick-commerce firm Blink.

The Ant Group-backed food delivery firm said on Friday it would acquire Blinkit for Rs 4,447 crore in stock, as it tries to gain a foothold in the fiercely competitive quick delivery market.

"We believe Blinkit will require investments beyond the $400 million envisaged by Zomato, given rising competitive intensity," analysts at Kotak Institutional Equities wrote in a note to Reuters.

Also read: Udaan, backed by Tencent and Lightspeed Ventures, fires 160-180 employees as it 'refines its cost structure'

The company's shares fell as much as 14 percent since the announcement of the offer, shedding nearly 76.78 billion rupees in market capitalization. They are also down nearly 48 percent since going public last July.

Ola Electric’s HR director Ranjit Kondeshan will be exiting the Bhavish Aggarwal-run electric mobility company on July 2, just 14 months after joining the firm, as per a report by IANS. According to his LinkedIn profile, Kondeshan joined Ola Electric Mobility from Visa where he worked for three years in Mumbai. Before Visa, he was Senior HR Manager at Bajaj Allianz Life.

Kondeshan’s exit comes at a time when the EV company has seen a slew of exits across roles. When CNBC-TV18 reached out to Ola Electric, a source in the company who did not want to be named, played down this a trend, calling it a business as usual exit, “These are mid-level churns not at a senior level, these churns happen at every organization. As OLA we get more attention than other company. This is business as usual, no deductions to be made from it.”

The source further added that a company as large as OLA Electric will continue to have HR requirement and hence, the hiring process at the firm is ongoing to meet those requirements.

B2B e-commerce platform Udaan has laid off 160-180 employees or 4-5 percent of its 4,000-strong workforce.

The company has attributed the lay offs to its "efficiency enhancement exercise", which has resulted in redundancies, with some roles no longer required.

"We have taken various steps to enhance efficiency, refine our cost structure and grow faster in our journey to achieve strong unit economics," the company's spokesperson told CNBC-TV18. Incidentally, the layoffs come within two weeks of the Udaan CEO Vaibhav Gupta telling employees in an internal note that the business could possibly achieve positive unit economics by the end of June.

However, as part of the long-term plans, the unicorn B2B startup will continue to hire talent for 'the new roles that have been created to grow the business faster'.

The B2B platform's previous round of retrenchments had come on the back of disruptions during the pandemic, when it let go at least 1,000 employee after losing nearly 60 percent of its business. Some media reports had pegged the number above 3,000.

Code-teaching platform WhiteHat Jr, which Byju's acquired in 2020, has laid off around 300 full-time employees, as per a report by the Economic Times.

The majority of the sacked employees where in the company's code-teaching and sales teams. Eighty were working at the company's office in Brazil, where Byju's entered last April as a part of its 'Future School' offering.

“WhiteHat Jr is focused on providing quality education to young students while continuing to build a strong business. To realign with our business priorities, we are optimising our team to accelerate results and best position the business for long-term growth,” a Byju's spokesperson told ET.

Edtech major BYJU's has named Krishna Vedati as President of Global Growth and Strategic Initiatives, along with rejigging top leadership at K-12 creative coding platform Tynker (which it acquired for $200 million) as part of its US expansion.

Vedati, Co-Founder and CEO of Tynker, will report to BYJU's Co-Founder and CEO Byju Raveendran. Srinivas Mandyam, Co-Founder and CTO of Tynker, will replace Vedati as Tynker's CEO, and Kelvin Chong, Tynker Co-Founder and Chief Architect, now takes on the expanded role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO), the company said in a statement.

"With more than 150 million users on our personalised learning platform, it is important for us to put in place the leadership necessary to continue scaling our businesses globally," said Raveendran.

Raveendran is currently focusing his energies on global operations, especially in the US, as the Indian online edtech market shrinks considerably with schools, colleges and tuition centres reopening.

Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao inaugurated the new facility of business incubator T-Hub in Hyderabad on Tuesday. The new building, called T-Hub 2.0, comes with a total built-up area of over 5.82 lakh square feet.

This makes it the world's largest innovation campus, the second largest being startup incubator Station F based in France, a statement said.

The facility was inaugurated in the presence of founders of various unicorn startups from across India, as well as founders of various promising startups from Hyderabad.

“The innovation campus will bring together all the startup ecosystem stakeholders to create sustainable businesses with a special focus on verticals like EV/ Mobility, Healthtech, Enterprise tech, Gaming and Artificial Intelligence. It will continue to establish Telangana as a centre for technology and innovation at a global level, encouraging new technologies, guiding entrepreneurs, and creating investment opportunities. We aim to support over 2000 startups and provide the required lift to these entrepreneurs by offering them access to the 6Ms and 2Ps through global partnerships,” said Mahankali Srinivas Rao, CEO, T-Hub.

Former chief financial officer (CFO) of Zilingo Ramesh Bafna has joined Coinswitch Kuber, a crypto investment platform which turned unicorn last year.

This comes at a time when Zilingo has been struggling with financial irregularities and alleged sexual harassment claims, leading to the ouster of its co-founder Ankiti Bose. Its shareholders are now in a wait-and-watch mode after the company's board meeting ended inconclusively on June 20.

In his previous roles, Bafna has worked with e-commerce companies such as Myntra and Flipkart and IT services major Wipro. Bafna takes over the CFO role from Sarmad Nazki who has decided to pursue other opportunities, said the company in a statement.

Google has announced a combination of Crisis Response efforts to help the impacted communities of flood-hit Assam, parts of North East India and Bangladesh.

"The onslaught of floods that have claimed thousands of lives and displaced millions, we have launched a combination of Crisis Response efforts to help reach critical support to impacted people and communities," said Google in a blog post on Tuesday.

The tech giant has launched an SOS alert that brings together updates from authoritative local and national sources to the top of the search results. In case you are nearby any of the affected areas, the search results will also show emergency phone numbers, websites and maps. If not, the alert will show a timely overview of the situation.

Google.org has also donated $500,000 to the Center for Disaster Philanthropy to support community-based organisations that provide emergency support and long-term recovery in the affected areas.

Lentra AI, a digital lending cloud platform, has announced the acquisition of Chennai and Singapore-based AI company TheDataTeam (TDT).

Lentra will deploy TDT’s behaviour intelligence platform Cadenz to help banks and financial institutions make better data-driven decisions on customer creditworthiness based on their unique financial journey.

"This will help launch new innovative products for a faster go-to market," said Lentra in a statement. The cloud-native platform works with over 50 banks and financial institutions, and has processed over 13 billion transactions.

Facebook and Instagram have begun promptly removing posts that offer abortion pills to women who may not be able to access them following a Supreme Court decision that stripped away constitutional protections for the procedure.

Memes and status updates explaining how women could legally obtain abortion pills in the mail exploded across social platforms. Some even offered to mail the prescriptions to women living in states that now ban the procedure.

Almost immediately, Facebook and Instagram began removing some of these posts, just as millions across the US were searching for clarity around abortion access. General mentions of abortion pills, as well as posts mentioning specific versions such as mifepristone and misoprostol, suddenly spiked Friday morning across Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and TV broadcasts, according to an analysis by the media intelligence firm Zignal Labs.

Investors managing more than $350 billion of assets have demanded that Microsoft publish more transparent tax and financial information, as tech giants face growing scrutiny globally over their tax affairs, Reuters reported.

A shareholder resolution on tax transparency had been filed to Microsoft ahead of its annual investor meeting this year, said the organiser of the action, Britain-based proxy advisers Pensions & Investment Research Consultants (PIRC).

Investors including Nordea, AkademikerPension and Greater Manchester Pension Fund had backed the resolution, PIRC said.

The resolution calls on the company to publish financial and tax information on a country-by-country basis outside its home market of the United States so investors can assess whether it is paying fair taxes and identify any risks posed by tax reforms.

Uber and Australia's main transport union agreed to back a federal body that enforces minimum pay for the company's drivers, joining a global thawing of relations between the ride-hailing giant and industrial bodies, as per a Reuters report.

In a joint statement, Uber and the Transport Workers Union (TWU) said they signed an agreement to support an unspecified federal body to "set minimum and transparent enforceable earnings and benefits/conditions for platform workers".

The new body would also oversee disputes that resulted in drivers in the so-called "gig economy" having their accounts shut off, and protect drivers' rights to organise with a "collective voice", the statement said.

The move, though largely symbolic, reflects a broader response by the San Francisco tech giant to pressure from unions around the world to put a floor under wages that supersedes its fee-setting algorithms.

Israel's Competition Authority has closed a case against Walt Disney and Bezeq Israel Telecom's satellite TV unit YES after the companies agreed to cancel an exclusive streaming deal.

Disney Israel launched its Disney+ streaming service in Israel earlier this month and it had forged an exclusive deal with YES to offer the service rather than make deals as well with cable company HOT and internet-based TV operators.

The companies had applied for permission from the Competition Authority, which looked into the matter. The agency said that, the companies withdrew their request for exclusivity.

Also read: Byju’s pushes back payments for $1 billion acquisition