In a rare move, more than 4,500 Amazon employees have written a letter to CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, criticising the ecommerce company’s lack of commitment to battling climate change.

The letter, dated April 10 has been published on online blogging website Medium, and its rapidly growing list of signatories includes many prominent software developers, managers and scientists working for the company. The letter has urged Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s board of directors to take concrete steps towards making Amazon more eco-friendly.

“We haven’t disclosed a company-wide plan to reach zero carbon emissions within the timeline required by science. Our goal to reach 100% renewable energy does not have a date for completion,” the letter said.

The move is surprising as Silicon Valley techies rarely speak up against the companies they work for. This is the second major protest by employees of a large software company after about 20K Google employees staged a walkout across 50 Google offices the world over, last year. They were protesting the search giant’s $90 Mn settlement with Android creator Andy Rubin, despite allegations of sexual misconduct against him.

Compiling a list of wasted opportunities by Amazon to emerge as a socially responsible global company, the letter highlights several things which should have been done by Amazon.

Chief among the complaints was Amazon’s donations to US members of congress who voted against climate legislation consistently and Amazon’s practice of buying carbon credits to offset its pollution footprint.

“We recently ordered 20,000 diesel vans whose emissions will need to be offset with carbon credits. Offsets can entail forest management policies that displace Indigenous communities, and they do nothing to reduce our diesel pollution which disproportionately harms communities of color,” the letter says

“The science is clear: we must keep fossil fuels in the ground. – Amazon employees”

Commenting on Amazon’s weak sustainability goals the letter highlights that “Our sustainability goals lack context. For example, we’ve set a goal of at least 50 solar installations in warehouse facilities by 2020. This represents only 6% of buildings in our global fulfillment network and a fraction of our overall carbon footprint.”

The letter also asks Jeff Bezos to prioritise climate impact when making business decisions, including ending all custom solutions specifically designed for oil and gas extraction and exploration.

Finally, the letter says that “In our [Amazon’s] mission to become ‘Earth’s most customer-centric company,’ we believe our climate impact must be a top consideration in everything we do. We have the power to shift entire industries, inspire global action on climate, and lead on the issue of our lifetimes. We ask that you, as leaders responsible for our strategic direction, adopt the climate plan resolution and release a company-wide plan.”

The post Over 4K Amazon Employees Call On Bezos For Swift Action Over Climate Change appeared first on Inc42 Media.

The ink has dried on the blockbuster Walmart-Flipkart’s $16 Bn deal. While the effect of this merger on Flipkart is still under debate, a filing  by the US-based retail giant has now thrown up new insights.

Walmart’s 10-K filing (a mandatory annual report filed by US public companies) showed that Flipkart’s name, along with all the other trade names under its ownership, accounted for $4.7 Bn of the $16 Bn price tag.  

That means for Walmart, close to 30% of Flipkart’s economic value lies in its name along with other brand names it owns!

The valuation seems even more extraordinary because at $4.7 Bn, Flipkart would be the fifth most valued Indian brand name. The company would follow Tata Group, Airtel, Infosys and LIC, which are the top 4 valued Indian brands, according to 2018 report by Brand Finance, a global brand valuation agency.

In India, where companies generally look at the economic value of the company more than the intangibles such as brand value, this is unprecedented.

The Economic Value Of Habits

While Brand Finance defines brand value as the net economic benefit an owner would obtain by licensing the brand on the open market, a broader definition of brand value is derived from a combination of reputation, intent and capability.

To better understand why brand trademark, an asset that largely exists in people’s minds, are so valuable, Inc42 talked to Kartikeya Kompella, a Bengaluru-based branding expert and author of multiple books on the subject. Citing the example of Lifebuoy, which spent crores in the 1990s on advertising to habituate people into washing their hands, Kompella said a big part of determining a brand’s value is about building such habits.

“In India we are creatures of habit. Flipkart and Amazon have driven a huge amount of consumption with discounts and marketing. They have on-boarded people, created accounts and verified addresses and established preferences over a decade. Imagine how much Walmart will have to do to break that habit?” he said.

Essentially, Flipkart has built a loyal user base over the years, introduced them to online shopping, familiarised them with digital payments and created the right market conditions for ecommerce to succeed in India. As a result, a majority of Indians associate online shopping with Flipkart. Now imagine, if Walmart had to replicate Flipkart’s recall or disrupt it. It would have taken the US company many years and a lot of cash – perhaps $4.7 Bn or more.

Just look at how Amazon is burning through billions every year to make a place for itself at the table.

A Lesson For Indian Startups

While it would be any startup’s dream to have their brand valued at $4.7 Bn, Flipkart’s valuation could actually be a steal for Walmart execs who no doubt went over that  ‘Make vs Buy” debate many times before the Flipkart deal.

However for Indian startups this deal highlights the need to give serious thought to the concept of building brand value.

Siddharth Mahajan, partner, Athena Legal told Inc42, “$4.7 Bn attributed to Flipkart trade-marks and brands is significant for startups in India. This will reinforce the value of startups investing in trademarks and other intellectual property protection as these are directly related to the overall valuation of the entity. For consumer facing businesses it is imperative that the brands are not only protected, but also legal actions are brought against third parties trying to use the brands in an illegitimate manner.”

Mahajan added,  “Hopefully with the numbers attributed to brands and trade names of Flipkart, Indian companies including startups will spend more resources in protecting their IP not only in India but also globally.”

While perceived value and loyalty creation are the major forces that underpin marketing and brand management. In our highly fragmented, digital environment, the smartest firms are the ones who understand these intangibles and work on building their branding into the very heart of their operations

As David Ogilvy (widely regarded as the father of advertising) once said, “Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand.”

The post What’s In A Name? $4.7 Bn If It Is Flipkart, Says Walmart appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Reliance Jio is acquiring chatbot maker, Haptik for over INR 200 Cr, to build its own conversational platform on the lines of Amazon’s Alexa, a source close to the development told Inc42.

The transaction is expected to be completed this week. Haptik had last raised $11.2 Mn and counts Times Internet and Kalaari Capital as its investors.

Queries to Haptik over mail and messages did not elicit any response till the time of publication.

According to a company document accessed by Inc42, the company founders have signed the board resolution in an EGM earlier this month regarding the deal. According to the document, Reliance Jio Services Ltd, Haptik founders — Aakrit Vaish and Swapan Rajdev have signed a Business Transfer Agreement.

Haptik: The Power Of Bots

Founded in 2013 by Aakrit Vaish and Swapan Rajdev, Mumbai-based Haptik lets users chat with their voice assistants to complete daily tasks such as online shopping, travel bookings, food delivery among others. The company signed a strategic partnership with Times Internet in April 2016 to further develop its product and improve its AI capabilities.

The company has worked with over 50 brands such as Samsung, Future Group, OYO and KFC. One of the unique points for Haptik as its cofounder Ashish has shared earlier, is that every single chatbot built on the Haptik platform is 100% customised, and all of the customisation is done by its in house professional services team. The company expanded to the US in 2018 and the UK in 2019. It is now looking to focus on English-speaking markets in the coming years.

According to filings accessed by Inc42, in FY18 Haptik reported a total revenue of INR 4.58 Crores (189% increase from FY17) and expense of INR 27.85 Crores (10% drop from FY17). Its net losses for FY18 stand at INR -22.54 Crores.

Is Reliance Preparing To Take Over India’s Internet?

Last year, Reliance merged its Jio Music business with the music streaming app, Saavn, at a combined valuation of $1 Bn.

In light of Haptik’s acquisition, it looks like Reliance is gearing up to create a complete ecosystem of products similar to Amazon Alexa’s ecosystem built for Jio’s vast subscriber base.

In February this year, the Reliance also acquired a vernacular language technology development company, Reverie, picking up 83% stake in the company in a deal worth INR 190 Cr.

Jio’s reach and connectivity and Saavn’s audio streaming technology can now be leveraged along with Haptik and Reverie’s abilities to create a challenger to Alexa and Google Home, albeit with better regional language support.

Reliance itself has hinted at a similar objective earlier. In its press release announcing the acquisition of Reverie, the Mukesh Ambani-led company said that the investment would “further enhance the group’s digital initiatives including digital consumer platforms with multilingual capabilities.”

Meanwhile, Amazon has employed a staggering 40K developers to develop Alexa’s regional language skills, while Google Home is now available in four Indian languages with seven more in development. The battle for India’s next billion users is definitely heating up!

Speaking of Jio, in 2018, it witnessed a massive user growth in contrast to its competitors as well as prominent players like Airtel, and Vodafone. The average percentage change between (January’18 – November’18) for Jio was +4.92 % whereas in the case of Airtel and Vodafone it has been +1.6% and -0.12% respectively. These numbers show that the penetration strategy focused on providing high-speed internet at low cost has turned out to be a success story for Jio.

Acknowledging the booming Indian economy, Reliance is now gearing itself up for optimal capitalisation of the digital data which they have gathered with their Jio product including DTH, mobile wallet and more.

As of 2018, India’s internet user base was estimated to be around 560 Mn, which is just 41% of the total population of India. As more and more people go online, it’s an obvious fact that they will be prone to start using integrated vertical services like payments and entertainment.

After establishing a successful strategy to capture new users coming online through Jio, it looks like Reliance is now bullish on capturing the complete digital entertainment space, the first thing most new internet users consume, as well as leverage the innovation capabilities of Indian startups to further its technological ambitions. The company has backed over four Indian startups in 2019 alone.

Gauging from Reliance’s new found interest in fintech, ecommerce and retail, which are currently the fastest growing sectors of the Indian economy, the company’s latest move shows that it is now fully prepared to takeover the Indian internet.

The post Exclusive: Reliance Is Acquiring Haptik For Over INR 200 Cr To Build India’s Own Alexa appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Gurugram-based coworking startup Innov8 has been acquired by hospitality chain OYO in an all-cash deal worth about INR 220 Cr ($31.84 Mn). According to Inc42 sources, the founders and investors of Innov8 have taken an exit as part of the buyout.

Post acquisition, Innov8 founder Ritesh Malik will drive the company’s expansion under OYO. The Innov8 team will continue to remain intact post-acquisition.

Innov8, which graduated from Y Combinator in 2016, has raised over $4 Mn in funding from investors such as LetsVenture, Venture Catalysts, Credence Family Office, Rajan Anandan (VP India and Southeast Asia, Google), Vijay Shekhar Sharma (founder and CEO, Paytm), Girish Mathrubootham (founder and CEO, Freshdesk) among others. Under OYO, the coworking space provider will be working towards creating a capacity of 10,000 seats across India.

Founded in 2015, Innov8 currently boasts of hosting 350 companies as members and claims to have a 95% occupancy across all its 15 coworking spaces with combined seating of approximately 5,500.

It has spaces in the National Capital Region (NCR), Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chandigarh. Its clients include well-known names such as Vice Media, Ratnakar Bank Limited (RBL Bank), and Swiggy.

The source also added that OYO is working on three coworking brands set to be priced differently. These include Workflo and PowerStation in its mid to budget category, while Innov8 will be placed in the premium category.

On reaching out, OYO and Innov8 refused to comment on the development.

According to Inc42 sources, the first PowerStation centre will be based out of the Pioneer Square complex on the Golf Course Extension Road, Gurugram. The centre will have a seating capacity of more than 1,000 seats.

In the coworking category, OYO will be competing with New York-based WeWork, 91springboard, Sequoia-backed Awfis among others. The deal also marks first acquisition in the India’s coworking space.

Meanwhile flush with funds from its $1 Bn fund raise, OYO has been busy forging ahead with its international expansion plans. As of March 2019, the company has already expanded to nine other countries beyond India and operates in 500 cities with half a million rooms listed.

It had recently committed $200 Mn (INR 1,400 Cr) towards growing its business in India and South Asia. The company recorded a 3.5x jump in revenue from its India operations and a 4.3x Y-o-Y global sales growth for the year ended March 2018.

According to a study by real estate consultancy Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) and shared workspaces provider WeWork, the coworking industry in India will likely attract more than $400 Mn in investments by 2018.

The report further said that the potential number of seats in the coworking industry stands at 12-16 Mn, of which the biggest proportion — 10.3 Mn — is attributed to large companies, 1.5 Mn to SMEs, and another 1.5 Mn to freelancers. Startups, surprisingly — form the smallest of the lot — at 100K seats. According to Inc42 DataLabs, India currently has over 200+ coworking spaces.

The post OYO Acquires Innov8 For INR 220 Cr In An All Cash Deal appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Hotstar has surged to the top of the Indian on-demand video streaming market over the past few years on the back of live sports and streaming content. Its growth has coincided with the rise of live TV streaming and original online programming in the country. Just consider the immense popularity of the cricket tournament Indian Premier League, and how much it has added to the appeal of Hotstar — not just in India either.

Over the past years, all of Hotstar’s innovations have come through IPL’s prism — this includes the company’s ad network floated last year, as well as the in-app rewards for users through various mini-games. It has made Hotstar India’s streaming king. This year’s IPL has set a new world record for Hotstar beating its own record from last year. The company has now announced that with a peak concurrency of 12.7 Mn viewers, with 267 Mn viewers overall in three weeks. That’s a staggering figure even for live TV.

IPL is Hotstar’s trump card in the long-term battle against Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and other competitors, but every year the now-Disney-owned platform pulls an ace from its sleeve, to further cement its pole position. Winter may be Game Of Thrones’ predominant season, but for Hotstar the mega HBO show represents spring and great growth.

This year’s GoT Season 8 opener drew extremely high search interest across India. This highlights how entrenched the show is in India, but Hotstar was not far behind.

Google Trends normalises the volume of searches in a region to give you an idea of which terms are trending more at a certain time. A score of 100 here means the search volume is as high as it has been ever before. It must be noted that Google Trends doesn’t give you an absolute volume of searches but shows you how much a topic is trending in comparison to the baseline.

Search interest in Hotstar matched the wild popularity of Game of Thrones in most places across India as can be seen by the pale red areas on the map below.

With its global popularity Game Of Thrones was trending over Hotstar, but with the platform being the only legal way for fans in India to watch the show online, it stands to reason that the app saw a positive impact from this volume of search.

In fact, we can see searches for the streaming service doubled in the early hours of Monday, as seen in the blue spike below. Here’s a look at the search trend for the morning of April 15. The huge spikes for both search terms happened early in the day, just when the episode started airing.

This is the biggest spike in search trends for Hotstar in relation to its content in the past month, including the high-profile IPL 2019 launch day at the end of March. Before the launch of IPL, Hotstar search interest remained flat and did not see any big spikes.

Given that Game of Thrones is a Hotstar Premium offering, we also saw a minor spike in searches for Hotstar Premium around the same time. This small spike as seen below for the blue line represents a 3X growth in search volume for that term.

Related search keywords tell you in what context people are searching for a particular term. For instance, the most trending related keyword for Hotstar is Hotstar Premium and not Game of Thrones, which indicates most people were interested in Hotstar Premium in the morning than Game of Thrones. Of course, this spike in Hotstar Premium is thanks to the GoT season premiere.

As evident in the related searches graph, Hotstar Premium had a huge volume of searches — as Google has normalised it to 100 on the Trends chart, which is the highest rank for trends.

Going back to the last Game of Thrones season, we can also see searches for Hotstar go up when it aired the season 7 of Game of Thrones on July 16, 2017. Here, the searches for Hotstar went up by 10-15 percent before the launch.

Hotstar has set the pace in India as far as streaming is concerned, and while a huge part of it is down to the record-breaking IPL deal, it’s also a fact that Indians have become more familiar with the television industry around the world over the years, especially thanks to Netflix and Amazon Prime’s success as well. Game of Thrones is clearly peak frenzy, as far the global television is concerned. No other show has managed to do this in the past half a decade and we doubt any show will come close to its success across geographies and cultures.

With Game of Thrones going on all month, the platform could see a surge of new sign-ups this month. The company announced last week that it had crossed 300 Mn users in India, and is already working with many content creation startups to bring more original programming to its platform. While originals may be the next big ticket item, for now there’s no doubt that Game of Thrones is clearly king of the seven kingdoms of Hotstar.

Update 1: 1.10 PM, April 16, 2019 

Updated Hotstar’s viewership figures for IPL based on press release dated April 16, 2019.

The post IPL Is Hotstar’s Trump Card, But Game Of Thrones Is The Ace Up Its Sleeve appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Reliance Jio is acquiring chatbot maker, Haptik for over INR 200 Cr, to build its own conversational platform on the lines of Amazon’s Alexa, a source close to the development told Inc42.

The transaction is expected to be completed this week. Haptik had last raised $11.2 Mn and counts Times Internet and Kalaari Capital as its investors.

Queries to Haptik over mail and messages did not elicit any response till the time of publication.

According to a company document accessed by Inc42, the company founders have signed the board resolution in an EGM earlier this month regarding the deal. According to the document, Reliance Jio Services Ltd, Haptik founders — Aakrit Vaish and Swapan Rajdev have signed a Business Transfer Agreement.

Haptik: The Power Of Bots

Founded in 2013 by Aakrit Vaish and Swapan Rajdev, Mumbai-based Haptik lets users chat with their voice assistants to complete daily tasks such as online shopping, travel bookings, food delivery among others. The company signed a strategic partnership with Times Internet in April 2016 to further develop its product and improve its AI capabilities.

The company has worked with over 50 brands such as Samsung, Future Group, OYO and KFC. One of the unique points for Haptik as its cofounder Ashish has shared earlier, is that every single chatbot built on the Haptik platform is 100% customised, and all of the customisation is done by its in house professional services team. The company expanded to the US in 2018 and the UK in 2019. It is now looking to focus on English-speaking markets in the coming years.

According to filings accessed by Inc42, in FY18 Haptik reported a total revenue of INR 4.58 Crores (189% increase from FY17) and expense of INR 27.85 Crores (10% drop from FY17). Its net losses for FY18 stand at INR -22.54 Crores.

Is Reliance Preparing To Take Over India’s Internet?

Last year, Reliance merged its Jio Music business with the music streaming app, Saavn, at a combined valuation of $1 Bn.

In light of Haptik’s acquisition, it looks like Reliance is gearing up to create a complete ecosystem of products similar to Amazon Alexa’s ecosystem built for Jio’s vast subscriber base.

In February this year, the Reliance also acquired a vernacular language technology development company, Reverie, picking up 83% stake in the company in a deal worth INR 190 Cr.

Jio’s reach and connectivity and Saavn’s audio streaming technology can now be leveraged along with Haptik and Reverie’s abilities to create a challenger to Alexa and Google Home, albeit with better regional language support.

Reliance itself has hinted at a similar objective earlier. In its press release announcing the acquisition of Reverie, the Mukesh Ambani-led company said that the investment would “further enhance the group’s digital initiatives including digital consumer platforms with multilingual capabilities.”

Meanwhile, Amazon has employed a staggering 40K developers to develop Alexa’s regional language skills, while Google Home is now available in four Indian languages with seven more in development. The battle for India’s next billion users is definitely heating up!

Speaking of Jio, in 2018, it witnessed a massive user growth in contrast to its competitors as well as prominent players like Airtel, and Vodafone. The average percentage change between (January’18 – November’18) for Jio was +4.92 % whereas in the case of Airtel and Vodafone it has been +1.6% and -0.12% respectively. These numbers show that the penetration strategy focused on providing high-speed internet at low cost has turned out to be a success story for Jio.

Acknowledging the booming Indian economy, Reliance is now gearing itself up for optimal capitalisation of the digital data which they have gathered with their Jio product including DTH, mobile wallet and more.

As of 2018, India’s internet user base was estimated to be around 560 Mn, which is just 41% of the total population of India. As more and more people go online, it’s an obvious fact that they will be prone to start using integrated vertical services like payments and entertainment.

After establishing a successful strategy to capture new users coming online through Jio, it looks like Reliance is now bullish on capturing the complete digital entertainment space, the first thing most new internet users consume, as well as leverage the innovation capabilities of Indian startups to further its technological ambitions. The company has backed over four Indian startups in 2019 alone.

Gauging from Reliance’s new found interest in fintech, ecommerce and retail, which are currently the fastest growing sectors of the Indian economy, the company’s latest move shows that it is now fully prepared to takeover the Indian internet.

The post Exclusive: Reliance Is Acquiring Haptik For Over INR 200 Cr To Build India’s Own Alexa appeared first on Inc42 Media.

About 200 US companies are reportedly planning to shift their manufacturing plants to India after the Lok Sabha Elections, the US-India trade advocacy group, the US-India Strategic and Partnership Forum’s (USISPF), said.

While no names of such potential companies have been made public, USISPF president Mukesh Aghi, said in an interview to PTI, “The companies are talking to us about how to set up an alternative to China by investing in India.” These companies are reportedly looking for alternatives to the strict compliance requirements of China’s communist government.

US-India Trade Relations Waver

US-India trade relations have been blowing hot and cold since last year when the US refused to  exempt it from new steel and aluminum tariffs. In retaliation, New Delhi decided in June last year to raise the import tax on some U.S. products including almonds, walnuts and apples.

Things took a turn for the worse after US president Donald Trump announced plans earlier this year to end a preferential trade agreement between the US and India that allows duty-free entry for up to $5.6 Bn worth of India’s exports to the US.

However, in what may be a thawing of hostilities, New Delhi has repeatedly delayed the implementation of the new tariffs on US products.

The US trade advocacy group has also criticised India’s much debated draft of FDI ecommerce rules, calling it regressive and predicted that new rules could potentially harm the consumers.

Make In India To Get A Boost?

Given the country’s domestic-oriented policy decisions such as ecommerce and data localisation rules in the past 12-18 months, the group will look to have a say in the process of forming regulations, Aghi said.

Some critical issues according to the US companies who are looking to migrate are land acquisition and customs duty. The USISPF member companies and the former Assistant US Trade Representative for South and Central Asian Affairs Mark Linscott are reportedly working on a recommendation to enhance India’s exports, and make it a manufacturing hub.

Considering the concern of Indian trader groups about cheap goods coming from China, the USISPF has suggested a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between India and the US.

“You can put barriers to Chinese goods and still have the U.S. providing access to the Indian market and Indian companies having more access to the US market, and issues like Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) would diminish,” Aghi added.

Commenting on the potential investment that these companies would bring to India, Aghi said it will be a substantial amount, “If you look at, our member companies in the last four years have invested over $50 Bn.”

The post US Companies May Shift Manufacturing From China To India, But Demand Say In Regulations appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Fintech unicorn Paytm has announced a new feature to ease repeated and scheduled payments for its merchant partners. This is likely to help merchants make recurring payments for a wide range of services such as insurance companies, home loans and mutual funds investments

Consumers will have the option of choosing their preferred mode of payment like credit cards, debit cards, net banking, Paytm proprietary instruments and saved cards on Paytm for automatic billing based on frequency of their subscription.

Recurring billing makes the process of paying for goods convenient. The customer can consume services without having to worry about monthly bills for the services delivered.

Paytm’s new feature will also cover payment use cases such as content subscriptions, grocery purchases, membership fees for other online services etc.

“Frictionless recurring payments is a critical element of subscription businesses and with this feature on our payment gateway, merchants can now reach out to millions of users for their subscription offerings,” said Kiran Vasireddy, chief operating officer, Paytm.

The Noida-based company said that it processes more than 400 Mn transactions on its gateway business for its merchants.

Regulatory Issues Around Recurring Payments

Last week, The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) received approval from the Reserve Bank of India for implementing e-mandates for both internet banking and debit cards. This will allow users to issue standing instructions to automatically pay their recurring payments using NPCI’s instruments.

In its circular, NPCI has informed all the member banks to take immediate measure and implement both the variants within June 30. The limit for each mandate is set at INR 1 Lakh, and depending on the usage, the organisation will review the limit in due course.

Earlier, the process has traditionally involved paper forms and cheques under the RBI’s electronic clearing services (ECS) and the newer NACH (National Automated Clearing House).

Banks did provide a paperless eSign facility for mandates briefly, in May 2017, but the NPCI discontinued this shortly after the Supreme Court restricted the use of Aadhaar in September, 2018.

The post Paytm’s Brand New Feature Promises To Ease Recurring Payments appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Currently, there are over half a million open software engineering jobs in the US alone. That number is predicted to be over 1.4 Mn by 2020. On the contrary, there are 5 Mn software engineers in India. But here is the irony. While on one side software engineers in San Francisco can make $150 per hour working remotely from anywhere in the world, on the other, the average salary for an Indian engineer is somewhere between $6,600 (entry level) and $11,400 (senior level) per annum irrespective of the type of employment i.e. full time or on outsourced projects.

Over the years, Indian IT companies have outsourced their talent to US companies at a much lower cost. However, it has been proven that if the hardest working software engineers in India are provided with world-class, intensive training, they can be effective remote team members for the US companies, with a potential to earn much more than they currently do or even expect to earn.

“It felt wrong that our [Indian] engineers were working on projects alongside engineers in the US, making less than 10 percent money as the latter for the same work. We wondered if there could be a better way. What if instead of keeping each employee on the payroll, we simply trained them and connected them to US companies on the basis of an income share agreement,” said Ayush Jaiswal, founder, Pesto.

This is the thought that led Jaiswal and his friend Andrew Linfoot to launch an edtech platform which could act as a career accelerator for providing world-class training to India’s top engineering talent to help them gain access to better job opportunities with a much better pay scale which they usually get.

Founded in March 2017, Pesto has today announced that it has raised $2 Mn in its first round of funding led by Matrix Partners, with participation of a group of angel investors including — Swiggy founders, Sriharsha Majety, Rahul Jaimini and Nandan Reddy; Innov8 founder Dr. Ritesh Malik; Posist founder Ashish Tulsian and OIC Capital’s Jack Yeung.

Pesto offers a 12-week intensive training programme to the software engineering talent to help them break into international tech careers via full-time remote jobs, with a 6x increase in salary on an average.

“Remote work is an early trend globally driven by a shortage of high-quality local talent, rising cost of living in key technology hubs and widespread adoption of enabling infrastructures such as co-working and collaboration tools. Pesto is on a mission to build a marketplace for quality remote talent from India and we strongly believe in their skilling led approach,” Rajat Agarwal, Vice President, Matrix India said.

The startup’s first batch which ‘graduated’ 8-9 months ago has witnessed students being placed at jobs with an average salary package of $45K. To date, it has helped 9 students gain offers worth INR 2.8 Cr. combined.

The Long Road to Pesto

Jaiswal grew up in a typical Indian middle-class family and was inspired by what the likes of Steve Jobs were doing in Silicon Valley. He dreamt of landing an IIT seat but unfortunately, that didn’t happen. While he got into an engineering college, he quickly realised that conventional classroom education was not helping him achieve his dreams. He taught himself graphic design — usually not part of a typical Indian engineering curriculum — and started creating websites. In the first year of college, he floated a startup, but could not scale it up due to class work and lack of time.

“For my next startup, I decided to go all in and quit college. I knew my parents wouldn’t take my decision too well,” Jaiswal chuckled.

Entrepreneurship only looks glamorous in magazines, or so they say. Jaiswal spent the next two years near bankrupt, living in an Innov8 (its founder is now an investor for Jaiswal) coworking space and gatecrashed events (sometimes weddings too, he confessed) for free food.

“I tried so many ideas. I launched more than a dozen products — but one after another they all failed. I began to believe that the Silicon Valley dream that I had been pursuing since I was a little kid was all a lie.”

To compound his worries, he was diagnosed with a life-threatening, but fixable, case of tuberculosis. Fixable became his operative word. Startups are fixable too, and that’s when he met Linfoot. Linfoot regaled Jaiswal with stories of working all over the world and how he ended up in Delhi. It was clear to both of them that they wanted to help fulfil the Silicon Valley dreams of Indian engineers which led to the foundation of Pesto.

Understanding The Market To Tailor Your Product

In its initial avatar, Pesto was a consulting company that earned its revenue by capitalising on the massive arbitrage between India and the US in the software engineering job market. Pesto helped upskill Indian software engineers who wanted better pay and opportunities. This included helping meet potential candidates meet the technical requirements of US tech companies, through training.

While they were able to crack deals with large companies in the first three months itself, however, they realised that their revenue model was built on keeping the status quo alive, or to put it in other words, artificially keeping their employee’s salaries low.

While clients loved the idea of taking each Pesto engineer through their own technical interview and hiring process, they didn’t want to have to deal with the tax, legal or logistical complexity of hiring an overseas employee.

“This is when we knew we were on to something BIG. We could easily automate the paperwork and invoicing to help US companies draft standard contracts and pay salaries in US dollars. This would make the hiring process as easy as paying for agency work. We could then provide a reserved desk in our offices so companies wouldn’t have to set up an office in India. Complexity solved,” said Jaiswal. And that’s how Pesto took the current form.

Pesto Program: How does It work?

The startup offers a 12-week intensive training program to students to help them break into international tech careers via full-time remote jobs. Apart from technical skills, it teaches students about the cultural distinctions between the US and India, communication skills, time management for remote work environments, and other soft skills.

The company has also onboarded mentors who have the experience of working in top tech companies in the US such as Tesla, Twitter, Facebook, Uber and more.

If a Pesto engineer decides to change their role or company, Pesto helps them land another job using their partner network, unless they lost it because of unethical reasons.

However, to avoid such situations and to ensure that only quality candidates got admitted into its batches, the startup introduced an online-assessment test to screen candidates. “Interestingly, out of around 45K applications, we accepted only 40 and were able to place the entire batch with a good average salary package,” said Jaiswal.

“By the time students graduate, they have the confidence to believe that their career opportunities are not limited  and that they can participate as equals in the global tech community,” added Linfoot.

Instead of charging an upfront fee, the startup takes a fixed percentage of the engineer’s salary for a period of three years through an income sharing agreement with the employer. For instance, with a package of INR 15 Lakhs per annum, the employee would have to pay Pesto 17% of the salary for the next 3 years.

“It’s understandable that a candidate feels uncomfortable about entering a three-year-long commitment to share income, so a two-week window is given to them to exit the contract without any strings attached,” Jaiswal said.

He further informed, “Since each student is an investment for us, we could only do 6 students per batch because of cash flow issues. Going forward, 50-60 (per month) is the target for the next 6 months.”

India’s Massive Upskilling Challenge

Only a fraction of the 1.5 Mn engineering graduates who graduate in India every year come from top engineering colleges such as IITs. While the quality of engineering education in India is debatable, the curriculum is certainly not in keeping with the latest technologies. Upskilling students is a major challenge for Indian companies and training is often a difficult and cost-intensive task.

In the past few years, several startups have gravitated towards this gap and there’s been plenty of innovation too. HRtech startups such as HackerRank, HackerEarth, Codlity as well as edtech startups such as Udemy, Unacademy, upGrad are some of the notable names moving to upskill India’s engineers and entry-level workers.

IT spending is projected to reach $3.76 Tn globally in 2019, an increase of 3.2% from last year, according to research firm Gartner. It is expected to grow at 2.8% by 2020 to touch $3.87 Tn, and those are projections based on current IT market size; as the market expands so does the spending. There’s a lot of opportunity for companies in IT upskilling such as Pesto Pesto program can be said to be the need of the hour.

This is the market that Pesto is hoping to capture. The world is changing faster than ever and the future belongs to distributed teams with talent no longer being restricted to their location. As Jaiswal said, “There’s a severe shortage of tech talent in certain parts of the world (US, Canada, Europe etc) and India has a large number of undiscovered tech talent that can fill this gap.”

The post Pesto’s Mission Of Upskilling 5.2 Mn Engineers Gets $2 Mn Funding Boost From Matrix & Angel Investors appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of Tata Sons, has invested an undisclosed amount in Ola Electric Mobility as part of its Series A round.

Ratan Tata said, “The electric vehicle ecosystem is evolving dramatically every day, and I believe Ola Electric will play a key role in its growth and development.”

The company plans to use the latest funding to fund its mission to make electric mobility viable at scale. Prior to this, Ola Electric Mobility has raised a total of INR 400 Cr ($56 Mn) from its existing investors including Tiger Global and Matrix India among others. Tata, who is also an early backer of Ola’s parent company, ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd, led this round is personal capacity.

Ola Electric Mobility was set up as an independent entity in March 2019. It is currently running several pilots involving charging solutions, battery swapping stations, and deploying vehicles across two, three and four-wheeler segments.

The company was initially established to enable Ola’s electric mobility pilot program in Nagpur. In 2018, Ola subsequently announced ‘Mission: Electric’ to have 1 Mn electric vehicles running on Indian roads by 2021.

Most recently, Ola raised $300 Mn from South Korean automaker Hyundai Motors along with its affiliate Kia Motors. As part of the deal, Hyundai plans to introduce its electric vehicles in the cab fleet of Indian ride-hailing company Ola by 2021.

Bhavish Aggarwal, cofounder & CEO, Ola considers Ratan Tata as an inspiration and a mentor playing a significant role in shaping Ola’s journey over the years. “I’m very excited to welcome him on board Ola Electric as an investor and a mentor in our mission of building sustainable mobility for everyone on our planet,” he added.

EV Four Wheelers Still At Surface

The Indian electric vehicle segment is currently ripe for disruption. With the continuous push from the government to ensure 30% electric mobility in India by 2030, both local and foreign companies are making their way into this opportunity. Earlier this week, UK-based electric bike company and lifestyle brand GoZero Mobility also announced plans to enter India.

One of the key factors driving this growth in interest is high-demand opportunity in the Indian automotive market, particularly in the two-wheeler segment, considering the vast population of 1.3 Bn. According to a January 2019 Livemint report, India is the world’s biggest market for scooters and motorcycles with annual domestic sales exceeding 19 Mn in the fiscal year ended March 2018 – six times that of car sales over the same period.

However, of the 2.6 Lakh electric vehicles sold in India as of December 2018 (according to FAME India report), a majority 59% of sales came from two-wheelers. Two-wheeler electric vehicles like Ather Energy, Emflux Motors, Hero Electric have already tasted success in this segment. Others like Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, Toyota Motor Corp and Nissan Motor Co are testing the ground to launch two-wheeler electric vehicles in the country, some as early as 2020.

With investors like Tiger Global, Matrix India and now Ratan Tata making investments in Ola Electric Mobility, the timing could not be better for Ola to raise its flag in the Indian four-wheeler e-mobility segment.

However, the month of April saw sales of e-bikes or two-wheelers plummet due to lack of availability. Many two-wheeler models are awaiting recertification under the FAME II scheme, and industry players told Inc42 that the two-wheelers segment suffered a big blow as a result of this process.

The post Ratan Tata Invests In Ola Electric Mobility’s Series A Funding Round appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Indians have always focussed on the use of natural products for personal care and that is visible from the wide use of Ayurveda, Naturopathy, etc. In fact, the country is credited with being the inventor of shampoos back in the 16th century when people started using natural products like reetha (soap berries), amla (Indian gooseberry), and shikakai (Acacia) to shampoo their hair.

With time and rapid growth of the beauty industry, over the shelf products became the norm. The growing demand has led to the use of quick formulas to produce these products which mostly rely on chemicals such as parabens and phthalates. This has led to a scepticism among people on the ill-effects on the body and environment at large and has turned their eye towards organic products. According to reports, the herbal cosmetic industry in India is expected to grow at 12% annually.

Understanding this trend of the rising demand for organic products, right from personal wellness to eatables, many startups are now catering to this need by developing natural products. One of them is Delhi-based Arata, founded by Dhruv Madhok and Dhruv Bhasin, a startup that produces natural, vegan and chemical-free personal care products for both men and women. Arata was founded in 2018 and has sold over 30,000 products so far.

Arata: Humble Beginnings With A Mother’s Recipe

The idea behind Arata came about during a discussion between the two cofounders at a dinner at Madhok’s home on a cold January evening.

The conversation happened to steer in the direction of the harmful effects of toxic and unsafe hair styling products. Adding to the conversation, Bhasin spoke to Madhok about how his mother had been making a natural hair gel at home by boiling flax seeds, that worked just as well as the other famous brands of the world, without any side-effects and promised to send Madhok a small bottle to try. A few days later, Madhok tried it and loved the product. He instantly called Bhasin and asked to meet for a coffee and 24 months later, the first product was sold on the website of Arata.

Arata means ‘fresh and new’ in Japanese. “We import our key ingredients from Japan and were inspired by the Japanese concept of minimalism, which manifests itself in the ingredients we use — as few as possible, keeping the fillers out. It also manifests in our packaging and branding where we keep clean lines and plenty of negative space,’’ says Bhasin.

In the first year of operations itself, Arata delivered over 25K orders and onboarded investors like DSG Consumer Partners, Utsav Somani (AngelList) and Dr. Rajan Raghavachari (former R&D Director, Unilever U.K.) to scale the business further.

“We had the realisation that every personal care product, barring a few oils, had chemicals in them. Some of these were even known to be carcinogens and were banned in North America and Europe, but were still being widely used in India. From there the vision of an honest personal care company that would offer trustworthy and credible products, made from the highest quality of safe and clean ingredients became a dream for Arata,’’ says Madhok.

The Making Of The Products At Arata

Arata has a full range of personal care products including face washes, lip balms, body washes, shampoos, and conditioners with plans to add more products to the pipeline this year. The startup claims to use 100% nature-derived, plant-based, vegan and chemical-free ingredients to produce these products.

The startup sources its ingredients from countries such as Japan and USA as well as from the organic farms across India. Flax seeds, which is the key ingredient in Arata’s products are sourced from organic farms in Andhra Pradesh and are certified as organic.

The startup works with four cosmetologists and Ayurveda experts to develop new products that can add value to the personal care and wellness routines of its customers.

These experts also help the company in its quest to substitute synthetic products with natural products. The startup has also found the floral-based fragrance and essential oils that swap out synthetic fragrances. In the case of surfactants, it uses coconut-based cleansers and soapnut instead of synthetic ones.

“We do spend a significant amount on not only the actual ingredients and importing them, but also on the research and development and testing involved to ensure that the products work just as well, if not better than, traditional personal care products, all while ensuring that not a single synthetic ingredient finds its way into our products,’’ says Bhasin.

The product samples are first tried by the Arata team and their friends and family. After the feedback, the products are finalised and sent for dermatologist safety testing, stability testing, efficacy testing and more.

“Once all the tests have been cleared, the products are sent for production and if the first batch receives the approval from our quality control team, they are launched in the market,’’ emphasises Madhok.

The Competitive Landscape For Arata

Since Arata uses natural products, the prices are higher than usual products available in stores and online marketplaces which contain some amount of chemicals.

“We continue to keep our products affordable and don’t retail at luxury prices to ensure we can cater to as large a customer base as possible without having them break the bank for high quality, safe and non-toxic wellness products. We believe everyone deserves access to safe and honest personal care,’’ says Madhok.

While there is rising concern around the ingredients used in personal-care products and ethical concerns around their testing, the demand versus supply gap is still huge. The number of buyers compared to suppliers are limited owing to:

• The higher cost of production, a high sale price thus reducing the number of purchases.
• The high cost and difficulty in procuring high quality and clean ingredients in India
• High import duties on imported ingredients
• Time consuming and costly R&D requirements
• Lack of enforcement of safe and clean ingredients in the industry

All these reasons have limited the presence of more players in this segment, giving advantage to Arata. Currently, India has a handful of companies such as Karma Ayurveda, The Moms Co, Omved Therapies, Rustic Art, and Biotique, which are focussed on developing personal care products from natural resources like Arata.

The 12 member team is now working towards launching eight new product lines and may also look at entering the offline market in 2020. While many brands are playing catch up in this sector, Arata’s attention to detail when it comes to ingredients and packaging, their commitment to avoid chemicals is hard to match.

Arata was the gifting partner for Inc42’s Mixer.

The post When A Dinner Conversation Led To The Founding Of A Natural, Vegan-Friendly Startup appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Ideas can strike you at any point. Like at a kid’s birthday party for Smartivity Labs’ Tushar Amin and Apoorv Gupta. The two noticed how even the most expensive toys could not manage to grab the attention of children for more than a few minutes. This got them talking about the need for toys that could offer a more wholesome experience and immersive engagement for children.

Gupta went on to discuss this idea with his IIT-Delhi batchmates Ashwini Kumar and Rajat Jain. Kumar, who also happened to be Gupta’s roommate, liked the idea and so did Jain. Coming from a family that’s involved in the importing and wholesale distribution of toys from China, Jain was well aware of the lacunae in this sector.

After a few months of brainstorming, they decided to take the plunge. In 2015, they came up with Smartivity Labs — a startup that designs STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) educational DIY toys, augmented reality-enabled activities, as well as internet-connected toys.

The Smart Pivot

Before Smartivity Labs, the team had come up with a digital subscription-based startup — Yoohoobox that designed arts and crafts activity kits for 3 to 6-year-olds.

“We consider Yoohoobox as our training school. It taught us the fundamentals of the startup world, the toy industry, and retail industry, and the expectations kids and parents have from a product,” said Amin.

However, due to budget constraints, Yoohoobox could only focus on design, or marketing and customer acquisition. They chose to go with designing and therefore had to abandon the digital subscription business model, for retail or in-store sales.

This time, the team faced the major challenge of convincing toy stores to stock its products. The few retailers who signed up did so under the condition that the team sold the toys themselves. Yoohoobox employees spent a few months standing outside toy stores as sales executives, explaining and trying to sell the products to their key target audience — parents.

While painstaking and cost-intensive, this effort proved to be a blessing in disguise as interacting with parents offered the company valuable customer insights and expectations. Additionally, the experience of working with shop owners and external sales staff taught key brand management techniques to the team.

This helped Yoohoobox pivot to Smartivity Labs.

The post With 3000X Revenue Growth In Three Years, This STEM Toys Startup Could Be India’s Answer To Lego appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Technology has touched nearly every aspect of commerce and transaction these days. It’s no different when it comes to borrowing and loans. With Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs) coming to the fore and offering loan products to underserved audiences, the lending market in India has taken a whole different shape in the past 2-3 years. Fintech startup MobiKwik was one of the first digital payments companies to emerge in India, and has also branched out into lending after beginning life as a digital wallet service. The company recently announced an ambitious target of clocking 70,000 fully-digital loans in May, after disbursing 55,000 loans in April 2019.

According to MobiKwik, about 1 Mn users apply for a digital loan on its platform every month. These loans are made available to MobiKwik users in partnership with leading NBFCs. Since the launch of its lending service in 2018, the company claims to have disbursed over 5 lakh loans and is growing at 25% month on month.

Founded in 2009 by Bipin Preet Singh and Upasana Taku, MobiKwik has raised four rounds of funding from investors including Sequoia Capital, American Express, and Net1 of close to $120 Mn. The company offers, booking and payments, lending, wealth management, and insurance services, and its user base comprises over 107 Mn users, 3 million merchants, and 200+ billers.

Speaking on the growth of the credit business, Upasana Taku, cofounder and chief operating officer, MobiKwik, said, “We started out with the objective of providing affordable and accessible financial services to billions of Indians. Over the last one year, our loan products have been well received by customers across tier 1, 2 and 3 towns and cities. With our simple products, easy user journeys and robust payments ecosystem, we have made it possible for lakhs of Indians to get access to digital credit in their mobile app in 90 seconds.”

MobiKwikoffers an extensive portfolio of lending products, which cater to various use-cases and audiences.

Boost: MobiKwik’s personal loan product that offers instant loan disbursal to users and do not require any security. These digitally-processed loans make it possible for users to get the amount in their mobile wallet in just 90 seconds. MobiKwik disburses instant loan amounts as low as INR 1000 going up  to  INR 100K.

MobiKwik Money Solutions: Under this B2B2C model, MobiKwik empowers small and medium merchants to instantly furnish digital loans to walk-in customers in their stores. This approach allows MobiKwik to extend the distribution network of its ‘Boost offering to customers, who have not signed up with MobiKwik directly.

MobiScore: Over the years, MobiKwik has amassed data on user transactions, payment   Using this data,MobiKwik has created a proprietary credit score platform called MobiScore, which is used to finalise loan eligibility for applicants. The loan amount is payable through  equated monthly instalments and the customers can either repay through the MobiKwik app or can choose to let MobiKwik’s NBFC partner auto-debit due amount from their bank account every month.

Digital Lending: The Road Ahead

India witnessed a true fintech wave after the demonetisation drive in 2016. Over the next five years digital lending in India is set to become a $1 Tn market. The total funding in digital lending startups between 2014-2018 has been $1.58 Bn across 138 deals, according to Inc42 DataLabs. This growth is spurred on by the increasing penetration of lending services to rural users in India.

With the lending landscape featuring a long list of players including the likes of Lending Kart, Razorpay, Instamojo, PayU India, Rubique, Loan Tap and others in addition to MobiKwik, the segment is expected to witness huge growth in the coming years, especially with the greater digital and financial inclusion across India’s rural and urban audiences.

The post MobiKwik Looks At Clocking 70,000 Digital Loan Disbursals In May 2019 appeared first on Inc42 Media.

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal and numerous allegations of ignoring user privacy and rampant data collection, Facebook is once again caught in a controversy. This time around, the problem is due to the company not informing users about what it actually does with their posts, videos and photos.

For a long time, Facebook has admitted that it runs analysis and puts user content through data processing to improve the main feed as well as the kind of posts that users will see. A new report this week says that it’s not machines reading your posts.

According to a Reuters report, at least 260 third-party workers scan through user content on Facebook, and that’s just from one company in one location in India. These workers label images, status updates and other posts to understand the context of the post and surface related ads and improve the main News Feed algorithm.

The social network also gets these works to label private posts according to the report. Labelling or data annotation is one of the fastest growing industries as companies race to train AI and machine learning systems. Employees label images, text, logos, and symbols to help computers understand context and contents of the image or text. This is then used to develop consumer-facing AI features such as text OCR or object recognition inside camera apps.

Facebook’s Year of Controversies

Facebook has not yet recovered from the Cambridge Analytica scandal which broke out in early 2018 but had been brewing in the background since mid-2017.

Before 2016, British marketing analytics firm Cambridge Analytica allegedly mined data without user consent through an innocuous Facebook app, which was subsequently used by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) and the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump to run ads, promote disinformation, and spread fake news and misleading content. Trump’s Facebook campaigns proved instrumental in leading him to the White House.

Many aspects of Facebook’s involvement with Cambridge Analytica are still under investigation. Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg were grilled by legislators and lawmakers in the US and UK over its involvement with the British company.

Facebook has tried every step to recover from the PR nightmare that was the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Zuckerberg, at the F8 conference last week, said that Facebook is going to emphasise privacy in its features and services this year onwards. However, the Reuters reports suggest the company has not revealed the full scale of what it does with user data.

How Is Facebook User Data Being Labelled?

The report says that Indian company Wipro has a contract with Facebook for the labelling operations. Wipro runs this operation from its Hyderabad office and 260 ‘workers’ have been hired by Facebook, through Wipro, to manually tag or label photos, posts, links shared on timeline, stories and videos into several category items according to the ‘five dimensions’ that Facebook considers key for its AI datasets.

The datasets are used to improve the AI and machine learning algorithms on Facebook’s platform to improve content and ads suggestions. However, Facebook is running human labelling with no consent from the user. Although it may in the grey area of legality, annotation/labelling of personal posts on Facebook is certainly unethical on the grounds that a user has no idea their private posts are being read by other humans, who may also be Facebook users.  

A Facebook spokesperson told Inc42 that “We’re building AI systems that help people across a variety of Facebook products, from reducing policy violating content to helping people with visual impairments connect better with their friends and family. Labelled data is important to train the models that make this possible.”

What does Facebook’s Privacy Policy Say?

Facebook uses the information any user uploads to personalise features, content, and to improve suggestions and recommendations. Its privacy policy states that “[Facebook uses the information a user provides] to create personalized products that are unique and relevant to you, we use your connections, preferences, interests and activities based on the data we collect and learn from you and others.”

Further, on who has access to this data, it says “We provide information and content to vendors and service providers who support our business, such as by providing technical infrastructure services, analyzing how our products are used, providing customer service, facilitating payments or conducting surveys.”

To clarify to what extent data is shared with the likes of Wipro, the Facebook spokesperson further told Inc42, “We treat the privacy of our users with utmost importance when labelling content for the purposes of improving the user experience for all that use our products.”

What is Data Annotation

As more and more companies embrace AI, the data which goes into teaching the AI system is increasingly becoming proprietary. In such a scenario, the need for such ‘data annotation’ companies is only set to increase with time.

One such company is iMerit, a data-training startup which counts eBay, Getty Images and Microsoft as its clients. Over 1400 employees working in iMerit around the world are trained to label photos on behalf of the clients in a way which eliminates bias. iMerit’s 90% clients are US-based. Another company based out of Kerala, Infolks, which started just three years ago with an investment of INR 25K, now has enough cash to employ 200 people.

The industry, in its early stage is presenting a lot of employment or semi-employment opportunities in tier 2 and tier 3 cities as most of the annotation/labelling work is outsourced by major companies developing AI.

In March, the tech industry body, Nasscom’s senior vice president and chief strategy officer, Sangeeta Gupta said that “This is an emerging sector… in India and everybody has begun to realise the humongous opportunity it presents”

Commenting on the huge opportunity annotation presents in India she further added that “AI requires properly annotated, classified and anonymised data. For this, whether you like it or not, you will use automation but you will also have to use skilled human workforce, and that is the opportunity it presents for India.”

(This story has been written by Ankur Bhardwaj and Nikhil Subramanium)

The post Facebook Responds To Reports Of Indian Workers Labelling Private User Data appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Amtrak, the marketing name given to the passenger railroad service run by the National Railroad Passenger Corporation in the US, is one of the most widely-used and busiest transit systems in the country. In 2016, Amtrak was dealing with major issues in relation to the punctuality of its trains. One in five of its trains was running late and Amtrak turned to German tech major Siemens, which installed sensors on locomotives and recorded data about their movements. The sensors helped detect potential issues before they occurred, and reduced train delays by 33% in 2016, compared to the previous year.

While sensors feel like an obvious solution after implementation, companies still need a push when it comes to adopting such new technology. Thanks to Siemens, Amtrak had joined the Industrial Internet Of Things (IIoT) juggernaut. Simply put, IIoT includes connected sensors, devices and gadgets that are ushering in radical changes for businesses, manufacturing units and corporations.

According to a joint report by IAMAI and Deloitte, in India, Industrial IoT will have the lion’s share of the revenue from the overall IoT by 2020. The overall IoT market is projected to grow to $12 Bn by 2020, according to the report, and within the IIoT segment, the energy and utility sector and the industrial manufacturing sector will together account for roughly 43% of this market.

Three friends recognised the massive potential and opportunity in this space in India and decided to build a company around helping the industrial world adopt IoT. Having been in the enterprise technology space and worked for marquee companies such as Persistent Systems, Amazon, BMC Software, and Bladelogic, the trio –  Ranjit Nair, Vinay Nathan, and Yogesh Kulkarni – believed that they had the expertise to build an entrepreneurial venture in the IIoT space. They were not wrong; in 2013, they launched Altizon, an IIoT tech platform.

Building IIoT For India

Based in Pune, Altizon helps enterprises use machine data to help drive manufacturing decisions and improve operational efficiency. The company is also a digital transformation enabler for legacy enterprises and works towards accelerating smart manufacturing initiatives, modernising asset performance management, and adopting new business models for service delivery.

The company does so with the help of its flagship products — Datonis IIoT platform and Datonis Manufacturing Intelligence Suite (MInt). The former facilitates secure connectivity (support for the most common IIoT protocols) and process IoT data at scale with its stream-analytics engine. It provides the ability to analyse and visualise this data in real-time with its Analytics Notebook service. The platform also provides a set of connectors and an API to integrate IoT data into enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and business intelligence systems (BIS) of its partner enterprises.

Datonis Manufacturing Intelligence Suite, relevant for both discrete and process manufacturers is used for measuring productivity, improving quality, enabling product genealogy and part traceability of the company’s manufacturing assets. It provides a set of business value apps, enterprise integrations, and data services for Operational Intelligence.

With the company dealing with such a massive amount of sensitive client data, it has to ensure that its data security infrastructure and protocols are top notch. On being asked as to how Altizon deals with data security, Nathan claims that the product development process follows universally-accepted protocols and security standards. It has established multi-layered security and uses only validated and certified libraries.

“Moreover, our products and solutions are frequently audited by third-party auditors,” he added.

Altizon has partnered with over 35 companies in their specific domain/vertical and has outsourced its support functions such as legal and finance. With a team of about 50 employees operating out of its India (Pune) and North America office, the IIoT startup primarily caters to the automotive, tyre, chemical, FMCG, metal, and energy & utility industries.

Last year, the IIoT company received its fair share of recognition in India, as well as globally. Inc42’s 42Next list recognised Altizon Systems as one of the 42 most innovative Indian startups of 2018.

In 2018, the global research firm Gartner recognised Altizon in its Magic Quadrant for Industrial IoT (IIoT) report. It was one of the 11 companies worldwide to be included in this report.

The Dawn Of Industry 4.0

Digitalisation has entered every aspect of our lives, and the same is true for businesses, especially in manufacturing. This industry is witnessing a significant transformation in the way products are being manufactured, or rather the processes that enable manufacturing. Such is the impact of this digital transformation that it is being called Industry 4.0 or the fourth industrial revolution.

We have come a long way from steam and hydropower (first industrial revolution), through the era of assembly-line mass production powered by electricity (second revolution) and then the age of computers, robotics, and automation (third revolution). Now data and machine learning are being used along with computing power to create smart, flexible and efficient manufacturing units, supply chains and distribution models or Industry 4.0.

Primarily, there are nine technological components that form the building blocks of Industry 4.0 — autonomous robots, big data, and analytics, augmented reality (AR), additive manufacturing, cloud computing, cybersecurity, IIoT, horizontal and vertical system integration, and simulation.

IIoT is at the forefront of this new phase in manufacturing. According to IOT Analytics, the number of active IoT devices is expected to grow to 10 Bn by 2020 and 22 Bn by 2025. The global Industrial IoT market is predicted to reach $122 Bn in 2021, registering a CAGR of 7.3% through this period.

A separate report from Assocham-EY says IoT has the potential to reach 2 Bn connections in India, thereby unlocking revenues of $11.1 billion by 2022. It also predicted a trillion-dollar digital economy in India by 2022, which would be key to Industry 4.0.

In the race to digitalise manufacturing, Altizon faces competition from a few domestic players such as EroNkan Technologies and Oizom Instruments. Both these startups raised funding this year. According to Nathan, the company also faces frequent completion from PTC’s ThingWorx (the global tech company’s IIoT platform). But Nathan says Altizon’s comprehensive IIoT product portfolio, global rapid deployment capability, and cloud-agnostic stance (no lock-in with any cloud vendor or infrastructure provider) are the three key differentiators and the company’s competitive edge.

The Indian government is also doing its part to accelerate the adoption of IoT and other Industry 4.0 components and create awareness around best practices. In order to do so, it has partnered with various industry bodies to create a thriving environment and take Indian manufacturing to the next level.

One such national initiative is Smart Automated Manufacturing and Rapid Transformation Hub or SAMARTH Udyog. This Department of Heavy Industries initiative introduces a necessary framework for digitalisation in the manufacturing sector by focusing on awareness of technologies, education and training, and proliferation of Industry 4.0 standards. Under this initiative, four centres have been set up at IIT Delhi, IISc Bangalore, CMTI Bangalore, and C4i4 Lab Pune, which work with manufacturing companies in their region to facilitate early adoption of Industry 4.0 standards. Altizon is a founding member of C4i4.

“We are positive that the adoption rate for Industry 4.0 in India will increase rapidly in coming years and Indian manufacturing will reach to next level,” Vinay Nathan.

Altizon Revenue Roadmap

Altizon works on a SaaS model, offering flexible license-based pricing for entire software usage, for both partners and end users. The company also offers premium consultancy for IoT-readiness assessment or data science expertise.

In fiscal 2018-19, Altizon’s revenue funnel has grown 3x has been registering 2x revenue growth for the past several years, claimed Nathan. It also has secured multi-year contracts with over a dozen global industrial majors.

The company recently raised Series A funding of $7 Mn from the Singapore-based subsidiary of automobile manufacturer TVS Motors to fuel its international expansion and IP development. It also counts The Hive, Wipro Ventures, and Lumis Partners as its investors.

According to Nathan, the reason for choosing Pune as its operating base in India was because the city offers a great platform to interact with manufacturers, test and validate the technology, and build customer traction.

Since its inception, Altizon has worked on over 270 IIoT projects and is currently facilitating the digital transformation journey of over 130 enterprises. In the past two years, it has established its presence in North America and European regions and registered continued growth in APAC regions. It plans to expand its footprint in North America and Europe, this year.

The post How Altizon Is Bringing Data-Driven Smart Manufacturing To India With Its IIoT Platform appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Digital nutrition platform HealthKart has raised $25 Mn from Sofina in a fresh round of financing.

HealthKart is an omnichannel healthcare platform, made up of an online portal, over 110 retail stores spread across 40 cities. Owned by Bright Lifecare Pvt Ltd, HealthKart also provides customer education modules for users in topics such as nutrition, fitness and wellness, through trained experts.

The company said it would use the funds to further expand its store network, and plans to use data science and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve its customer-facing offerings.

In a press statement, HealthKart said it has set up a 30 member R&D team, including food scientists and pharmacists, and it’s developing next-gen nutraceuticals or consumable nutrition products built for the Indian market. The company also revealed it is in talks to set up a manufacturing plant, for quicker product development, tighter control on manufacturing and fostering innovative nutrition products.

According to an Assocham report from 2017, the Indian nutraceuticals market is estimated to grow to around $10 Bn in 2022, and that each year $12-15 Bn is being added to the global market, which bodes well for Indian startups looking to go global in this space.

From Sports Nutrition Success to Supplements

Besides its general-purpose nutrition products, HealthKart says it saw double-digit market share for MuscleBlaze, the company’s sports nutrition product. Launched four years ago, MuscleBlaze has helped HealthKart achieve strong brand recall on digital channels. The company plans to build brands and IP in nutrition-adjacent categories such as vitamin supplements, health and fitness supplements and kids nutrition products.

Tanya Sen, Investment Manager at Sofina Asia said what impressed most about HealthKart was the pace set by MuscleBlaze in India. “We look forward to partnering with HealthKart to further expand its brand portfolio and distribution network in the fast-growing nutrition & wellness space in India. We are impressed by the pace at which the management team has scaled the MuscleBlaze brand and are proud to back their commitment to building a range of high quality, authenticity-guaranteed products for the Indian consumer,” Sen added.

Last year, HealthKart raised around $10 Mn or INR 73 Cr in a fresh funding round from Sequoia India and IIFL Alternate Asset Advisors Ltd. in July 2017, the company had raised around $1.01 Mn from Kae Capital. Other investors include Intel Capital, Edelweiss, Marico founder Harsh Mariwala and MakeMyTrip founder and CEO Deep Kalra.

The post Breaking: HealthKart Raises $25 Mn Funding from Sofina appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Earlier today Bengaluru-based Frontizo Business Services, a joint venture between ecommerce giant Amazon and the Ashok Patni Group reportedly set up a new facility in Haryana to focus on providing text and voice-based consumer support for Amazon users in India, who are regional language speakers.

The facility, which will reportedly house 200 to 300 executives, is the latest indicator of the shift in India’s ecommerce sector, and the broader internet services sphere, towards catering to Indian regional language users. With users from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and rural areas slowly catching up with users in metros and urban areas in terms of online shopping, ecommerce marketplaces are moving towards establishing a base for operations catering to non-English and non-Hindi speakers.

Like it did in the metros and larger cities a decade ago, ecommerce is changing the lives of Indians in rural and semi-urban locations. The easy availability of big brands, deep discounts, easy financing, increasingly wider logistics networks and support for payment standards such as UPI have played a key role in increasing ecommerce adoption and penetration in rural India.

At the same time, users in these parts of the country are also getting familiar with using the internet and social media apps in their regional languages. The success of ShareChat and TikTok is a testament to the rise in usage of non-English apps.

While ecommerce companies have been increasing their presence in mid-tier cities and towns for a while now, last year’s Diwali sales in September and October last year underlined the trend. Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal and others had a stellar festive season and clocked billions of dollars worth in sales. And for most players, a big chunk of the new shoppers logged in from Tier 2 and 3 cities and towns.

The Unsung Majority

While English is commonly perceived as the default language for commerce and internet in India,  according to a report by Google and KPMG India published in April 2017, there were 234 Mn Indian-language internet users in 2016 while only 175 Mn English users, and the gap between the two groups is expected to widen going forward.

The report states that nine out of ten new internet users between 2016 and 2021 will use local languages. It also states that by 2021, India would have over 500 Mn internet users who don’t use English as a language for communication or consumption. With such a huge potential audience, it’s no wonder that companies are targeting this burgeoning user segment.

Ecommerce players say that content and customer support in local language would put a larger part of the population at ease when shopping online. For example, when Snapdeal launched a Hindi and Tamil version of the platform, it saw an increased reach within the Hindi-heartland and Tamil Nadu.

Following in Snapdeal’s footsteps, in August 2018, Amazon also begun experimenting with a Hindi interface for its mobile website which marks its first move towards an Indian regional language offering.

In an interview last year, Rajeev Rastogi, director of machine learning at Amazon India said the company is launching a shopping experience in Indian languages and also enabling voice-based search and purchases in vernacular languages. “We use deep learning very extensively in our business — for voice recognition of machine translation between English and other European languages like German, Italian, Spanish, etc. We already have the technology for translating between languages and, of course, in the future some of the Indian vernacular languages will be included to translate,” Rastogi had said.

The Battle For Regional Language Users

Not to be outdone, Walmart-owned Flipkart acquired Liv.ai in August 2018, a speech recognition tech startup that focuses on Indian languages. At the time Flipkart was expected to use the technology to reach out to the next 100-200 Mn customers who are first-time internet users and speak Indian languages. The technology is expected to be used in areas such as transactions, payments, customer support, interaction with sellers on its marketplace and in its logistics arm, eKart.

With deeper internet penetration, both domestic and international companies are looking to reach users beyond the urban space by stepping up their efforts in regional language offerings.

Last week, it was reported that social media giant Facebook is in early talks with several regional content startups in India for investments. It is being speculated that Facebook is also trying to figure out how to structure investments in India. The company has been meeting content startups over the past month and will continue the process.

Korean smartphone maker Samsung is also looking to capture the Indian market by introducing more Indianised products. The company had partnered with domestic operating system developer IndusOS to offer its app store in 12 Indian languages on the entire Galaxy smartphone range.

In October 2018, Google-owned video streaming platform YouTube revealed its plans to grow its business in India via its regional content as it expects viewership to grow by 40% for the contents produced in Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Bengali.

The post As Ecommerce Bug Bites Mid-Tier Towns, Demand For Regional Language Customer Support Rises appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Bengaluru-based social commerce company Wooplr has shut down operations after negotiations for a merger fell through, the company’s former employees said.

“The company has shut down after an internal decision was taken to not go through with the acquisition,” a senior member of the Wooplr team told Inc42 on the condition of anonymity. All the workers have been referred to other companies, the source added.

Calls and messages to the company’s founder Arjun Zacharia went unanswered till the time of publication.

The company has already informed its clients about the temporary shutdown of its operations and has told them that it will take care of the pending payments in the coming months

Despite this, some suppliers are reaching out to the company for pending payments, one as late as May 7.

Wooplr had last raised $8 Mn in Series B round of funding from Sistema Asia fund in February, 2017. Helion Ventures and Amereus Group also participated in this round. Till date, the company has raised close to $13 Mn in total.

In 2014, the company had secured $5 Mn in Series A funding from Helion Ventures and over $140K from MakeMyTrip CEO Deep Kalra and a few others angel investors. The company also has received investments from industry veterans Naveen Tewari, Jaspreet Bindra, Abhay Singhal, Amit Gupta, Piyush Shah, Raghunandan G, and Rajiv Mehta.

The company was also in talks with CDH Investments in last year August, however, the deal didn’t go through. Later, CDH ended investing in Wooplr’s competition, Bengaluru-based social commerce platform GlowRoad in a $10 Mn in a Series B round of funding.

Wooplr was co-founded by Arjun Zacharia and Ankit Sabharwal in 2013 as a fashion discovery platform. Later in 2017, the startup pivoted to full-fledged social commerce model.

Wooplr provided a platform to social sellers to open their online store, add products from the Wooplr catalogue and start selling in less than a minute through social media platforms.

On the backend, Wooplr used to take care of operations such as shipping, payments, returns and customer service. As of October 2018, the company had over 1 lakh products from over 300 brands and was reporting a staggering growth rate of 20% month on month.

Wooplr competes with social commerce companies such as Meesho, Glowroad, Limeroad. These social startups leverage the user bases of social media platforms such as WhatsApp or traditional media platforms to build ecommerce solutions for its customers which are more friendly and personalised.

While social commerce startups were expected to have lower acquisition costs as they tap into the existing social circles, however, this approach has yielded mixed results for the companies as their reach has not extended beyond Tier 1 cities.

Growth in the sector has also not come at the speed that investors originally predicted in 2015, at the height of the start-up funding boom.

The post Exclusive: Social Commerce Startup Wooplr Shuts Down As Merger Talks Fall Through appeared first on Inc42 Media.

In a rare move, more than 4,500 Amazon employees have written a letter to CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, criticising the ecommerce company’s lack of commitment to battling climate change.

The letter, dated April 10 has been published on online blogging website Medium, and its rapidly growing list of signatories includes many prominent software developers, managers and scientists working for the company. The letter has urged Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s board of directors to take concrete steps towards making Amazon more eco-friendly.

“We haven’t disclosed a company-wide plan to reach zero carbon emissions within the timeline required by science. Our goal to reach 100% renewable energy does not have a date for completion,” the letter said.

The move is surprising as Silicon Valley techies rarely speak up against the companies they work for. This is the second major protest by employees of a large software company after about 20K Google employees staged a walkout across 50 Google offices the world over, last year. They were protesting the search giant’s $90 Mn settlement with Android creator Andy Rubin, despite allegations of sexual misconduct against him.

Compiling a list of wasted opportunities by Amazon to emerge as a socially responsible global company, the letter highlights several things which should have been done by Amazon.

Chief among the complaints was Amazon’s donations to US members of congress who voted against climate legislation consistently and Amazon’s practice of buying carbon credits to offset its pollution footprint.

“We recently ordered 20,000 diesel vans whose emissions will need to be offset with carbon credits. Offsets can entail forest management policies that displace Indigenous communities, and they do nothing to reduce our diesel pollution which disproportionately harms communities of color,” the letter says

“The science is clear: we must keep fossil fuels in the ground. – Amazon employees”

Commenting on Amazon’s weak sustainability goals the letter highlights that “Our sustainability goals lack context. For example, we’ve set a goal of at least 50 solar installations in warehouse facilities by 2020. This represents only 6% of buildings in our global fulfillment network and a fraction of our overall carbon footprint.”

The letter also asks Jeff Bezos to prioritise climate impact when making business decisions, including ending all custom solutions specifically designed for oil and gas extraction and exploration.

Finally, the letter says that “In our [Amazon’s] mission to become ‘Earth’s most customer-centric company,’ we believe our climate impact must be a top consideration in everything we do. We have the power to shift entire industries, inspire global action on climate, and lead on the issue of our lifetimes. We ask that you, as leaders responsible for our strategic direction, adopt the climate plan resolution and release a company-wide plan.”

The post Over 4K Amazon Employees Call On Bezos For Swift Action Over Climate Change appeared first on Inc42 Media.

The ink has dried on the blockbuster Walmart-Flipkart’s $16 Bn deal. While the effect of this merger on Flipkart is still under debate, a filing  by the US-based retail giant has now thrown up new insights.

Walmart’s 10-K filing (a mandatory annual report filed by US public companies) showed that Flipkart’s name, along with all the other trade names under its ownership, accounted for $4.7 Bn of the $16 Bn price tag.  

That means for Walmart, close to 30% of Flipkart’s economic value lies in its name along with other brand names it owns!

The valuation seems even more extraordinary because at $4.7 Bn, Flipkart would be the fifth most valued Indian brand name. The company would follow Tata Group, Airtel, Infosys and LIC, which are the top 4 valued Indian brands, according to 2018 report by Brand Finance, a global brand valuation agency.

In India, where companies generally look at the economic value of the company more than the intangibles such as brand value, this is unprecedented.

The Economic Value Of Habits

While Brand Finance defines brand value as the net economic benefit an owner would obtain by licensing the brand on the open market, a broader definition of brand value is derived from a combination of reputation, intent and capability.

To better understand why brand trademark, an asset that largely exists in people’s minds, are so valuable, Inc42 talked to Kartikeya Kompella, a Bengaluru-based branding expert and author of multiple books on the subject. Citing the example of Lifebuoy, which spent crores in the 1990s on advertising to habituate people into washing their hands, Kompella said a big part of determining a brand’s value is about building such habits.

“In India we are creatures of habit. Flipkart and Amazon have driven a huge amount of consumption with discounts and marketing. They have on-boarded people, created accounts and verified addresses and established preferences over a decade. Imagine how much Walmart will have to do to break that habit?” he said.

Essentially, Flipkart has built a loyal user base over the years, introduced them to online shopping, familiarised them with digital payments and created the right market conditions for ecommerce to succeed in India. As a result, a majority of Indians associate online shopping with Flipkart. Now imagine, if Walmart had to replicate Flipkart’s recall or disrupt it. It would have taken the US company many years and a lot of cash – perhaps $4.7 Bn or more.

Just look at how Amazon is burning through billions every year to make a place for itself at the table.

A Lesson For Indian Startups

While it would be any startup’s dream to have their brand valued at $4.7 Bn, Flipkart’s valuation could actually be a steal for Walmart execs who no doubt went over that  ‘Make vs Buy” debate many times before the Flipkart deal.

However for Indian startups this deal highlights the need to give serious thought to the concept of building brand value.

Siddharth Mahajan, partner, Athena Legal told Inc42, “$4.7 Bn attributed to Flipkart trade-marks and brands is significant for startups in India. This will reinforce the value of startups investing in trademarks and other intellectual property protection as these are directly related to the overall valuation of the entity. For consumer facing businesses it is imperative that the brands are not only protected, but also legal actions are brought against third parties trying to use the brands in an illegitimate manner.”

Mahajan added,  “Hopefully with the numbers attributed to brands and trade names of Flipkart, Indian companies including startups will spend more resources in protecting their IP not only in India but also globally.”

While perceived value and loyalty creation are the major forces that underpin marketing and brand management. In our highly fragmented, digital environment, the smartest firms are the ones who understand these intangibles and work on building their branding into the very heart of their operations

As David Ogilvy (widely regarded as the father of advertising) once said, “Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand.”

(Co-written by Bhumika Khatri and Aditya Kondalamahanty)

The post What’s In A Name? $4.7 Bn If It Is Flipkart, Says Walmart appeared first on Inc42 Media.