Indian edtech Unacademy cuts another 250 jobs

Indian edtech giant Unacademy is laying off about 250 employees. This is the latest in a series of job cuts at the company after schools reopened across the country following the pandemic lockdowns.

The Bengaluru-headquartered startup, valued at $3,4 billion in its last funding in 2021, is letting go of 100 people in marketing, business and product, and about 150 in sales, according to a source familiar with the situation. The layoffs bring Unacademy’s total job cuts to about 2,000 since the second half of 2022.

An Unacademy spokesperson confirmed the layoffs but didn’t elaborate on how many individuals were impacted.

The spokesperson said the restructuring exercise was “necessary” for staying on the company’s goal of reaching profitability. The startup counts General Atlantic, SoftBank and Peak XV among its backers.

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Awign bags $24.5 Mn in series C, Mynavi now holds 73% stake

Awign has raised Rs 203.5 crore or $24.5 million from Japan-based Mynavi Corporation, which will now control a 73% stake in the Bengaluru-based HR tech startup, according to the company’s filings with RoC.

In May, the board at Awign passed a special resolution to issue 11,485 Series C CCPS at an issue price of Rs 1,77,206 each to raise Rs 203.5 crore or $24.5 million, its regulatory filings show.

This coincided with Awign’s public announcement that MyNavi will control the majority stake in the former. However, the startup had not divulged more details of the transaction at the time.

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Agritech startup Arya.ag raises $29 Mn at valuation of $325 Mn

Agritech startup Arya.ag has raised Rs 242.36 crore approximately ($29.2 million) from existing investors. This is the first round of investment for the Noida-based company since January 2022.

The board Arya.ag has passed a special resolution to issue 53,695 CCPS at an issue price of Rs 45,137 each to raise the aforementioned sum ($29.2 million), its regulatory filing accessed from the RoC shows.

The company has received Rs 134.46 crore from previous backers: Asia Impact and Quona Capital through Quona Blue Earth and Accion Quona. 

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Oyo raises $50 Mn from InCred at $2.38 Bn valuation

Oyo has raised Rs 416.85 crore (approximately $50 million) from InCred Wealth and Investment. The funding is coming after a gap of almost three years for the Gurugram-based hospitality unicorn.

The board at Oyo has passed a special resolution to issue 14,37,41,379 Series G CCPS at an issue price of Rs 29 each to raise Rs 416.85 crore or $50 million, its regulatory filing accessed from the Registrar of Companies (RoC) shows.

Oyo will use these proceeds for growth, global expansion (including acquisitions), and enhanced business plans, according to the filings.

As per TheKredible estimates, the company has been valued at around Rs 19,756 crore or $2.38 billion post-allotment. Importantly, the new investor will command a 2.11% stake in the company (post allotment).

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Goat Brand Labs raises $21 Mn in debt and equity

E-commerce roll up company Goat Brand Labs has raised $21 million in debt and equity from investors including BlackRock, Mayfield, NB Ventures, and others. The fresh funding has come after a gap of more than two years for the Bengaluru-based company.

Goat Brand also added that the round will be closed at about $30 million. The new funding will be utilised to fuel the growth of its portfolio brands such as Chumbak, trueBrowns, The Label Life, Pepe Jeans Inner Fashion, Voylla, Petcrux, and Nutriglow.

GOAT is a marketplace roll-up platform that acquires direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands and scales them with its expertise. The company has around 19 subsidiaries under its portfolio.

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Byway is using AI to help travelers slow down and take the scenic route

Solo founder Cat Jones took the plunge on setting up a travel business right around the time the pandemic was hitting Europe in March 2020. Fast-forward to summer 2024 and her curated package tour business, Byway, is announcing the close of an oversubscribed £5.04 million Series A round (around $6.4 million at current exchange rates).

Jones’ conviction that slow and more sustainable travel — trips whose unique selling point is they’re programmed to be flight-free, going overland (and sea) by train, bus or ferry, allowing holidaymakers to take in the scenery and dodge the crowds as they unwind in more off-the-beaten-track locations — is on a roll. Growth has been 3x year-on-year, with more than 4,200 trips sold to date.

Environmental concerns are one major factor encouraging holidaymakers to find ways to reduce flying. Meanwhile, many popular European city-break destinations — from Amsterdam and Barcelona to Rome and Venice — and even well-known holiday islands are not as hospitable to tourists as local communities struggle with the effects of over-tourism.

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Deep tech startups with very technical CEOs raise larger rounds, research finds

SaaS founders trying to figure out what it takes to raise their next round can refer to Point Nine’s famous yearly SaaS Funding Napkin. (The term refers to “back of the napkin” plans or calculations.)

Now European hardware deep tech teams have a similar resource from First Momentum, a pre-seed fund investing in technical B2B and deep tech startups.

With its Deep Tech Hardware Napkin, the German VC firm hopes to democratize knowledge and benchmarks on funding, team, product ,and commercialization, broken down by stage. It focuses on Europe’s blossoming deep tech sector, which gives quite different results from what one might see in global SaaS.

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More ex-military officials are becoming VCs as defense tech investment reached $35B

The distance between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon just keeps getting smaller. As venture capitalists continue to pour money into defense tech startups, they’re turning to a new hiring pool: veterans and ex-Department of Defense officials.  

Andreessen Horowitz hired Matt Shortal, an ex-fighter jet pilot, as its chief of staff; Lux Capital brought on Tony Thomas, former head of U.S. Special Operations Command, as an adviser; and Shield Capital’s managing partner Raj Shah served in the Air Force. 

Hiring ex-military personnel can be a major advantage for firms, giving them “an understanding of what problems are actually on the battlefield,” instead of just “sitting in Silicon Valley and theorizing,” Ali Javaheri, PitchBook’s emerging tech analyst, told TechCrunch.
The boon in ex-military hiring comes alongside the continued defense tech investment craze.

Silicon Valley pumped almost $35 billion into defense tech startups in 2023, and over $9 billion so far this year, according to a report released last week by PitchBook. This trend is anchored by some blockbuster fundraises. Shield AI, which produces an AI-powered drone pilot system, raised $500 million last year, and Anduril, Palmer Luckey’s defense tech startup, reportedly secured a fresh $1.5 billion in funding last month. Although funding into the sector has slowed this year, Javaheri said it’s still shown “resilience” in the context of a brutal overall fundraising environment.

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AI-powered Regard nabs $61M to find missed illness, boost hospital revenue

People in tech often say that data is the new oil. That phrase, coined by British mathematician Clive Humby, of course implies that data is valuable.

Data about a person’s health can also provide meaningful insights and improve outcomes, but only 3% of patient data is currently used by physicians, according to the World Economic Forum.
Although doctors know they can glean useful information from patient data, they don’t have the time to review every detail in the medical record.

Regard, a digital health startup founded in 2017, wants to help physicians save time and increase the accuracy of diagnosis by analyzing patients’ health data using AI. 

Regard announced on Thursday that it raised a $61 million Series B round led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from Cedars-Sinai Health Ventures and existing investors TenOneTen, Calibrate Ventures and Techstars. The company is now valued at $350 million, according to a person familiar with the matter. 

The company’s software mines thousands of data points in a medical chart and presents data in a way that allows doctors to detect health conditions more easily.

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HerculesAI was working with large language models long before it was cool

HerculesAI (formerly Zero Systems) has been working at automating professional services since 2017, originally concentrating on the legal industry. As part of that, it has actually been building large language models for several years, long before the idea entered the public consciousness. As such, it found itself in the right place at the right time when ChatGPT popped onto the scene in late 2022, and suddenly everyone was talking about LLMs.

Today, the company announced a $26 million Series B investment to help keep building on its recent momentum.

Alex Babin, company CEO and co-founder, says that they had been working on small models since around 2020, with half a billion parameters to 2 billion parameters, and running them on edge devices for compliance purposes, but prior to the emergence of ChatGPT nobody paid much attention to that aspect of their solution.

“It was maybe eight or nine months before ChatGPT, and I remember speaking to our clients, explaining to CIOs what an LLM is — and no one cared,” Babin told. By November that year, of course that would rapidly change and suddenly everyone was interested in the concept. That shift has helped drive rapid growth in the business over the last year.

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Infra.Market raises Rs 150 Cr debt led by Yubi

Infra.Market has secured Rs 150 crore (approximately $18 million) in debt financing over the past two months. The debt infusion for the Mumbai-based firm follows the $50 million equity round from the Mars Unicorn Fund — a joint venture of Liquidity Group and MUFG.

The board at Infra.Market has approved a special resolution to issue non-convertible redeemable debentures to raise Rs 150 crore. Previously, the committee had approved a resolution to raise up to Rs 500 crore through debentures. The new infusion is the tranche of Rs 500 crore.

Yubi has invested Rs 80 crore while Raymond Limited, IKF Home Finance, and Samunnati Financial (through their NBFC treasuries) participated with Rs 25 crore, Rs 25 crore, and Rs 20 crore, respectively.

Founded by Souvik Sengupta and Aaditya Sharda in 2016, Infra.Market sells construction materials, infrastructure goods, and technical equipment. It is targeting the growing construction materials market, with a strong focus on the infrastructure sector.

The company caters to both institutional customers (B2B) and retail outlets (D2R) in the construction materials sector. As per the company, it supplies across 16 states in India and also exports to markets such as Dubai, Singapore, Jordan, and Italy, among others.

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Deepinder Goyal enters billionaire club as his holding in Zomato crosses $1 Bn worth

Deepinder Goyal, founder and CEO of Zomato, has entered the billionaire dollar club as the value of his holdings in the foodtech firm surpassed Rs 8,400 crore.
With this, Goyal joins the ranks of Sachin and Binny Bansal, Nikhil and Nitin Kamath, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Byju’s Reveendran, and Ritesh Agarwal who hit a similar high at some point with their startups’ growth and valuation.

As of March 31, 2024, Goyal owned a 4.19% stake in Zomato and had 36,94,71,500 shares. Since the Info Edge-backed firm recently hit its all time high share price ~Rs 232, the value of his personal holding crossed $1 billion.

Zomato currently has a market capitalization of Rs 2,01,343 crore or $24.25 billion (as of 11.27 AM IST on July 15). With 36,94,71,500 equity shares, Deepinder Goyal’s holdings are valued at Rs 8,423 crore ($1.01 billion)

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Lhoopa raises $80M to spur more affordable housing in the Philippines

A lack of affordable housing is a growing problem worldwide, even in emerging markets with significant demand. That’s in part because traditional developers and real estate companies focus on serving people looking for luxury houses, and want to avoid the immense operating expenses associated with affordable housing, which eat into gross margins over time.

The Singaporean-headquartered startup uses a mix of technology and decentralized operations, partnering with local professionals, including brokers and building contractors, to solve the problem specifically for people looking to buy affordable homes. The six-year-old startup has kicked off its service in the Philippines, a market with unfilled demand of around 6.5 million units for low-income earners.

Marc-Olivier Caillot (co-founder and CEO) and Sabrina Tan (co-founder and president) founded Lhoopa in 2018, shortly after moving to the Philippines from the U.S. and experiencing firsthand the lack of platforms for searching for affordable housing.

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Google backs Indian open source Uber rival

Google has become one of the latest investors in Moving Tech, the parent firm of Indian open source ridesharing app Namma Yatri that is quickly capturing market share from Uber and Ola with its no-commission model.

Bengaluru-based Moving Tech has raised $11 million in a pre-Series A funding round co-led by Blume Ventures and Antler, the startup said. Google, which has pledged to invest $10 billion in India, participated in the round.

Namma Yatri works atop the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), an interoperable scheme backed by the Indian government is aiming to democratize e-commerce in the country. Namma Yatri’s app connects customers with auto-rickshaw and cab drivers without charging either party for rides. Instead, the startup collects a small monthly fee from its driver partners.

Uber and Ola, in comparison, charge their driver partners as much as 25%-30% of the ride cost, and have refused to join the ONDC network for their core mobility offerings.

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Exa raises $17M from Lightspeed, Nvidia, Y Combinator to build a Google for AIs

While there’s no shortage of startups aiming to replace Google with AI-powered search (we’re looking at you, Perplexity), a startup called Exa has a different idea: a Google for AI.

Humans aren’t the ones who desperately need a new kind of search engine, Exa’s founders believe. Rather, as AI increasingly takes hold in corporate and consumer life, it is the AI platforms themselves that must regularly venture out onto the internet to search for information and return bona fide answers, not hallucinations. And they can’t just type their requests on their keyboards.

Exa is building a tool that allows AI models to perform something like a web search, but with an AI-native twist.

The co-founders bought a million dollars’ worth of GPUs (which were easier to get in those days) and, using a vector database and embeddings (not a classic transformer-based LLM), they began to build a machine learning model trained to natively understand links rather than words and sentences.

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YC-backed CrowdVolt shakes up the secondary ticket market with its bid-ask model

The current secondary ticket exchange system is fraught with several issues, such as tickets being resold at prices much higher than their face value, exorbitant fees and other additional costs. Not to mention the risk of purchasing counterfeit or invalid tickets, resulting in a disappointing user experience. 

CrowdVolt wants to disrupt the space with its user-centric, bid-ask ticket marketplace, which aims to give buyers an affordable ticket price with full transparency. A graduate of Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch CrowdVolt operates on a model similar to sneaker resell marketplace StockX, meaning buyers submit bids on tickets, and sellers set asking prices. When a bid aligns with an ask, the transaction is complete.

The platform’s bid-ask model could appeal to concertgoers because it allows them to name their desired price. Traditionally, secondary ticket marketplaces are focused on how much the seller wants to sell a ticket for, but CrowdVolt changes that. CrowdVolt also enables buyers and sellers to message each other, making ticket-buying less anonymous.

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After Tesla and OpenAI, Andrej Karpathy’s startup aims to apply AI assistants to education

Andrej Karpathy, former head of AI at Tesla and researcher at OpenAI, is launching Eureka Labs, an “AI native” education platform. In tech speak, that usually means built from the ground up with AI at its core. And while Eureka Labs’ AI ambitions are lofty, the company is starting with a more traditional approach to teaching. 

San Francisco-based Eureka Labs, which Karpathy registered as an LLC in Delaware on June 21, aims to leverage recent progress in generative AI to create AI teaching assistants that can guide students through course materials. 

Eureka Labs envisions AI assistants or personalities that would work with a human teacher to allow “anyone to learn anything,” according to Karpathy, who posted the news on X. Teachers would still design the course material, but they’d be supported by this AI assistant. The startup does not yet appear to have built or tested the efficacy of integrating AI assistants into the classroom. At least one Georgia State University studyfound that AI teaching assistants helped some students get better grades.

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