Finshorts | Published on 28th Sept, 2020 | 1 min read
MUMBAI: Paytm’s wealth management subsidiary Paytm Money has gone live with its stockbroking service for all customers. The company aims to register 1 million new retail investors on the platform by close of the ongoing fiscal year in March 2021, according to Varun Sridhar, the newly appointed CEO of Paytm Money, leveraging on the demand for equity trading among first-time users. According to a statement shared by Paytm with ET, the platform’s early access version saw 220,000 users registering on Paytm Money for retail stockbroking. Paytm Money faces competition from Zerodha, Upstox and Groww, among startups, and traditional players such as ICICI Securities and Motilal Oswal. In an interview with ET last month, Sridhar had explained Paytm Money’s business model as a mix of commissions on intraday trades, interest income on loan against shares, and subscription income from select services that will be launched over the next few months in a 60%-20%-20% mix, respectively. “The platform witnessed higher adoption from tier 1 cities such as Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Jaipur and Ahmedabad. Smaller cities such as Thane, Guntur, Bardhaman, Krishna and Agra are also showing high traction,” Paytm said. The Bengaluru-based Paytm Money has also set plans to launch more complex features on the platform, including commodity and derivative trades by next year, Sridhar had told ET..
Finshorts | Published on 28th Sept, 2020 | 1 min read
BENGALURU: Global direct-to-consumer tea brand Vahdam Teas has partnered education technology startup Byju’s to digitally tutor less privileged children of tea estate workers from about ten tea estates in Darjeeling. By the end of the academic year, the partnership plans to expand to 20 tea estates and cover about 50,000 children across tea-growing regions in India. The five-year-old homegrown tea brand, popularised by international celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Mariah Carey, launched the social initiative in 2018, where it earmarked minimum 1% of its revenues for the education of tea-estate workers’ children. India is the largest consumer of tea, accounting for nearly 30% of global tea production. According to experts, the country consumes tea ten times more than coffee. The premium tea startup added that tea is the second largest employer of organised labour only after railways providing direct employment to approximately 1 million, of whom 51% are women. About 10 million people derive their livelihood from tea through forward and backward linkages.
Finshorts | Published on 28th Sept, 2020 | 1 min read
It has wreaked havoc in the education system with the closure of academic institutions. With everything being virtual, the schools and colleges are leveraging new age technology solutions to empower remote learning for students of all age groups. MasterSoft, a ERP solutions provider in the country takes on streamlining the everyday work processes of schools, colleges, and universities through its integrated cloud-based solution. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted the years old conventional system to virtual education models. To implement this seamless transition, MasterSoft features comprehensive ERP solutions that support digital transformation and motivate immersive learning experience. MasterSoft bets on versatile solutions that enable the students and teachers to adapt to the new normal. The secured solution enables the teachers to create competitive question banks, prevent malpractices during the online examination, and provide data-driven reports to identify the learning gaps of the students.
Finshorts | Published on 28th Sept, 2020 | 1 min read
The GlobalTM diagnostic kit, developed by Bengaluru-based Equine Biotech, got approval from the Indian Council of Medical Research to join the list of made-in-India diagnostic test kits for Covid-19. The kit uses the Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction method of testing. “Our startup has been working on testing for coronavirus infections for many years, even before the COVID-19 pandemic started. This experience has helped us engineer the kit for COVID-19,” said Tatu. This “Sensitive, rapid, and affordable COVID-19 diagnostic kit” is easy to use with 100 percent specificity, meaning there are no false negatives, according to the start-up. The test kit shows results relatively faster than those available in the market, IISc said in a statement. “Equine Biotech is looking to licence the above kit for large scale manufacturing and sale,” the statement added. “The agreement would involve tech transfer and support in manufacturing of kits. We are looking at med-tech companies with experience in distribution and marketing of diagnostic kits,” it further added.
Published on 26th Sept, 2020 | 1 min read
Small businesses in India, already struggling amid the pandemic, are now having to repay mounting debt after a loan holiday ended last month. The Reserve Bank of India gave borrowers a six-month freeze on their loan repayments, which ended on Aug. 31, with about a third of India’s $1.8 trillion outstanding loans being deferred under the program. Businesses still trying to cope with a collapse in demand must now figure out how to pay back their loans or face closure. “The Reserve Bank should ask banks to extend the moratorium,” said Philip, managing director of Cosmos Agencies LLP. “Else, I may have to resort to cut capital expenditure and staff retrenchment.” The central bank has provided some relief to borrowers by allowing banks to extend the moratorium and restructure loans, but the process isn’t automatic. Lenders can grant extensions of as long as two years, and have until the end of the year to pick which loans to recast and until June 2021 to get it done. Withhold Payments Banks are against extending the loan payment freeze as they see it as a strain on their finances and an opportunity for borrowers – who have the capacity to repay – to withhold payments.
Published on 26th Sept, 2020 | 1 min read
MUMBAI: Wellbeing Nutrition, a startup founded by Mumbai based Avnish Chhabria, has raised angel funding from marquee investors to scale up operations in the fast growing startup. The investors include Ashutosh Valani and Priyank Shah, the co-founders of Beardo, who had recently sold their company to Marico, family office of Nikhil Gandhi, TikTok India CEO, and well known angel investors Harsh Vardhan Bhandari and Jeenendra Bhandari. “The investors have bought a minority stake in the startup. The funds would be utilised to launch new products, scale up its existing product volumes and to acquire talent,” said a person aware of the development. A spokesperson for Gandhi Investments Pvt. Ltd, the family office of the TikTok India head, responding to an ET query said, “We refrain from divulging any details on our family investments. You may connect with Wellbeing Nutrition for more details. But we can confirm we have made the investment.” The investment comes at a time when many well known angel investors are looking at trends amidst Covid pandemic.
Published on 26th Sept, 2020 | 1 min read
BENGALURU: Chqbook, a fintech startup focused on small business owners such as kiranas, merchants and chemists, has launched a suite of services, including current account for daily transactions, short to long-term business loans and insurance products on its platform. Many of these small mom-and-pop business owners currently depend on manual ledgers to record daily transactions, and some do not even own a bank account, without a which access to credit is almost impossible. Chqbook said it plans to address this gap by opening current accounts and providing financial products such as insurance and credit access to help bring small business owners to the formal economy. The three-year-old start-up already has over 300,000 customers across the top 25 cities and on-boards over 25,000 customers on its platform every month for various products and services catering to small business owners. “Chqbook’s mobile app brings together all the financial transactions a small business owner must handle, now available on demand and at their fingertips. Our ‘financial control center’ aggregates a simple to use current account, traditional khata transactions, lending, and insurance. It brings all daily transactions in one place making them easy to access, so that small business owners can focus on what they do best – running and growing their businesses,” Vipul Sharma, founder, and chief executive, Chqbook said in a statement.
Published on 26th Sept, 2020 | 1 min read
Japanese business-to-business ecommerce company MonotaRO is set to invest $15 million in a joint venture with Emtex Engineering, the holding company for Industrybuying. The joint venture will only include Indusybuying’s small and medium enterprise business and the company’s large enterprise supply business will continue to function independently, the company said in a press note on September 25. MonotaRO had first announced the deal in the Tokyo Stock Exchange on September 23. TechCircle in a report said through the deal, MonotaRO will pick up 51.6 per cent stake in the joint venture with Industrybuying. In the press note, the Gurugram-based startup said this deal will help Industrybuying access global expertise and infrastructure in this business. Industrybuying is backed by large VCs like Beenext, Saif Partners, Kalaari Capital and others. Founded in 2013 by Swati Gupta and Rahul Gupta, the platform sells industrial products online for large businesses operating across 40 categories of products.
Published on 25th Sept, 2020 | 1 min read
The online grocery delivery market is set to become $18.2 billion in size by 2024, from around $1.9billion in 2019, found a report by Redseer and BigBasket released today. The share of online out of the total food and beverages industry is set to grow to 2.3 percent from 0.3 percent in the next four years, the report titled ‘Online Grocery: What Brands Need to Know’ has predicted. This report highlights that growth will be slow for traditional retailers and aided by Covid and its effects on digitisation online grocery will grow rapidly and eat out a small chunk from the total retail business. While online will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 57 percent, the organised retail segment which includes the likes of Reliance Fresh, Spencer’s, DMart and More will grow at a CAGR of 16 percent. The online grocery space in India, saw heightened activity since 2011 with the first set of players BigBasket, Grofers, followed by new players like Milkbasket, Amazon, Flipkart in this sector and recently others like Zomato, Swiggy and Reliance Jio. Further working urban mothers prefer online shopping because of time constraints and tier two consumers who go online for the varied choices.
Published on 25th Sept, 2020 | 1 min read
Homegrown content sharing platform ShareChat has announced a $40 million fund raise in a Pre-Series E round from Pawan Munjal, the Chief Executive and Chairman of Hero MotoCorp, and Ajay Shridhar Shriram, Chairman of DCM Shriram. The current round of funding will be utilised to drive growth for the company’s newly launched video platform Moj. ShareChat and Moj together claim to having over 240 million monthly active users currently. In April last year, Twitter led ShareChat’s Series D funding round along with SAIF Partners, Lightspeed Ventures and India Quotient. The trio have also been involved with ShareChat as investors since its early days. ShareChat recorded over 15 million downloads in just 36 hours of the app ban. With the new round, ShareChat’s total funding now stands at $264 million.
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