ETtech

2008 – The subprime crisis breaks in the US with the demise of Lehman Brothers and later in that financial year, an industry icon, Satyam, collapses. Both these events could have taken down less resilient industries and companies or at least led to a temporary decline in fortunes. As chairman of Nasscom that year, it was my task to boldly predict that the industry would weather the storm and still grow, and grow we did, albeit in single digits.This year, we have seen the sudden decline of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and the…

October 2021. India was slowly emerging from a devastating second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. In Bengaluru, Kiran Prasad was beaming. He was aggressively expanding his cloud-kitchen startup Hygiene BigBite and was just coming out of a $15-million fundraise from marquee investor Falcon Edge (now Alpha Wave Global).His business had grown from six to 50 kitchens spread across four cities in just 10 months and he was looking forward to opening 100 kitchens by 2022. But the virus retreated, restaurants opened their doors,…

Funding activity in the Indian startup ecosystem saw another muted week. A total of $87 million was raised across 12 rounds between March 18 and March 24, according to data provided by market intelligence firm Tracxn.ETtechThis represents an 86% dip in the amount of funding, compared to the same period last year, when $609 million were poured into startups.ETtechAccording to Tracxn data, no late-stage startups received funding this week, with early-stage startups picking up $68.2 million. This represented 78.5% of the…

The Indian startup ecosystem saw a jump in funding for the period between March 11 and March 17, 2023, compared to last year at the same time, largely due to late-stage investments in omni-channel eyewear company Lenskart and Walmart-owned fintech PhonePe.Total of $782 million was poured into Indian startups in this week across 25 rounds, a 34% jump compared to the same period last year when startups raised $582 across 66 rounds, according to data provided by market intelligence firm Tracxn.ETtechThe bump up in funding…

A slew of developments coming together, starting with the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) Financial Group announcing steps to shore up capital after suffering losses on its securities portfolio, has sent ripples across the tech investment ecosystem, and has unnerved prominent venture capitalists. What happened at SVB has its genesis in the rising interest rates, and while the bank would have been able to bear a single shock, it was subjected to stress from two different directions. Here’s a breakdown of how events transpired at…

Indian startups received $140 million in funding over the week across 20 rounds, 90% lower compared to the same period last year when $1.43 billion came in as across various companies, according to data from market intelligence firm Tracxn. ETtechCompared to last week, startups saw a dip of 69% in funding, from $450 million raised across 26 rounds.Supply-chain financing platform Mintifi bagged the biggest share of the funding this week by picking up $110 million in a late-stage funding round led by Premji Invest. This…

The crisis at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in the US has rattled some Indian investors and founders running SaaS companies with accounts at the lender. As the bank's stock lost over 60% of its value on Thursday, venture capital funds checked in with homegrown startups, especially those headquartered in the US, about how much of their capital is held at SVB Financial Group. While late-stage Indian-origin SaaS (software as a service) firms like Zenoti told ET that they moved out of SVB last year, early-stage SaaS firms do bank…

The Indian government is considering pulling the plug on its Rs 10,000-crore Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric Vehicles (EV) in India or FAME-II scheme after the next financial year, ET reported on March 7.The subsidies, which were seen as a significant boost for the burgeoning EV sector, hit a roadblock when allegations of misusing the sops by providing misleading information and wrongfully declaring imported components as locally sourced sprang up last year.Why is the government mulling scrapping the subsidy…

The Electric Vehicle ( EV) based ride-hailing story, which began unsuccessfully with an $8 million foray by Ola in the Western city of Nagpur in 2017, has lately seen renewed action with dominant players Ola and Uber planning big moves even as startups like BluSmart have flipped the typical model of cab-aggregators.While Uber recently signed a deal with Tata Motors to buy 25,000 electric cars, Ola earlier said it will roll out 10,000 EV cabs in Bengaluru over a period of a year. The upstart in the segment, BluSmart…

It would be an understatement to say that the last three years have been about change.From an era of relative predictability to a more uncertain, more volatile environment, emerging tech shifts, geopolitics, and war, clearly, we are in an era of a no normal world.Does a no normal mean a prolonged global downturn? I would say not.It means an environment of more rapid shifts and differentiated growth based on the ability of companies to invest in the right opportunities.Technology spending has also witnessed massive shifts…