funding winter

The ongoing funding winter and concerns over profitability have not deterred homegrown unicorns from onboarding top talent. This and more in today’s ETtech Top 5.Also in this letter:■ ETtech Deals Digest ■ IT stocks tumble on Accenture guidance cut■ Reddit stock price soars post market debutProgramming note: There won’t be an edition of ETtech Top 5 and Morning Dispatch newsletters on March 25 on the occasion of Holi. Happy Holi to all our readers. Do stay tuned for all the news and updates on ETtech.com.Top unicorns…

‘Startup Mahakumbh’ can bolster investor confidence and help shorten the funding winter that new enterprises have been facing, said a member of the committee that’s organising the three-day mega event for startups, investors and incubators in the national capital next month.Ahead of the March 18-20 event, which will see the startup ecosystem discuss issues ranging from funding and customers to markets and governance, the event’s organising committee members — Sanjeev Bikhchandani, vice-chairman of Info Edge, Prashanth…

India’s startup companies are rewarding and ringfencing critical talent more than ever, amid continuing job cuts and a shift in focus to profitability from business growth in a sector hit by a protracted funding winter.Companies such as UpGrad, Plum, Simplilearn, Eruditus, Shiprocket, Urban Company, CashKaro and Simpl are rewarding their top performers with disproportionately high increments, stock options, performance-related bonuses, non-monetary incentives, larger or global roles and accelerated promotion…

Amid what is being called the ‘global funding winter’, if investors are bullish on one area, it's generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Indian GenAI startups have received a cumulative investment of $700 million in the last three years, showed estimates by technology industry apex body Nasscom.The country now has over 100 genAI startups and the funding received by new genAI ventures such as Hindi LLM maker Sarvam AI, as well as Adobe’s acquisition of Bengaluru-based Rephrase.ai last year are “good validations” of…

Startups must brace for further down rounds in 2024 as valuations could fall by nearly a third compared with 20-25% now amid a lingering funding winter and an increase in the number of companies looking to raise cash, says Deepak Padaki, president of Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy’s investment firm, Catamaran Ventures. The family office has backed around 27 private firms including Acko, Udaan, PaperBoat and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. In an interview with ET’s Beena Parmar, Padaki, who joined the company last August, also…

A total of 11 startups raised $511.47 million in the December 9-15 week, with a sizable 66.5% chunk coming from business-to-business ecommerce startup Udaan’s funding round, according to data from Tracxn. This compares to $175 million raised by 31 companies in the same week a year ago.Sequentially, however, the latest week saw a 20% drop in terms of volume and a 4.8X jump in value.Elevate Your Tech Prowess with High-Value Skill CoursesOffering CollegeCourseWebsiteIIT DelhiIITD Certificate Programme in Data Science &…

Hi, Digbijay here in Bengaluru. The slowdown in funding for startups continues unabated across stages unless you are building something with those three magical words: generative artificial intelligence. During my conversations with several top entrepreneurs, CEOs, and venture investors over the past many weeks, what’s been clear is that even as there is a funding slowdown, significant secondary share sales are happening, and more such deals are being planned for the rest of the year as well. Peyush Bansal, cofounder and…

Several startups and ecommerce companies are likely to freeze salaries for senior management during appraisals as they step up cost-cutting measures to survive a harsh funding environment.As pressure mounts to conserve cash, founders, investors and human resources experts told ET that many startups will hold back raises for senior staff this year. At some companies, including those undergoing layoffs, top management may take pay cuts as well, they said.At February-end, ecommerce firm Flipkart announced that it would be…

Until early in 2022, ecommerce startup Meesho was burning around $40 million a month in cash as it took on bigger rivals Amazon India and Walmart-owned Flipkart. As the etailer cuts its spends, growth has slowed down. Today we take a closer look at the company’s numbers and analyse its strategy. This and more in today’s edition of the ETtech Morning Dispatch.Also in this letter:■ Startup employees bear the brunt of funding winter■ Experts alarmed by surge in fake ChatGPT domains, extensions■ OCI’s Chris Chelliah on AI…

Last week on my monthly visit to Bengaluru, like always I met a bunch of founders. February is typically marked by slow activity for everyone in the startup industry in Bengaluru. But this time around, things were abnormally glum. Add to it the premature summer heat that has struck the tech capital, making everyone grumble about more things than just the prolonged funding winter. One entrepreneur told me half-woefully in a dimly lit restaurant on a weekday afternoon, ‘Din mein bhi andhera hain (even during the daytime…