It's not easy being a startup, especially when it has been funded well and commanded a stellar valuation. The curious case of Housing.com has got "curiouser" as it has seen a plunge in its valuation. A year ago when it had raised $100 million from Softbank, the PE company, the startup was valued at $400 million. In less than six months, the company is valued at less than $50 million. Sources close to BW|Businessworld say that a large listings and classified business approached the company to buy them out for as little as $30 million.
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Former Citigroup Chief Executive Vikram Pandit has taken a stake in London-based currency transfer startup Transferwise, adding to his portfolio of financial technology investments. "Thrilled to welcome Vikram Pandit, previously CEO of Citi to join TransferWise as an investor," Transferwise co-founder Kristo Kaarmann tweeted on Tuesday. Transferwise said Pandit invested during its $58 million fundraising in January, but it declined to say how much he put in. That fundraising valued the four-year-old online money transfer group at about $1 billion. Other investors include Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and British billionaire Richard Branson. Transferwise said this year's fundraising helped it expand globally, including opening U.S. offices. It plans to launch in Australia in the next few months, and now has 400 staff. Pandit was Citigroup CEO from 2007 and steered it through the financial crisis until he resigned in October 2012. He has previously invested in Orchard, which helps institutional investors buy loans originated by marketplace lenders; Dataminr, which analyses tweets and other data to alert finance professionals; bitcoin payment processor Coinbase; and online student lender CommonBond.(Reuters)
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Digital healthcare startup Practo, on Thursday (24 September) announced the acquisition of rival firm Qikwell, a leader in appointment scheduling at hospitals for an unrevealed amount. The company said that with the acquisition, Practo becomes the world’s largest appointment booking platform with nearly 40 million appointments managed every year. Shashank ND, Founder & CEO, Practo said, “This is our 4th acquisition in the last 5 months. We continue our mission to help simplify and digitize healthcare globally and make Practo your health app. I am very pleased to welcome Krishna, Ragavendra and the Qikwell team to Practo. Practo has been the pioneer in digital health and with this acquisition Practo now becomes the world’s leading appointment management platform.” He further added, “Over the coming months, we will continue our aggressive expansion and as build the world’s leading healthcare technology platform.” Practo started its aggressive strategy in April when it acquired digital fitness solution provider Fitho, followed by Genii in July and Insta Health earlier this month. The Bengaluru-based company raised $ 90 million from a group of investors like Tencent, Google Capital and Sequoia India, taking its total rose funding to $ 125 million. Qikwell started in 2011, by Krishna Prasad Chitrapura and Raghavendra Prasad TS at present has over 100 employees and offers appointment in 250 Hospitals in 19 cities. It also has over 6000+ top doctors across in leading hospitals like Apollo, Fortis and Narayana Hrudalaya. The company will continue to be led by its founders, added the statement. “Qikwell is thrilled to join Practo in our quest to enable digital healthcare worldwide. We share the same passion, vision and commitment to customers in offering great products. We chose Practo over some other options because together we can offer superior, comprehensive and integrated solutions.” - said Chitrapura.(BW Online Bureau)
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Before every trip there is a feeling 'have I forgotten to pack something?' The list of things to be carried on a trip is long – a travel pillow, headphones, eye mask, pen knife. And, then these things get lost in the big black hole of the back pack. What if you could have a separate pocket for all travel needs in your hoodie? This is the idea behind the new line of functional wear launched by online campus merchandise brand CampusSutra.
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This will be a huge industry in five years and will add 300 million new customers, say Vishal Krishna and K Chandra MohanThere have been several payment, money transfer and wallet solutions that have been cropping up over the last six months. Snapdeal along with Freecharge has launched a wallet service. Novopay, funded by Vinod Khosla, launched its wallet service recently. Private banks such as HDFC and ICICI have launched their own wallet services. What is interesting is that Flipkart has stayed away from this business, instead, it has chosen the advertising business to bring in additional revenues. Why does finance make sense to technology companies like Snapdeal and PayTM? It's because the government has granted permissions to these companies to apply for payment bank licences. PayTM was one of the first companies to apply and get a license. But the licences are just one part of the game. Today 160 million smart phones have been sold in India and the number is expected to hit 600 million by 2018. The bet is on the new customers that will be added on the payments bank platform. Acquiring these new customers will increase the valuation of each of these businesses 50 fold. The financial payments industry is expected to hit $1 trillion by 2020. So the money raised for payments banks will be far higher than the money spent on etailing. Today, these six odd technology companies that are vying for payment banks licences are focused on a market that is not more than 40-million-strong. Their wallet businesses, where phone bills and cable bills can be paid, along with their etail platforms are suffering from low margins. They are burning money and customer acquisition cost is high and the margins are less than one per cent per transaction. This will take these businesses more than a decade to break even and meanwhile they will have to survive on the money raised. But being a bank could increase their transaction customer base to a population the size of the USA, which is 300 million, in less than 18 months. The payment banks will be a combination of the best of banking services (where there will be high margins) along with etailing services. Finally there could be a business model that could take these companies to profitability. Today none of them have sketched out a market strategy for being payment banks. They have to get people to download their apps on smartphones. They need to work on local language technologies and sync in even text message based money transfers. They also have to tie up with local folk, certified to collect money, to on board people. A payment bank carries money on the app and it becomes a deposit account. People can remit upto Rs 1 lakh in to this smart phone based app. The companies can issue debit and credit cards. They can also pay interest on deposits. What they cannot do is to disburse loans. The government expects at least 150 millions new accounts to be opened on these platforms. These six startups together have raised $1 billion just to build wallet solutions. Experts that Businessworld spoke to say there will be an additional $1 billion raised to make payments banks work. The answer, to the question about technology being disruptive to add new customers on to the mobile, in smaller towns, will be found when smart phones truly replace the business correspondents that banks deployed to win new account holders in rural towns. Perhaps cash will be burnt here by these tech companies. This will also answer a teething question; what is the real size of smart phone transactions in India. Perhaps funds have to commission a study based on the hypothesis that payment banks transactions could be their answer to big valuations.
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GenNext Innovation Hub, an accelerator programme by Reliance Industries (RIL) and Microsoft Ventures on Friday (11 September) began its second ‘Fall 2015’ batch by announcing the names of ten startups.
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In first two days of the rally, the company has got more than 1,600 registrations on their job portal.
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The Right to Education (RTE) Act may have been passed but more than 95 per cent schools are still not compliant with the infrastructure standard prescribed in the RTE Act, says a 2012 civil society survey.
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