Author: Kanishk Jain

Cloud-based cross-browser testing tool BrowserStack has raised $50 million Series A funding from Accel Partners. Mumbai-headquartered BrowserStack will be valued at around $400 million after this round of financing. Accel India and Accel Growth participated in the funding round along with their US-based partner Ryan Sweeney. The newly acquired financing will be used by the company to improve their overall global awareness as well as for expanding their team and infrastructure. They are hoping for an extensive rise in 2018, especially in North America. BrowerStack also announced the opening of their new headquarters in San Francisco, North America. Shailesh Rao,…

After months of guesses and speculations, Alibaba.com Singapore E-commerce Pvt. Ltd, a subsidiary of China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has finally infused $35 million (Rs 225 crore)  in Pune-based logistics startup XpressBees. Earlier this month, there were reports floating in the market saying Alibaba is looking forward to investing $100 million in Xpressbees. With this investment, Alibaba has ensured that it has a command over three prime sectors in India – Digital payments (Paytm), E-commerce (Paytm Mall) and Logistics (XpressBees). In total, Alibaba has invested around $1.6 billion in Indian market space. It has infused $1 billion in Paytm, $175 million in…

To maintain its sovereignty in the e-commerce business in India,  Amazon has injected $306 million in Amazon Seller Services, its Indian arm. This investment was made by Seattle-headquartered Amazon Inc in collaboration with its Singapore based auxiliary organization, Amazon Corporate Holdings. With this investment, the total amount raised by Amazon Seller Services has escalated to a whopping $1.3 billion for FY18. Amazon is specifically looking to use the investment for improving their technology and infrastructure in the country. The recent funding just comes a few months after it invested around $250 million in its Indian arm in October 2017. It…

Boston headquartered medical devices company Axio Biosolutions has raised $7.4 million in Series B funding round led by Ratan Tata’s RNT Capital along with the participation of existing investors Accel Partners and IDG Ventures. With the newly acquired funding, Axio is aiming for an expansion into newer markets like Europe and USA as well as production affordable yet highly effective medicines, especially in the advanced wound care segment. It is planning for an operational profit in 2 years. Axio, which has its corporate office in Bengaluru and a GMP-certified manufacturing facility in Gujarat was founded in 2010 by Leo Mavely to cater the needs…

JioPhone, with a 27% market share by shipments, has overthrown Samsung to become the leader in the feature phone segment. Jiophone’s aggressive supplies in the last months of 2017 helped it to dwindle the gap between demand and supply. Mukesh Ambani led Reliance Jio’s JioPhone is the first feature phone to support 4G Voice over LTE (VoLTE) technology. It is available at Rs. 1500 which Jio says would be fully refunded after three years, making it effectively free. In the phones typically below Rs 2000, Samsung follows Jio with a market share of 17%, trailed by Micromax, China’s Itel and Nokia.…

Times Internet, an Internet subsidiary of The Times of India Group, which manages some of the largest news websites in India like The Times of India, The Economic Times, Navbharat Times and Maharashtra Times has acquired a majority stake in Seoul based MX Player in an all-cash deal worth $200 million.  With this investment, Times Internet will be able to launch its over-the-top (OTT) video service which is expected to make a debut in the next few months. MX Player is among the very few Android video player applications which support multi-core decoding. With multi-c0re decoding, you get fine video…

Messaging giant Whatsapp has officially launched its new Whatsapp Business App in Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, the UK and the US. From today, you can get the free-to-download app from Google Play. It is soon going to launch the app in other markets, including India. Whatsapp said that its new app will help companies connect with their customers and also make it easier for their huge user base to chat with business organizations that actually matter to them. With the business app, customers can get helpful information like business description, email or store addresses and website. Also, users will get quick replies to…

New-Delhi headquartered IT organization Newgen Software has raised $20 million from its anchor investors by selling its shares as a part of anchor book allocation. Today, the company is going to open its $71 million IPO for a three day period till January 18,. Most of its anchor investors are sovereign wealth funds, mutual funds, and pension funds. Though the anchor investors are getting a guaranteed allotment, they are restricted for a period of 30 days to sell their shares. On the other hand, IPO investors have a choice on selling the shares on the listing day itself. All the…

Digital payments startup Razorpay has raised $20 million in its series B funding round led by Tiger Global and Y Combinator along with the participation of Matrix Partners. Till date, the company has raised $31.5 million. The newly acquired funding will be used by the company to improve technology and product scaling. It is also planning for geographical enlargement with the help of cutting-edge data science and expansion of team to meet market demands. The company has been seeing a continuous monthly growth of around 25-30%. It is planning to serve 500 million end users by the end of 2020. It is…

After a successful trial in China, Alibaba has launched DingTalk, an enterprise communication platform in the English version in India.  With DingTalk, you can plan meetings and assign tasks to others. DingTalk claims that its platform is used by over 3 million business organizations. The app supports text, voice messages, translations, name cards, DINGs, images, video clips, check-ins, emails, audio/video conference for up to 3,000 parties in a single call. However, currently, for users outside China, voice and video services are available only via Voice over Internet Protocol.  With DingTalk, organisations which have their offices located in different locations can communicate seamlessly,…

Delhi-based logistics startup Rivigo has raised $50 million in Series D funding round led by Warburg Pincus and SAIF Partners, its existing investors. It will value the company at around $1 billion. Rivigo is one of the fastest startups to achieve the unicorn status. The company had allocated 8,231 Series D compulsorily convertible cumulative preference shares to SAIF Partners India amounting to a total of around $33 million. 4,477 Series D compulsorily convertible cumulative preference shares totalling to about $17 million were allocated to Warburg Pincus arm Spring Canter Investment. Founded in 2014 by Harvard alumnus Gazal Kalra and IIM Lucknow…

Realty business organisation Embassy Group who is also a joint venture partner in WeWork India, has injected around $15.6 million into the company. In return for its investment, Embassy Group will get 100,00,000 compulsory convertible debentures. WeWork India is a joint venture between the luxury property developer Embassy Group and the New-York headquartered WeW0rk which was founded in 2010 by Miguel McKelvey, Adam Neumann. It is currently valued at over $20 billion. In July 2017, WeWork, which is considered as the world’s largest co-working startup, opened a centre in Banglore, which they called ‘WeWork Galaxy’. Later, in September 2017, it opened…