EV battery startup Lohum Cleantech partners with Glencore
Lohum Cleantech, a New Delhi-based startup that manufactures and recycles electric vehicle (EV) batteries, on Thursday said it has partnered with Switzerland-based natural resource company Glencore to supply 10,000 tonnes of specialty chemicals for the battery supply chain over the next five years.
Under the agreement, Lohum will supply battery raw materials, including cathodes, sulphates, carbonates, and oxides of various metals extracted from spent batteries and other sources. The agreement comes into effect in 2023.
The partnership will allow both companies to deepen their recycling expertise and support the advancement of a circular economy by supplying raw materials back into the battery supply chain, it said in a statement.
Lohum has a recycling, dismantling and re-assembling unit in the National Capital Region. It will procure spent batteries and recycle them at its plant, the company said. Last year, the firm raised $7 million funding round led by Baring Private Equity Partners (BPEP). Other companies in the space are Ziptrax, ACE Green Recycling Inc, Attero (tied up with MG Motor India announced for the recycling of EV batteries), among others.
Lending platform EarlySalary rebrands itself as Fibe
Lending platform EarlySalary on Thursday said it has rebranded itself as Fibe.
As part of the rebranding, the company has migrated to a new website, launched an updated version of its app and revealed its new logo.
Founded in 2016 by Ashish Goyal and Akshay Mehrotra, Pune-based EarlySalary provides instant loans to salaried individuals besides offerings like buy now pay later (BNPL), instant cash loans, instant salary advances, and skill upgrade loans.
With the new identity, the company plans to clock assets under management (AUM) of $2.5 billion over the next five years, and expand operations across verticals to build a large presence in its product lines.
In August 2022, the company, valued at around $300 million, had raised $110 million from TPG’s Rise Fund and Norwest Venture Partners. Its existing investor Piramal Capital and Housing Finance Ltd. also participated in the round.
Content marketing SaaS startup Scalenut partners with US-based Semrush
SEO and content marketing SaaS platform Scalenut has announced partnership with Boston-based Semrush, an online visibility management SaaS platform, to allow their respective customers to scale SEO content.
Under the partnership, Scalenut has integrated Keyword Overview and Domain Reports tools from Semrush, which would enhance Scalenut’s Keyword Researcher and Cluster Booster tools and give Scalenut customers valuable data on keyword difficulty, search volume and competition level. It claims that the users would now be able to continuously improve their SEO.
“With this integration, creating SEO content can become easier than ever before. The entire SEO content workflow, right from keyword analysis to content planning to competitive research to creation, can be managed without leaving the Scalenut platform,” it said in a statement.
The platform, primarily focussed on the US and the UK markets, says it has a clientele of over 100,000 marketers, content creators and businesses across 150+ countries. Snapdeal, PharmEasy, Foyr, Hubilo, and Mosaic Wellness are some of the names.
The startup is backed by Saama Capital and angel investors Amit Singhal (former senior VP of Google and head of Google Search), Titan Capital, First Principles VC, among others.
Greendigo announces strategic partnership with actor Dia Mirza
Sustainable baby clothing brand Greendigo on Thursday said it has onboarded actor, producer, UNEP Goodwill Ambassador Dia Mirza as a strategic investor and brand ambassador for the company.
The three-year-old brand claims to use organic materials and sustainable processes to create carbon-neutral clothes for children. With the partnership, the startup aims to create awareness about the harmful effects of toxic chemicals that are found in conventional baby clothing, and leverage the wide reach of the actor’s diverse platforms to push for a mindful shift to organic clothing and nursery essentials.
Greendigo Cofounders – Barkha Bhatnagar Das (L) and Meghna Kishore (R)
IIT Mandi researchers develop a portable device to detect ischemic stroke
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi in collaboration with PGMIER Chandigarh have proposed and developed a portable and cost-effective device to detect and diagnose stroke caused by impaired blood flow to the brain.
A research paper describing the device and its operation was recently published in IEEE Sensors Journal. The paper was co-authored by Dr Shubhajit Roy Chowdhury, Associate Professor, School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, IIT Mandi, and his student Dalchand Ahirwar along with Dr Dheeraj Khurana, PGMIER, Chandigarh.
Ischemic stroke, caused by the insufficient or interrupted blood supply to part of the brain, affects one of every 500 Indians every year. Surveys have shown that around 10-15% of strokes affect people below 40 years of age.
The efficient management and treatment of stroke depend upon early identification and diagnosis. Currently, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computer tomography (CT) techniques are considered the gold standard for ischemic stroke detection. While these are indeed reliable methods, they require considerable infrastructure and high cost, and are inaccessible to many communities in India – there is only one MRI service for every 1 million people in the country.
