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Business is booming at upGrad. 

Even as the edtech sector finds itself in a slump, the Mumbai-headquartered company registered a 96% jump in its revenue in FY23—Rs 1,194 crore from Rs 608 crore last fiscal. It also reported a flat EBITDA of Rs 558 crore from Rs 572 crore in the previous year. 

ICYMI: TechSparks is in Delhi! It was an action-packed first day at TechSparks Delhi, led by union ministers Jyotiradtiya Scindia and Rajeev Chandrasekhar decoding India’s Techade and the role it is playing on the global stage. 

Don’t miss out on Day 2 of India’s largest startup-tech conference, with a star-studded line-up, including ONDC’s T Koshy, Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Shark Tank judge and boAt co-founder Aman Gupta, and Zomato’s Deepinder Goyal.

Also, Chinese payments firm Alipay has sold a 3.5% stake in food delivery platform Zomato for Rs 3,336 crore, reported The Economic Times, adding that the company has offloaded its entire stake at about Rs 112.7 apiece.

Lastly, a sleeping polar bear and some sociable penguins are shortlisted for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year People’s Choice award. 

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Most exciting time for Indian tech
• Aviation, spacetech new frontiers
• Prosus’ hits and misses in H1 FY24

Here’s your trivia for today: What fish is known as a poor man’s lobster?

TechSparks

Most exciting time for Indian tech

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Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar and YourStory Founder and CEO Shradha Sharma.

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In the near future, digitisation of every segment of the economy will be deep and accelerated, and successful startups will not be restricted to metro cities with the current startup policies, said the Union Minister of State for Electronics & IT and Skill Development & Entrepreneurship, Rajeev Chandrasekhar. 

He further encouraged entrepreneurs to build startups in the electronics manufacturing and semiconductor industries as it offers a ‘huge’ opportunity, highlighting that the country has made investments worth $3 billion in the last 18 months in the sector.

Scorching pace:

• The Minister said that Indian startups, especially in AI and AI research innovation, stand to benefit from the India datasets platform, which will allow startups to use anonymised personal data with consent.
• He noted that, by 2024, India will have one of the world’s biggest collections of very diverse and powerful datasets that will be used as fuel for AI in the future.
• India is no longer just a consumer of tech, added the Minister, adding that the rest of the world is now beginning to align with our regulatory approach to new-age technologies like AI. 

<Funding Alert>

Startup: SustVest

Amount: $250,000

Round: Equity

Startup: Suind

Amount: Rs 5 Cr

Round: Seed

TechSparks

Aviation, spacetech new frontiers for Indian cos

The sky is the limit for Indian manufacturers in the space tech and aviation sector, said Jyotiradtiya Scindia, Union Minister for Civil Aviation and Steel.

The Minister also reminisced about growing up watching his father Madhavrao Scindia, former railways minister, draw inspiration from global ideas and execute the same back home—across systems, including the Shatabdi Express service, computerisation of ticketing platform, food services, and more. 

Flying high:

• Speaking about entrepreneurship, Scindia advised founders to pay attention to “granularities” as the devil lies in the details.
• India’s civil aviation is in its growth phase, with the number of air travellers growing from 144 million (pre-COVID) to 440 million by 2030, Scindia said.
• This will set the stage for India to become a base for aerospace manufacturing, with nearly 60% of the avionics for the sector to be built by Indian MSMEs, he said.

Investment

Prosus’ hits and misses in H1 FY24

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Edtech firm BYJU’S and healthtech startup Pharmeasy are among the biggest ‘underperformers’ in Prosus’s India portfolio, hitting the Netherlands-based investment major’s internal rate of return (IRR) in the first half of 2024. 

Prosus has written down the valuation of BYJU’S to below $3 billion, a steep drop from the $22 billion valuation the edtech startup hit early last year. 

Mark sheet:

• In its H1 FY24 results presentation, Prosus said its India revenue (from payment arm PayU India) grew by 15% to $211 million in the first half of the fiscal year, driven by growth from payment merchants, payech unit Wibmo, and omnichannel business.
• India is Prosus’s largest market in the core Payment Service Provider (PSP) business, contributing around 48% of revenues, after GPO (Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America), Iyzico (Turkey), and Red Dot Payments (Southeast Asia).
• Swiggy, which is one of Prosus’ significant investments in the country, managed to grow its overall GMV by 28% in H1 FY24 while reducing its trading losses to $208 million.

News & updates

• Space origins: ISRO is exploring joint collaborations with Boeing Co., Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, and Voyager Space Holdings Inc., as an official visit by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson highlights the growing level of cooperation between the US and India in outer space.
• Growing strong: The US economy grew at an even stronger pace than previously indicated in the third quarter, the product of a better-than-expected business investment and stronger government spending. US GDP accelerated at a 5.2% annualised pace. 
• Parting ways: Apple has given Goldman Sachs a proposal to end its credit card and savings account partnership within the next 12-15 months. The move, if it were to happen, would effectively end one of the highest-profile partnerships between a bank and a tech company.

What fish is known as a poor man’s lobster?

Answer: Monkfish. It is known to some as “the poor man’s lobster” because of its firm, sweet, and delicious taste similar to lobster tails.

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