Blog

Hello,

OYO is on a hunt for funds. 

According to TechCrunch, the hotel-chain company is engaging with investors, including Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund Khazanah, to raise a new funding round that could cut its valuation to $3 billion or lower.

The report, citing sources, said the round would see some secondary transactions that will value OYO at as low as $2.5 billion—a steep drop from its peak valuation of $10 billion in 2019.

Meanwhile, Zomato has launched a crowd-supported weather infrastructure, Weather Union—comprising over 650 on-ground weather stations—to offer real-time, location-based information on key weather parameters.

Elsewhere, Simpl, which specialises in buy-now-pay-later products, has laid off over 100 employees as it aims for profitability. The fintech startup is reportedly dealing with elevated cash burn and a slowdown in new user acquisitions.

In other news, it looks like McDonald’s is having a tough challenge in the country. 

Its Indian franchisee owner, Westlife Foodworld, reported a 96% slide in Q4 profit as inflation-weary consumers cut back spending on fast food even as franchisees tried to lure them with discounted prices.

ICYMI: Global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels this century.

Lastly, thanks to AI, this specialist has identified 40 counterfeit paintings selling on eBay, and among them are a “Monet” and a “Renoir”, priced exorbitantly high!

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Decoding NoBroker’s AI model
• LLM for financial services
• Preserving Gujjar crafts in Kashmir

Here’s your trivia for today: What caused the first computer bug?

Startup

Decoding NoBroker’s AI model

For the past seven years, proptech unicorn NoBroker has been dabbling with AI. NoBroker’s latest B2B offering, Convozen, is a small language model (SLM) that offers service agents tools to enhance performance and customer satisfaction. 

Improving performance:

• Convozen streamlines business operations by leveraging AI to evaluate consumer interactions across channels, ensuring adherence to SOPs and providing automated quality assessment. It uses ML to transcribe and extract insights.
• Its Pitch Pop feature summarises previous conversations and customer moods. On the other hand, the Agent Assist feature offers real-time support and guidance to service agents.
• Convozen has a mechanism for companies to rate the customer-agent interactions, which NoBroker calls ‘sentiment analysis’, by marking them either positive or negative. This process involves monitoring conversations continuously.

Funding Alert

Startup: Atlan

Amount: $105M

Round: Series C

Startup: Myelin Foundry

Amount: $4M

Round: Equity

Startup: Eternz

Amount: $1.15M

Round: Pre-Seed

Fintech

LLM for financial services

Fintech player Pine Labs-owned API platform Setu has developed India’s first domain-specific Large Language Model (LLM) for the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sectors. 

Called Sesame, the LLM has been developed in collaboration with Sarvam AI, an indigenous AI research firm specialising in creating innovative and tailored AI solutions for various industries.

AI solution:

• The model aims to enable BFSI users to make smarter and faster credit decisions and provide hyper-personalised financial services across their entire lifecycle.
• It uses a data-rich ecosystem backed by India’s thriving digital infrastructure to provide improved credit underwriting, fraud detection, loan monitoring, upsell/cross-sell, and personal finance advisory. 
• “We showed that we can significantly increase the accuracy of identifying insights from financial statements. This is a template which we believe can be repeated across sectors,” said Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder, Sarvam AI.

Inspiration

Preserving Gujjar crafts in Kashmir

Shahida Khanum, a 25-year-old philosophy and social science graduate, has turned her paternal home into a centre for reviving the Gujjar community’s rich art and heritage. The Noor Centre upholds the vanishing handwork—colourful embroidery, stitching, knitting, and designing practices—unique to the Gujjars’ once pastoral lifestyle, identity, and ancestry.

Celebrating identity:

• Khanum’s Noor Centre has become a knowledge and skilling hub for young women from the ethnic community to reclaim their identity and sow the seeds for financial independence. 
• Last year, with the help of the NGO Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Federation of India Limited, she presented her work at cultural events in Ladakh and Ranchi.
• “At Noor, I have learnt ways to incorporate our traditional styles into my designs, thereby making them mainstream,” says 25-year-old professional designer Kulsuma Yusuf.

News & updates

• Recovery: Almost all customers of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX will get their money back—plus interest. As per a reorganisation plan, FTX estimates it owes creditors around $11.2 billion. The company said it has between $14.5 billion and $16.3 billion to distribute to creditors.
• Warnings: The RBI has warned some non-bank lenders against disbursing cash loans in excess of the permissible limit of Rs 20,000, a move likely to stop large cash payouts to those borrowing against gold. The advisory comes within weeks of regulatory action against IIFL Finance for violating cash disbursal and other norms.
• Losses: Uber posted a surprise first-quarter net loss of $654 million, driven by legal charges and provisions and those related to fair valuation of certain company investments, sending the shares of the ride-share and food delivery company down nearly 9% on Wednesday.

What caused the first computer bug?

Answer: An insect, more precisely, a moth!

We would love to hear from you! To let us know what you liked and disliked about our newsletter, please mail nslfeedback@yourstory.com. 

If you don’t already get this newsletter in your inbox, sign up here. For past editions of the YourStory Buzz, you can check our Daily Capsule page here.