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Internet’s favourite celebrity is back. After nine days of silence, Elon Musk has resurfaced on Twitter—with a photo with the Pope. 

If you are curious why he met the Pontifex Maximus, get in line. Neither where nor why Musk met the Pope has been revealed yet.

In other news, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has entered the OTT market, with what it calls the “world’s first fintech sitcom”. Released in partnership with NVIDIA, it is called Get Ahead and the first episode has just dropped. 

Guess Netflix’s Stranger Things isn’t the only show grabbing eyeballs this weekend.

MoEngage: What led to it?

In 2014, Raviteja Dodda and Yashwanth Kumar launched MoEngage, an insights-led customer engagement platform that works on a customer-centric approach and enables personalisation at scale across mobile, email, web, SMS, and messaging channels using AI and in-built analytics.

“When MoEngage started, we had only one guiding light—to build the world’s most trusted customer engagement platform,” Raviteja, CEO of MoEngage, told YS.

Starting up:

• In the last 12 months, the Bengaluru-based startup has raised three rounds—$32.5 million in July, $30 million in December, and in its latest, $77 million last month.
• It has over 1,200 customers and nine offices across 35 countries. Some of its clients include Samsung, Vodafone, Sharechat, Roposo, Ola, OYO, and Bigbasket. 
• In the coming months, it plans to deepen its geographic footprint in the US, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and expand to new markets like Latin America and Australia.

Upskill now and pay later

The pay-after-placement model is seeing some traction in India, especially when it comes to upskilling. After all, Statista predicts that India’s upskilling edtech industry will be worth $0.73 billion by 2025.

Capitalising on this growing need for upskilling combined with a focus on placement, serial entrepreneurs Bharat Gupta and Pritesh Kumar launched FunctionUp in 2021. The aim was to bridge the gap between college education and the skills required for a job—with a pay-after-placement business model.

Get upskilled: 

• FunctionUp has launched nine cohorts, and students from three cohorts have already graduated.
• Nearly 75 percent of its students are placed right after the course ends, 20 percent within three months, and the remaining 5 percent within a year of course completion. 
• It signs an Income-Share Agreement (ISA) with its students, where they pay 17 percent of their monthly salary to FunctionUp for 36 months.

“We are closely connected to the industry. We know what skills are required in the industry and in an entry-level job. We are confident in our programme so we do not charge upfront. We only charge fees after getting the students placed,” said Bharat.

Real estate in the metaverse

There’s real estate in the metaverse and you can buy it. According to Technavio, the global metaverse real estate market will grow at a CAGR of 61.7 percent to $5.37 billion between 2021-26.

Replicating real-world situations, the virtual ecosystem integrates technologies, including augmented reality, virtual reality, etc., to create a digital realm where users can engage, play, and converse the way they do IRL. 

Who’s doing what:

• London-based Metamall allows users to explore, build, and trade in its virtual mall, and use its native token MALL to own virtual real estate.
• Singapore-based FiEx, under its project District Rubicon, lets users build and manage virtual real estate. 
• In March 2022, pop singer Daler Mehndi bought virtual land in Hyderabad-based PartyNite’s metaverse and named it the ‘Balle Balle Land.”

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