Blog

Dunzo runs into trouble, again. 

The quick commerce company has not paid the dues to at least five partner stores in Bengaluru from December 4 to 10, which have now temporarily gone offline on its app. 

Further, the store owners have not received communication from Dunzo about the extent of the delay, adding, “If the delay goes on, the partner stores will not resume servicing any orders from Dunzo.”

In other news, after rival Zomato, Swiggy has now introduced a collection fee of 2% on all orders to facilitate online payments from customers on the platform. It will be implemented from December 20. 

Hero MotoCorp Limited, which owns 36.7% of Ather Energy’s shares, is planning to buy an additional 3% of shares of the electric mobility startup for Rs 140 crore in an all-cash deal. 

Elsewhere, Manu Sharma has officially resigned as the Head of London-based smartphone startup Nothing’s India operations. Appointed by Nothing’s Co-founder Carl Pei in 2021, Sharma played a crucial role in developing the India strategy and business from scratch.

ICYMI: Happy 50th anniversary to Hip hop! 

Trace its origins all the way back to Africa! 

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Krutrim’s AI models for India 
• ‘Space Gynecologist’ Dr Varsha Jain
• The journey of kidswear brand MiArcus 

Here’s your trivia for today: Before Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg created a website that allowed users to compare the attractiveness of two people side by side. What was it called? 

Artificial intelligence

Krutrim’s AI models for India

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Krutrim

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Krutrim SI Designs, the brainchild of Ola Co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal, hit a new milestone as it pulled back the curtain on its inaugural tech innovation—Krutrim, a family of AI models crafted to cater to the unique requirements of the Indian ecosystem.

Local tech:

• The base large language model—dubbed Krutrim, which means ‘artificial’ in Sanskrit—is trained on two trillion tokens.
• Most pre-trained models primarily use English tokens, with only a few Indic language tokens. Krutrim says its base model incorporates around 20 times more Indic tokens than any other model in existence.
• Krutrim can understand 22 Indian languages and generate content in about 10, including Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Odia, Gujarati, and Malayalam.

<Top Deals of the Week>

Startup: Udaan

Amount: $340M

Round: Series E

Startup: Vegrow

Amount: $46M

Round: Series C

Startup: Aye Finance

Amount: Rs 310 Cr

Round: Series F

Health

Meet the ‘Space Gynecologist’ Dr Varsha Jain

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Varsha Jain

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Space travel affects an astronaut’s short- and long-term health. Despite following a strict diet and exercise routine, spending so much time in a low-gravity environment can result in many health problems, including loss of muscle and bone mass, weight loss, and eyesight disorders. 

Also known as a “Space Gynecologist”, Dr Varsha Jain specialises in studying how women’s bodies respond in space, particularly how microgravity affects menstruation.

New frontiers:

• Women astronauts who wish to suppress their periods usually do so by consuming oral contraceptive pills.
• Currently, Dr Jain is working on ongoing research about heavy bleeding. She explains, that heavy bleeding during periods can put women at a higher risk of iron deficiency and anaemia.
• She says that the female body is more likely to experience motion sickness on entering the space environment. However, men are more likely to experience sickness on coming back to Earth.

SMB

The journey of kidswear brand MiArcus 

MiArcus is a kidswear and kids furnishing retail brand that has established 35 stores across north India since 2019. However, its story began in 1975 when Gian Singh’s family in Ludhiana launched Oster Group as a hosiery business. 

A legacy:

• From making home furnishing products like blankets, soft toys, play mats, cushions, etc., for retailers, Oster Group became an OEM for IKEA, Mothercare, and other leading kids’ lifestyle retail companies. 
• By 2019, with the proliferation of ecommerce and the emergence of D2C avenues, Singh decided to broaden the B2B business into the B2C realm with MiArcus.
• With a focus on quality, MiArcus currently has eight categories of products, including clothing, baby furniture, footwear, diaper bags, accessories, toys, and feeding products. 

News & updates

• Superhumans: While investors were preparing to go nuclear after Sam Altman’s unceremonious ouster from OpenAI and Altman was plotting his return to the company, the members of OpenAI’s Superalignment team were assiduously plugging along on the problem of how to control AI that’s smarter than humans.
• Robots: Tesla Inc. posted a video showing improvements it’s made to its humanoid robot prototype, capping off the clip with two of the machines dancing to electronic music beneath flashing lights. Dubbed the Optimus bot, the human-mimicking machine is part of Tesla’s venture into developing AI and utilises a trained neural network to perform basic tasks.
• Skills: Reading print texts over a long period of time could boost comprehension skills by six to eight times more than digital reading does, a new study by the University of Valencia found. 

Before Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg created a website that allowed users to compare the attractiveness of two people side by side. What was it called?

Answer: Facemash.

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