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Big tech’s big bet on India continues.

Apple’s largest assembler, Foxconn, is set to invest over $600 million across two projects in Karnataka to manufacture casing components for iPhones and chip-making equipment, signalling its growing interest in India as it moves beyond China.

Elsewhere, the Apr-Jun quarter seems to have gone well for NASDAQ-listed Freshworks and MakeMyTrip. 

Freshworks posted a 19% year-on-year (YoY) rise in revenue at $145.1 million while narrowing its net loss by nearly 50%. Founder-CEO Girish Mathrubootham attributed this growth to the company’s new generative AI enhancements across its product lines, adding that Freshworks “outperformed our estimates across all our key financial metrics”.

On the other hand, MakeMyTrip reported an increase of 31% in its gross bookings, saying it witnessed strong growth in travel demand for leisure and business. It registered a profit of $18.6 million, quite the turnaround from the loss of $10.0 million during the same period last fiscal.

In other news, Nykaa saw the exit of six key top-level executives since April, including Chief Marketing Officer Shalini Raghavan, Kingshuk Basu (Senior VP – Retail), Sumant Kasliwal (Senior VP of the fashion unit), Aditya Sandhu (B2B sales unit), Sachin Kataria (VP of the ecommerce business), and Shantanu Prakash, VP of marketing and communications.

For now, Founder-CEO Falguni Nayar will oversee the firm’s marketing function given its criticality. 

ICYMI: Check out the oldest species of swimming jellyfish in 505 million-year-old fossils.

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Modernising poultry farming in MENA
• Cashfree Payments’ Zecpe is now Ecom360
• Karya brings dignified work to rural India

Here’s your trivia for today: What is the only bird known to fly backwards?

Startup

Modernising poultry farming in MENA

The poultry industry often finds itself at a disadvantage due to a lack of digitisation and technological intervention. Open poultry sheds tend to have lower egg output, profitability, and higher bird mortality compared to closed establishments. Monitoring and controlling key parameters is also more difficult in open sheds. 

Mohammed Mohideen, Santhanaraman Vijaykrishna, and Subramanian Santhanaraman realised the challenges faced by the poultry industry in terms of digitisation and IoT solutions. In 2007, they founded Denvik Technology to focus on sustainability solutions for poultry and property management.

Poultry mission:

• The Chennai startup has developed Ornithon, an IoT-enabled smart solution, to help poultry farmers improve profitability, operational efficiency, and compliance. 
• Denvik has expanded its products to various regions, including the Middle East, especially Dammam. 
• With a team of 25 employees, Devnik has been indirectly selling products since 2018 in the Middle East through OEMs. It began commercial sales in 2023.

Fintech

Cashfree Payments’ Zecpe is now Ecom360

Cashfree Payments has rebranded its recently-acquired subsidiary, Zecpe, to Ecom360, as it looks to double down its focus on offering checkout conversion solutions to online D2C merchants. 

The fintech company had acquired the one-click checkout solution platform in February. Zecpe has been rebranded as an all-in-one SaaS product for D2C merchants for better conversion and post-purchase experience.

New avenues:

• Ecom360 comes bundled with different services that resolve return to origin (RTO) issues, nudge customers into prepaid payments (reducing cash on delivery orders), and provide order tracking mechanisms and analytics to understand high potential orders.
• Currently, 1,500 brands are availing themselves of the services of Ecom360. It aims to tap the large pool of Cashfree’s merchant clients in future while continuing to operate independently.
• The firm with an eight-member team says its solution has led to a 15-20% jump in a brand’s product conversion rate, besides saving cost on RTO. 

Social Story

Karya brings dignified work to rural India

Karya, born out of a Microsoft Research project, provides AI-enabled digital work to people from marginalised communities across 22 states. Its solution is both simple and forward-thinking—equip low-come communities in rural India with smartphone-based solutions to learn and grow. All in languages they call their own.

Helping hand:

• Since its launch in late 2021, over 30,000 people from rural India have completed more than three million tasks with Karya and earned $800,000 in wages. 
• Karya offers four different tasks—speech/text collection, validation, image/video data collection, and annotation.
• The platform can be deployed even in low-resource areas with no internet and its Android app is supported on smartphones going all the way back to Android 6.

News & updates

• Nuclear power: India is reviewing its six-decade-old atomic energy law to allow more involvement of private firms to develop small modular reactors to help decarbonise the industry. It currently allows private technology and construction in nuclear plants.
• Under review: India has decided to levy a tax of 28% on online gaming companies on the total funds deposited to play and not on every bet, said FM Nirmala Sitharaman, offering some relief to the nascent $1.5 billion industry, which is backed by global investors.
• Digital control: Chinese regulators have proposed rules that would limit the smartphone screen time of people under the age of 18 to a maximum of two hours per day. These have been proposed by the Cyberspace Administration of China.

What is the only bird known to fly backwards?

Answer: Hummingbird

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