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Hello,

Ola’s mantra is DIY.

After exiting Google Maps and switching over to Ola Maps for its cabs, Co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal has offered developers a one-year free access to the company’s mapping service on its Krutrim cloud platform. The Ola chief said the company would save Rs 100 crore a year after shifting to in-house maps.

In May, Aggarwal moved Ola’s entire workload out of Microsoft Azure to Krutrim after voicing his dissatisfaction with LinkedIn’s AI.

Ola Electric also recently announced investing $100 million in the initial phase of building indigenous lithium-ion batteries at its gigafactory facility in Tamil Nadu to power Ola EVs.

Meanwhile, Paytm’s luck is on the rebound.

Its parent One97 Communications’ stock has risen 15% in the last two days, with the average trading volume jumping nearly four-fold.

Despite the recent regulatory setback, the fintech’s share in the overall UPI market for both May and June remained at 8%, maintaining its position as the third-largest player by transaction value.

Paytm also approved the allotment of 2.81 lakh equity shares to eligible employees through ESOPs. Following this, its total issued, subscribed and paid-up equity capital rose to Rs 63.6 crore. 

Recently, a bunch of startups, including Zomato and Nykaa, have offered stock options to employees. But did you know it first appeared in San Francisco in 1956, and was designed to give employees an opportunity to become owners of the company in the event of the founders’ passing? 

Now, it’s the currency corporates must spend to please unhappy employees—which studies show leads to greater job productivity, stability, and resilience.  

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Nykaa bets on growth
• Empowering communication with AI
• Exploring relationships and trauma

Here’s your trivia for today: When was the first esports tournament held?

Ecommerce 

Nykaa bets on growth

Nykaa’s going all-in on growth. FSN E-Commerce Ventures Limited, the ecommerce platform’s parent company, has projected a revenue growth of around 22-23% year-on-year for the first quarter of FY25. 

This outlook is despite the tempered growth in its physical retail business impacted by external factors such as elections and heatwaves across north of India. 

Fashion forward:

• Nykaa is commencing a vertical-wise segment reporting beginning this quarter, separating its ‘beauty’ and ‘fashion’ segments. 
• The beauty segment, comprising the Nykaa beauty platform and beauty-owned brands, physical stores, its eB2B distribution business ‘Superstore by Nykaa’ and the Nykaa Man BPC business, forecasts revenue growth of around 22-23%. 
• Nykaa said its fashion vertical revenue is expected to deliver a “healthy performance” with revenue growth of around 20% YoY, but a lower GMV than the beauty segment.

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Image credit: Shutterstock

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Interview

Empowering communication with AI

Modern workplaces are prioritising effective communication platforms given how information is processed across multiple channels, as well as the hybrid work culture.

Slack, the messaging app for business, which is a part of Salesforce, has upped the game by integrating AI features into its platform, which is helping organisations integrate both structured and unstructured data, according to Rahul Sharma, AVP – Platform, Service Cloud, Heroku and Slack.

Intuitive communication tools:

• Traditional systems of record primarily focus on structured data which can limit their utility, says Sharma, while Slack bridges this gap by effectively integrating both structured and unstructured data, enabling AI to deliver comprehensive insights.
• Slack AI features launched this year include channel recaps for crucial themes and highlights, thread summaries that give an overview of lengthy discussions, as well as intelligent search results.
• The company’s vision involves extending Slack AI’s search and summarisation capabilities to incorporate additional data sources like files, Slack apps, canvases, and clips.

Women Entrepreneurs

Exploring relationships and trauma

As a clinical sex-focused trauma therapist, Neha Bhat practices psychotherapy from a creative, art-based, and multicultural lens. In her 15 years of practice, she has been witnessing the sexual-emotional realities faced by people of Indian origin and the taboo surrounding mental and sexual health.

She recently released her book, ‘Unashamed-Notes from the Diary of a Sex Therapist’.

An Indian perspective:

• Seventeen years ago, Bhat became interested in art as a form of therapy, while her work with schools in the slums of Mumbai early in her career led her towards studying trauma and therapy training. 
• The premise of her book revolves around the crises of identity we all go through, which originate from not having a safe space in society to work these questions out, bringing shame to the forefront, she says.
• Bhat believes most people only come to “inner work”—healing after understanding and awareness—from extreme crises.

News & updates

• Labour rights: Samsung Electronics workers began a three-day strike for better pay in Hwaseong, with the union pointing to further action should South Korea’s biggest conglomerate continue to fall short of its demands. The National Samsung Electronics Union also wants an extra day of annual leave for unionised workers and changes to the employee bonus system.
• Movie merger: Hollywood production house Paramount Global has agreed to a merger with the independent film studio Skydance. Skydance has agreed to invest $8 billion into the new company as part of the merger deal. The deal, which values Paramount at $28 billion, brings an end to more than six months of negotiations.
• iPhone security: Microsoft told employees in China that starting in September they’ll only be able to use iPhones for work, effectively cutting off Android-powered devices from the workplace. The US company will soon require employees based there to use Apple devices to verify their identities when logging in to fortify Microsoft products and services against hackers.

When was the first esports tournament held?

Answer: In 1972, when Stanford University held the Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics for the game, Spacewar, on the PDP-1 computer.

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