Hello,
Winter is continuing, and startups are still losing their valuations.
This time, Neuberger Berman has slashed its investments in Pharmeasy and Pine Labs.
While PharmEasy’s parent company Api Holdings Limited saw its value drop from $5.6 billion to $4.4 billion, the US investment firm slashed the valuation of Noida-based fintech giant Pine Labs to $3.1 billion from $5 billion.
Other unicorns such as Ola, BYJU’S, Oyo, and Swiggy too saw their valuations written down in recent times.
Meanwhile, the government wants all ecommerce players to become part of ONDC. Rajesh Kumar Singh, Secretary of DPIIT, says the idea is to democratise ecommerce for MSMEs and smaller producers in the remote parts of the country and provide them with a level playing field.
Speaking of ONDC, magicpin witnessed a 100% growth in its daily orders on the platform last week. The hyperlocal startup, which joined ONDC in March, doubled its orders to 20,000 a day.
Oh, Twitter is in the news… again. It seems like Elon Musk has finally found a new CEO for Twitter—Linda Yaccarino. Erstwhile the head of advertising at NBCUniversal, she is “starting in ~6 weeks” as Musk returns to be “exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.”
Happy days ahead? Only time will tell.
In other news, as news of layoffs, cost cutting, and no hikes take over the headlines, in a refreshing twist, UAE-based Emirates Group has promised a 24-week salary bonus to over 100,000 employees after the aviation company registered its most profitable year.
At least someone’s making money somewhere…
In today’s newsletter, we will talk about
- ReFit-ting the refurbished device market
- Dance therapy for Parkinson’s patients
- SpotSpread keeping trade afloat
Here’s your trivia for today: Who was the first to observe and experiment with microbes?
Startup
ReFit-ting the refurbished device market
Launched by Saket Saurav and Avneet Singh in 2017, Delhi-based ReFit Global is trying to accelerate India’s refurbished tech market. The idea for ReFit emerged when Saket and Avneet, who have worked together for Shopclues and LG, saw the potential for second-hand devices, especially in Tier II and III cities.
Refurbish and recycle:
- ReFit sources phones exchanged on Flipkart and Amazon and brands like Oppo, Xiaomi, and Vivo. It has so far sold over 15 lakh phones. In the last FY, it sold nearly 500,000 handsets.
- The refurbished device segment is in demand. According to the ICEA report, the Indian recommerce market is projected to grow by 16% and reach $10 billion by 2025.
- ReFit has its own Mobile Diagnostics Application, which diagnoses each device on 37 quality check parameters.
Social work
Dance therapy for Parkinson’s patients
The Hrishikesh Centre for Contemporary Dance, run by Pune-based choreographer Hrishikesh Pawar, offers free dance classes to Parkinson’s patients to help them improve balance, flexibility, and coordination, and is busting the stigma around the disorder.
The power of movement:
- “This dance class focuses on building the confidence of people with Parkinson’s by normalising their health condition,” says Hrishikesh Pawar.
- Starting with a dry run of three students, Pawar has 25 students attending the classes offline and around 35 people participating in online sessions.
- His dance group is affiliated with the Mark Morris Dance Group (MMDG) and the Brooklyn Parkinson Group (BPG), which started offering free dance classes for people with Parkinson’s in 2001.
Cryptocurrency
SpotSpread keeping trade afloat
Started by Keshav Saraogi and Shraddha Agarwal, Singapore-headquartered SpotSpreads works with several Indian and international crypto exchanges and other Web3 entities to create liquid markets by deploying proprietary algorithmic trading and high-frequency execution capabilities.
Liquid markets:
- It has integrated with and deploys capital (in varying volumes based on market conditions) with Binance, Coinbase, Uniswap, Kucoin, OKX, dYdX, Crypto.com, WazirX, CoinDCX, Bybit, Coinswitch Kuber, Sushiswap, Huobi, and more.
- The startup and its founders (in their own capacity and with SpotSpreads) claim to have already facilitated cumulative trading volumes of over $20 billion for these exchanges across over 200 token pairs.
- Besides market making, SpotSpreads also offers over-the-counter (OTC) services for crypto and advisory and venture capital services.
News & updates
- Thrifty: Netflix plans to reduce its spending by $300 million this year as it continues its push to improve profitability. The company is looking to cut costs partly because its plans to crack down on password sharing broadly were pushed back from the first quarter to the second.
- Spin off: Goldman Sachs has spun out the first startup from its internal incubator. A networking platform for employees called Louisa, it was funded and owned by the New York-based investment bank until a few weeks ago when it became independent.
- Data leak: The vehicle data of 2.15 million Toyota Motor users in Japan, which comprises almost the entire customer base who signed up for its main cloud service platforms since 2012, has been made publicly available for a decade due to human error.
Who was the first to observe and experiment with microbes?
Answer: Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek, commonly known as “the Father of Microbiology”.
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