Subhash Choudhary ..

Highperformr.ai, a marketing SaaS startup floated by former Freshworks executives Ramesh Ravishankar and Srivatsan Venkatesan, has raised $3.5 Mn (INR 29.2 Cr) in a seed funding round 👇 The startup’s first product, Highperformr for Teams, leverages generative AI and LLMs to help B2B businesses maximise their return on investment (ROI) on social media campaigns. The fresh capital will be deployed to further the startup's research and development activity, build the platform's native AI capabilities, and expand its distribution network. To read more in detail, click here: https://lnkd.in/gV8tqWyU #startups #fundraising #growth #saas

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#SaaSeries2: Freshworks Q2 FY24 Results. Here are the key highlights: - Total customers in Q2 FY24 grew by 4% to 68.8K YOY. - Customers with ARR >USD 5K grew by 14% YOY, accounting for 90% of the ARR. - Customers with ARR > USD 50K grew by 30% YOY, making up 50% of the ARR. In terms of key metrics: - Revenue saw a 20% growth to 174 Mn in Q2 FY24, with the US market contributing 45%. The growth was also driven by acquisition of Device42 signaling the saturation in US market for key offerings. - Net Dollar Retention stands at 106%. - #ACV is at #USD10K, while the gross margin remains high at 85%. - #FCF USD 32.8 Mn in Q2 FY 24 Few observations: 1) The #Enterprise segment is the fastest-growing, maintaining its trend QoQ. 2) The #SMB segment, constituting ~10%, is critical for expansion despite being the least growing segment. Special focus areas include #GenAI solutions like #Freddycopilot and #Freshchat, with a 40% attachment rate, aimed at enhancing #agentproductivity. #SaaS #GenAI #Freshworks #SaaSUnicorn #AIagents #AIAssistants #conversationintelligence #venturecapital #privateequity #investments

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🚨Swiggy IPO gets oversubscribed led by QIB bids Swiggy’s IPO was oversubscribed 1.07 times by the third day, driven largely by QIBs, who oversubscribed their portion 1.52 times. Retail investors subscribed to 97% of their portion, while Non-Institutional Investors (NIIs) made bids for 22% of their allocation. Swiggy's employee quota also saw strong demand, with a subscription rate of 1.38 times. Swiggy raised around Rs 5,085 crore (approx. $605 million) from anchor investors like HDFC, ICICI, SBI, and global players including Fidelity and BlackRock. by Akshita Toshniwal | #SwiggyIPO #IPO #QIB #RetailInvestors #Foodtech Read more 👇 https://lnkd.in/ggm_piMt

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📊 Is pricing the answer to fragmenting the UPI App market? 📊 📈💡NPCI has extended the 30% market cap deadline because the top 3 UPI apps have ~92% market share. Phonepe, Paytm & Gpay capitalized on the early mover advantage. New apps don’t have incentives to compete for UPI volumes because it is a “free product.” And while this was why it grew, it has now also hindered entry of new players ✅ Global real time payment (RTP) equivalents are usually free for the customer while merchants are charged. Ex: 🇧🇷 Pix: Merchant: 0.22 - 0.3% / txn, free for user 🇨🇭 Twint: Merchant:1.3% / txn, free for user 🇵🇱 Blik: Merchant: $0.1 - $0.75 / txn, free for user 🇸🇪 Swish: Merchant: $0.09 / txn, free for user 🇸🇬 PayNow: Merchant: 1.3% / txn, free for user 📈💡 If we want to keep RTP free for the end user, the constraint is free P2P payments. Only P2M can be charged. Is that feasible? Let’s look at the data: 📌 UPI Value (in Cr): From April ‘23 to ‘24, grew by 39.6%. P2P grew from 10L Cr to 14L Cr, at ~32% growth YoY. And P2M grew from 3.2 L Cr to 5.3 L Cr, at~65% YoY. 📌 UPI Volume (in B txn): From April ‘23 to April ‘24 UPI volume grew by 62%. P2P grew from 3.8B to 4.9B, at YoY 29%. P2M grew from 5B to 8.3B at YoY 65%. And proportionally: 📌 April ‘24 Value: Total: INR 19L Cr, P2P: 72.97%, P2M: 27.03% 📌 April ‘24 Volume: Total: 13.3B, P2P: 37.5%, P2M: 62.5% ✅ The constraint of only being able to price P2M transactions is not a blocker, P2M seems to have significant volumes. But that’s the overall P2M market: There is a big segment that falls within P2PM (unorganized merchants), that NPCI will not charge 📈💡Let’s assume that P2PM majorly consists of low value transactions of AoV less than Rs 2000. If we look at AoV > 2000 bucket of P2M transactions, this constitutes for 4.50% of txn numbers, and 68.36% of P2M txn value. ✅ So even excluding P2PM this still leaves a significant~68% of P2M monthly value or 4.5% of P2M txns that can be monetized So what’s the ideal pricing model? ❗Well, the cost of a UPI transaction is ~Rs 0.4. At 13.3B UPI txns that is a monthly cost of Rs 532 Cr. Which is Rs 6384 Cr per annum to maintain the UPI ecosystem! The pricing needs to generate atleast this much❗ 1️⃣ Option 1: Fixed fee / txn: If only AoV > Rs 2000 txns are charged, then to break-even, the fee per txn needs to be Rs 15, which is high. If ALL the P2M txns are charged, then a per txn cost of Rs 0.67 would be enough to break-even. But the P2PM merchant would be impacted 2️⃣ Option 2: % of txn value: If only AoV > Rs 2000 txns are charged, then the break-even fee is 0.15%. If the total P2M value is charged, the fee needs to be 0.10%. Seems to make more sense But even if pricing comes, while it incentivizes new apps it also incentivizes incumbents to keep their market share. Enter: the 30% UPI market share cap To read the full article and other pieces like this, click here: https://lnkd.in/gSPm49aq #fintech #UPI #NPCI

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Venture capital firm Peak XV Partners has about Rs 16,000 crore of “dry powder” ready for investment Just think of it, a lot of problems in the ecosystem will be solved So just be strong, focused and lean for now Sooner or later, things are going to change

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🚨 Making of a billion-dollar exit 💰 Accel has sold shares worth over $300 mn in Freshworks over the last 12 months, according to research done by The Arc The VC firm had not sold any shares during the IPO in 2021. It still holds over 13% stake in the Nasdaq-listed company 👨‍💻 The returns on this will be a multi-bagger for Accel 🤑 Series A entry price - $0.05 a share Current price - $18.44 a share Accel's average price increased as it participated in follow-up rounds. More 👇 #venturecapital #software #saas #freshworks #accel #vc #exits #returns https://lnkd.in/g65TbjGR

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Who k*lled Koo? Is it X or YouTube? Koo is a publishing platform and gets its revenue from advertisement listed on the platform. Where all Indian online advertisement spend is going? Any guesses? Yes, it's YouTube (or Google) and Meta which has sucked in a major portion of India's social media advertising spend. Google's (including YouTube) 2023 ad revenue from India was whopping Rs. 28000 Crore!! And Meta earned Rs. 18300 Crore during same period in India through online ads! Now through WhatsApp advertising Meta will suck in a lot of other revenue from print media. Do you see the challenge here? These platforms are operating in India for more than 15 years now. They didn't make any money (or lost a lot of money) in the initial years and now making profit. They were able to survive because of their deep pocket. But for a startup like Koo it is an uphill task to compete with such giants unless it has a runway of minimum 10 years! Koo got just 4 unfortunately. Perhaps they should have been more conservative with their spent but sometimes investors themselves want founders to spend money quickly 🤔 Oh well - hopefully a good lesson for all the founders out there.... Thoughts? **** edurigo.com #koo #google #youtube #meta #whatsapp #socialmedia #advertising #ad #revenue #startup #competition #india #funding

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Zomato's Q1FY25 Earnings Soar: Revenue Up by 74% to Rs 4,206 Crore, Profit Skyrockets to Rs 253 Crore https://lnkd.in/d4YNQHFi Great to see regular profits from startup darlings of India. way to go 🎉🥳 #zomato #startup #india #indiastartup

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Finsire has recently started its learning series - Ideally by chatting with the best folks in the Industry. Here, with Siddharth Shetty, Co-founder and CTO of Account Aggregator (AA) from DigiSahamati Foundation, we speak about the data exchange's inception, growth, and future in India. - We use AA for various reasons, including pushing boundaries in India's data exchange layer with various use cases. - It's been about three years since it went live, and over 70 million cumulative Indian accounts are linked. - One-of-a-kind data sharing network from India that is not seen anywhere across the globe, baring Singapore with https://lnkd.in/gyrCQtVQ - Different approach to protect consumers as compared to the previous models that existed to attain consumer data by various methods used by Plaid or Salt Edge Onemoney Finvu (Cookiejar Technologies) Protean eGov Technologies Anumati by Perfios AA NADL - Account Aggregator Computer Age Management Services Limited KFin Technologies Ltd. Enjoy - Please click on the link below and watch the video!

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Who exactly is losing market share in the hotly contest grocery commerce? I thought it must be the now-not-so modern retail, but I'm not so sure. Zepto raised $665 Mn at a valuation of $3.6 Bn, and is in talks to raise $250 Mn more. And their cofounder and CEO Aadit Palicha recently commented that they can beat DMart - Avenue Supermarts Ltd on GMV in the next 12-18 months. Swiggy Instamart also is growing, and Blinkit is likely to be more valuable than their owner Zomato itself - so they are all doing well, even if Dunzo isn't. Sure, no idea what JioMart Digital is doing, but deep pockets. Same with Tata Digital and their weird assortment forced to converge on Neu. bigbasket.com is trying to unlearn and relearn, and it just might. And Flipkart Grocery and Amazon Fresh are also upping their game - launching faster deliveries, discounts, improved fill rates, and selection. So I wonder if it is the modern-trade players? The likes of More Retail Private Limited, Spencer's Retail, STAR BAZAR, and SPAR Retail that are suffering? The nearest Spencer's to me is definitely a sore sight, now reduced to a shell of it's former glory - I think they aren't even replenishing inventory now. And we all know what happened to Big Bazaar - Future Retail. But Dmart itself isn't doing half bad - with pareto presence in just 23 cities, and no presence in UP (except NCR), Bihar, and West Bengal, they have considerable headroom, still. And they haven't yet quite solved for ecommerce, so while The Ken says that they are lost, they may find their way, eventually? I also don't think that the real consumption is growing, if at all, it may even shrink with the K-growth. Thus, some one _is_ losing share. And if it is not modern trade, then is it the regional chains? The single kiranas? The corner-store? The hand-cart? I'm not entirely sure because this data is hard to organize, and get. Would you know? Image created by AI in Microsoft Bing Copilot.

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Who would invest in founders who have wasted $50M? Koo, an Indian microblogging platform, recently shut shop after raising $50M in capital. Everyone has their views on why Koo failed. IMO, the biggest reason behind its failure was a lack of PMF (Product Market Fit). Koo spent much money on marketing and didn’t build a product people wanted. It kept harping on nationalism, a Twitter for Indians, made in #India. This approach failed. However, this doesn’t mean Koo’s founders aren’t smart or intelligent. I wrote in an earlier post that we shouldn’t be surprised if Koo’s founders raise fresh capital for a new startup. To many of us, this might seem grossly unfair. Millions of smart, hardworking founders are struggling to raise capital while investors are backing failed founders who have wasted millions of dollars. How is that fair? It confirms the widely held belief that the #venturecapital industry is broken and corrupt where a few people with the right connections get all the capital while others don’t see a dime. It shows that the VC industry is a closed group, a cabal where who you know matters more than anything. While these are just complaints, most people who criticise VCs don’t understand how startup investing works. VCs welcome failures. They embrace them because they know failures are inevitable. When VCs invest in 20 #startups, they know 15 will fail. The goal is to invest in startups that can give them a 100x return. Failures are part of the game. They are unavoidable. The aim is to back founders who can build such 100x return companies. Hence, failures are not looked down upon in the VC industry. It’s similar to the American culture where society appreciates the people who take risks, and it easily accepts personal bankruptcies that result from this risk-taking approach. There’s no taboo in failing in the USA and the VC industry. I’m sure Koo’s founders have learnt from their mistakes. It’s an expensive mistake and not everyone is so lucky to have this luxury to spend $50M on their education. ;) However, most VCs will back Koo’s #founders because these founders know how to raise capital and they know how to not build and scale tech companies. Their past failures have improved their chances of future success. In the VC industry, Failure is Good.

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India has built Open Network For Digital Commerce (ONDC) - a unique network of apps - with more than 15M transactions every month, more than 100M transactions till today and more than billion $ of GMV. This network is poised to touch billion transactions per month in this decade. Why India is great at a billion unit scale? > Large population (1.4B) > Large economy (4th largest) > Successful population scale digital infrastructure like UPI and Aadhar with billions of transactions every month With billions of agents coming, can India replicate the DPI playbook and lead in creation of "World's largest Agentic Network"? Lot of similarities between ONDC and Agentic network - Code is wrapper on CPU, Apps are wrapper on Code, ONDC is wrapper on Apps - LLM is wrapper on GPU, Agents are wrappers on LLM, Agentic Network is wrapper on Agents - India not strong at core : cpu, gpu, LLM, coding languages - deep tech/high investment - India great at apps, app networks - upper layers of stack Plotch.ai has played a pivotal role in ONDC network. We believe that given our experience, agentic networks can be built in India. India has that DNA to win in this. Pramod Varma | Abhishek Singh

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🚨🚨 For Paytm Group, online commerce and retail has been a hard nut to crack. Paytm Mall was never able to scale meaningfully. It's valuation was marked down from $3 billion to $13 million. Paytm is also in the middle the sale of its movies and events ticketing biz to Zomato. Founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma is now focusing more sharply on doubling down on the core business - payments, credit and expand its presence in mutual funds and insurance distribution. The company wants to get back to operating profitability by March 2025. More on the latest results The Arc - https://lnkd.in/gTq7n22r

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Zepto raises $665 million at a $3.6 billion valuation. Here's why this raise is exciting for the Qcommerce space and startup ecosystem: Zepto's repeated fundraising success is impressive. > Pioneered the 10-minute commerce game. > Reached $1 billion GMV in under 2 years. > Founders are among the youngest in the startup world. > Built an exceptional team quickly. > Raised significant funds despite strong competition from Swiggy, Blinkit, BBNow, and others. > India is leading in aggressive Qcommerce growth. Reflecting on my TinyOwl days in the early FoodTech space, competition was fierce, and investors were cautious. However, things are different now: > Markets have scaled, unlocking multi-billion dollar opportunities. > IPOs are now viable, even for third or fourth ranked players with strong financials. Investors may feel relieved, but the Qcommerce space will remain highly competitive for the next few years. Consumers, meanwhile, are spoiled for choice. Interesting times ahead.

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AI-powered blue-collar recruitment platform Vahan.ai has raised $10 Mn (INR 83.7 Cr) in a Series B funding round led by existing backer Khosla Ventures.  The round also saw participation from Y Combinator, Gaingels and Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma among others 👇 The latest round takes the startup’s cumulative funding to $18 Mn till date, including $8 Mn and an undisclosed amount raised in 2021 and 2019, respectively. Vahan seeks to use the fresh money to develop its AI recruitment technology, which will support eight major Indian languages, including Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, Bangla and Gujarati. Currently, Vahan’s AI recruiter conducts interviews in English and Hindi. However, within the next year, the platform will expand into other languages To read the in-depth article, click here: https://lnkd.in/gSrziXGT #news #AI #startup #funding

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Only D2C teams know how BIG a news it is that Shopify's Advanced Cash on Delivery (COD) app shut down 3 days ago With multiple brands reaching out to us for help I was contemplating how this poorly rated app has been the backbone of building the D2C ecosystem in India The Shopify India team got it built through a dev agency back in the day, because literally no other country had these problems Brands have a deep love / hate relationship with COD Why Love? - Even after a small brand gets someone interested in their products & story It is still tough for the buyer to trust the brand enough to Pre-pay online COD gives them enough comfort to give the "new kid on the block" a chance In numbers, ~60-70% of D2C orders are still COD despite high UPI penetration. Brands see non-trivial increase in conversions when they give cash on delivery Why hate? ~10-30% of COD orders are never delivered for variety of reasons - fraud, bad addresses, change in mind etc That is very expensive for a small business -- ZERO revenue from the returned order, but o Cost of sending the package back and forth o Blocked inventory o Damages to the product This app attempted to solve this by providing control on who gets to see COD based on products, order sizes, pin-codes This problems with offering COD were however much deeper, as we realized over time shopflo merchants helped us create Advanced++ COD functionality, right within our product. As brands try to keep COD problems in check, we're doing our bit by creating "Priority onboarding for those using Advanced COD" DM me if you'd like to speak to us or visit www.shopflo.com End of an era, indeed

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CHANNELIAM FUNDING TRACKER RECENT UPDATES 1.    Chosen® Raises USD 1.2 Mn in Seed Round 2.    Clodura.AI Raises USD 2 Mn from Bharat Innovation Fund 3.    Digital marketing automation #startup Maino.ai raises $1.8 Mn 4.    #Healthtech startup DocPlix raises Rs 1.2 Cr in bridge round 5.    Speciality chemicals startup Scimplify to raise $5 Mn 6.    Robinhood acquires Bitstamp in $200M deal to expand #crypto presence globally #funding #startups #businessnews #channeliam

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'GenAI is easier to say in the boardroom and difficult to get right for many SaaS companies'. When speaking to multiple technology providers, we have observed this as well. I will go further to suggest that many existing players will find it difficult to move to agentic workflows meaningfully. Beyond document summarization, and basic AI uses. The real problem is not technology. It is the company's DNA and processes, and a large installed base of customers. Going from building deterministic systems to building non-deterministic systems with high accuracy is a different skill set and hard to pivot to quickly. #aiagents #genai

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Appcharge, the leading direct-to-consumer platform, is excited to share a $26 million Series A funding round, led by Creandum, with participation from Supercell, BITKRAFT Ventures, Moneta Ventures and Corundum, alongside existing investors Play Ventures, Glilot Capital Partners, and angel investors. This new funding marks Appcharge's next step in driving the DTC movement forward. Web stores have become ubiquitous—our recent industry report confirms this trend—but the DTC space still has so much room to grow. Maor Sason Roei Barassi Or Ben Shimon Gil Tov-Ly To share your startup story write us on - [email protected] #funding #startup #SeriesA #Appcharge

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