About Last Week : Startup News You Would Have Missed, But Shouldn’t!

by Kapil · Published August 9, 2017 · Updated August 10, 2017

We bring you a dose of important Indian startup news of the past 10 days!

Indian startup Ola’s employee and co-founder of Qarth Technologies, Abhinav Srivastava, has been arrested by Bengaluru Central Crime Branch on charges of Aadhaar data theft. According to the complaint, Srivastava illegally accessed UIDAI data through an “Aadhaar e-KYC verification” mobile app that he developed himself.
Amazon Transportation Services (ATS) to its sellers in India, even for orders placed through offline distribution as well as competitors Flipkart and Snapdeal. The ecommerce giant has recently launched a pilot programme, in which it is reportedly working with 300 of its registered sellers.
The company had applied for the approval in September 2016. It had proposed an investment of about $16.5 Mn. Bigbasket is touted to be the biggest online grocery player in the country. The platform claims to currently receive over 50,000 orders each day. Recently, Paytm Mall was in talks with online grocery startup Bigbasket to invest $200 Mn for a substantial stake.
One of the major highlights of the Indian startup ecosystem for the week was Snapdeal founders decision to give pink slips to about 80% of their employees. The news surfaced soon after the Snapdeal founders backed out from the merger deal with Flipkart and announced about Snapdeal 2.0.
In other major Indian startup news of the week, Flipkart has announced the launch of its Made-for-India brand, Billion. The new private label brand, Billion is developed specifically to cater to the unique needs of Indian customers. As part of the initiative, the ecommerce giant has teamed up with a number of domestic manufacturers. The news came around the time when Vanguard announced to mark up the valuations of Ola and Flipkart by 12% and 56% respectively.
Paytm is now in the process of integrating a WhatsApp like in-app chat service on its native app. With this launch, Paytm aims to replicate the success of Tencent’s WeChat business model in China. As per reports, the company will launch the service in the next few weeks and it will be live probably by the end of this month.
Zoomcar, a leading self-drive car rental company, announced the launch of Hop, the one-way intercity self-drive service. This allows a customer to pick up a car from Zoomcar location from one city and drop it off to another city at a Zoomcar location. The launch of a one-way intercity launch adds flexibility and options to people’s travel plans. The Hop service will be available across 24 cities including intra-state and eventually inter-state routes as well.
Skillet is an educational forum for restaurateurs, wherein Zomato will host a series of workshops to help them identify market opportunities, discuss challenges with peers, learn from experiences of master chefs, and address pain points in the business. These workshops will be conducted by industry experts and successful restaurateurs.