🏦 Fintechs divided over RBI's data repository

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30 May 2024 View in Browser

Hello,   The hottest day on record?   On Wednesday, Delhi reportedly recorded the country's highest-ever temperature at 52.3 degrees Celsius.   However, authorities are yet to confirm whether the temperature sensor in Delhi's Mungeshpur automatic weather station—which showed the record-breaking reading—is working properly.    Moving on, more capital pours into funds.    Sorin Investments, an early-stage venture capital firm co-founded by former KKR India head Sanjay Nayar, has announced the final close of its maiden fund at Rs 1,350 crore.   Holani Venture Capital Fund, a Rs 300 crore SME-focused fund, raised Rs 184 crore within one month of its launch.   Meanwhile, financial services company Avendus has launched its third fund under the Avendus Future Leaders Fund (FLF Fund) platform and aims to raise a corpus of Rs 3,000 crore, including a green-shoe option of up to Rs 1,500 crore.     Lastly, researchers have found a way to make chocolate with less sugar and calories by using the cocoa crop more efficiently.   Chocolate that’s good for the planet and the waist!   In today’s newsletter, we will talk about  RBI's fintech repository triggers cheers and fears Building an LLM for Marathi Helping children overcome health battles Here’s your trivia for today: When was travelator, or a moving walkway, invented?

Fintech RBI's fintech repository triggers cheers and fears Fintech startups in India don’t know what to make of the data repository announced by the RBI. The central bank hopes the portal would serve as a compendium for policymakers to improve their understanding of the sector, as well as help formulate sophisticated policy frameworks.   However, it has left the fintech industry divided.   Key takeaways: “It’s well known that tech innovation will always outpace regulatory action, but with the repository, the RBI can catch it early and pre-empt innovations before they get tangled up in investor capital,” Anurag Jain, Founder and Executive Director of KredX, tells YourStory. Some founders highlight that the fintech data repository has the potential to enhance transparency and corporate governance, largely because it would encourage companies to furnish regular updates to the RBI for internal tracking. “It seems like the RBI may want us to report like a regulated entity, without granting us the status of a regulated entity. Either the RBI should be open to giving out RE licenses more readily, or create reporting structures for the portal that are very lenient,” says one fintech startup founder anonymously. Read More

Funding Alert   1) Jakson Green: Rs 60 Cr|Debt 2) DiFACTO: Rs 40 Cr|Series A 3) EcoRatings: $1M|Pre-seed

Startup Building an LLM for Marathi Bengaluru-based startup Smallstep.ai is building a large language model (LLM) for the Marathi language. Sagar Sarkale, CEO and Founder of Smallstep.ai, drew inspiration from misal dish to build two versions of LLMs, called Misal 7B and 1B.   Indic LLM: Misal is built on top of Meta’s Llama 2, an open-source Gen AI model further customised by Sarkale for Marathi. The model was developed to address the limitations of the Llama2 model, which was mostly trained on English data. Misal first addressed the challenge of non-English languages, like Marathi, by developing a specialised SentencePiece tokeniser, expanding the token vocabulary. Then, the model underwent training where it was exposed to a large volume of Marathi text data. “While we cannot outperform ChatGPT 3.5 in tasks such as sentiment analysis, paraphrasing, and translation, the Misal-7B model surpasses OlaKrutrim in all tasks except translation,” Sarkale says. Read More

100 Emerging Women Leaders Helping children overcome health battles Overcoming severe body image issues, Priya Prakash made it her mission to help other children going through the same health challenges. In 2016, she started HealthSetGo Education in Gurugram to offer a large-scale health programme for schools.   Personal fitness: The programme offers annual health checkups, accidental insurance of Rs 1 lakh for every student in the programme, and education on nutrition, mental health, and menstrual hygiene. HealthSetGo Education has an application platform where every doctor can record their observations on an app. These are then transferred onto an online health report that parents and schools can access. Over the last six years, HealthSetGo Education has worked with 300+ private schools and at the city level with governments, impacting 500,000+ students and parents. Read More

From the CapTable Late-stage funding drops to lowest level since 2017 as negotiations drag out Despite the "upbeat" mood among investors, late-stage deal negotiations are taking significantly longer as investors meticulously run the rule over startups in order to avoid making the mistakes of 2021, when capital was cheap and investors were drunk on a heavy mix of FOMO and blind optimism.    Today, investors are thoroughly evaluating companies, scrutinising their economics, and spending considerable time with stakeholders such as vendors and customers before finalising funding rounds. This cautious approach marks a notable shift from the pandemic years, when deals were closed rapidly.   As a result of these protracted negotiations, late-stage funding has plummeted to a seven-year low in the country, even with many large deals in the pipeline. According to data collated by The CapTable from Tracxn, late-stage venture capital funding (Series C and beyond) fell to just over $3 billion in the first five months of 2024, down from more than $4.2 billion in the same period last year. The previous low was in 2016, when late-stage funding stood at just under $2 billion.   Key takeaways: Late-stage funding (Series C onwards) dropped to a seven-year low in the first five months of 2024 as deal negotiations continue to drag out. The average deal size of late-stage investments has also fallen to $47 million so far this year compared to over $57 million in the same period of 2023. Investors are now shifting focus towards metrics such as EBITDA multiples from revenue or GMV multiples. Big ticket investors continue to shy away from India’s startup ecosystem after being extremely bullish during the pandemic years. Continue Reading

News & Updates Union: A Samsung Electronics union in South Korea will begin escalating strike action next week by staging the first-ever walkout over demands for higher wages, union officials said on Wednesday. Turbulence: The Singapore Airlines flight that encountered severe turbulence on its way from London to Singapore dropped 54 meters (178 feet) in less than five seconds, preliminary findings released Wednesday showed. Crypto: Customers with funds locked up in crypto exchange Gemini’s defunct crypto lending programme are finally going to start getting their money back. The company said it will return $2.18 billion of its digital assets to users of the Earn programme, which it paused withdrawals for in November 2022.

Here's what else we have for you   Join Dell Technologies’ webinar to master the art of pitching and land your dream angel investor In association with Dell Technologies   🚀 Want to crack the code to angel investment? Join the ‘Empowered by Dell’ webinar with Navin Honagudi, Managing Partner, Elev8 Venture Partners, on May 30 at 3 PM IST. Gain valuable insights and strategies for your startup journey. Reserve your spot today! #AngelInvestors #StartupFunding #WebinarSeries Know More D2C fashion brands gear up with trend-first offerings for Myntra’s 20th edition of EORS In association with Myntra   Joining the Mnytra’s Rising Stars programme helped D2C brands Powerlook and Fabelstreet jump to lightspeed in terms of sales, reach and visibility. Now, they’re taking their brands to the next level at the 20th edition of Myntra End of Reason Sale. Learn more about their journeys, their triumphs and their anticipation for EORS. Know More Join the conversation on purpose-driven tech innovation with AWS Bharat Innovators and EkStep Foundation In association with AWS | AMD   What's the secret weapon to empower billions? The answer's closer than you think. Join the #AWSBharat Innovators Series and explore #DigitalPublicGoods! Dr Pramod Varma, CTO, EkStep Foundation, gets talking with Kanishka Agiwal of AWS on how tech can create positive change. Register Now: https://bit.ly/3wSVlJM Know More

Did you know?   When was travelator, or a moving walkway, invented? Answer: The first moving walkway debuted at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, US.

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