Surge, Sequoia Capital India’s rapid scale-up programme, launched its sixth cohort, where Sequoia Capital India and its co-investors invested in 20 early-stage startups, with funding totalling $60 million.
The cohort featured startups belonging to SaaS, Dev Tools, cybersecurity, edtech, D2C, fintech, and agritech sectors, who are leveraging tech to solve some of the biggest challenges faced by consumers and businesses globally.
According to Sequoia, this batch of startups is geographically diverse. While 50 percent of companies are based in India, it got new entrants from Malaysia, Thailand, and Taiwan, alongwith companies from Bangladesh and Australia.
Surge 06 will kick off on January 27, where founders will go through a rigorous 16-week virtual programme.
Some of the past speakers and mentors in the programme included Ankiti Bose (Zilingo), Ashwini Asokan (vue.ai/Mad Street Den), Binny Bansal (Flipkart), Byju Raveendran (BYJU’S), Doug Leone (Sequoia Capital), Girish Mathrubootham (Freshworks), Kunal Shah (CRED), Nithin Kamath (Zerodha), Sanjeev Bikchandani (InfoEdge), and Vidit Aatrey (Meesho).
“The exceptional calibre and talent displayed by the founders of each new Surge cohort continue to humble us. Every founder brings with them the kind of bold innovation and purpose the world needs to solve some of the most pressing problems today,” said Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Surge and Sequoia India.
He added, “Many of our companies are building strong, digital foundations that are opening pathways to international markets. We’re excited to be part of our founders’ ambitious journeys as they work towards becoming global businesses of the future.”
Surge 06 featured the largest number of software startups, who focus on cybersecurity, customer engagement, talent development, payments, digital learning, mentoring, retail investing, etc.
At present, two cybersecurity startups are in stealth mode.
Here’s a list of Surge 06 startups:
10 Minute School: 10 Minute School provides affordable and accessible education for K-12 and college students, university admission test candidates, job-seekers, and people looking for specialised skills training in Bangladesh.
Airavana: Airavana reduces privacy risks and improves data security while providing customer data discovery across more than 150 cloud applications. It enables enterprises to manage and protect customers' personal data in consonance with privacy regulations like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
Aqgromalin: Aqgromalin is building a full-stack agritech platform to help farmers diversify into animal husbandry and aquaculture. The Chennai-based startup provides a data-backed traceable supply chain to farmers, butchers, and meat companies for their poultry, seafood, and livestock needs.
BambooBox: AI-powered SaaS platform BambooBox helps companies build high-quality pipelines through engagement across an entire account than a single lead.
BiteSpeed: BiteSpeed is building a conversational commerce stack for D2C brands, which will enable online brands to interact with customers and sell products on apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Using chat as the core communication channel, BiteSpeed solves for the entire ecommerce customer journey, from retargeting to providing shipping updates to customer support.
Blend: Blend is on a mission to turn every online seller into an ecommerce pro with an AI graphic design and marketing app that creates product visuals, social graphics, product descriptions, and ads in seconds.
Canary Mail: Canary Mail is reimagining email security for modern businesses and individuals. With easy to use email encryption, protection from inbound threats, and human error prevention, Canary Mail delivers 360-degree email security and helps achieve regulatory compliance without compromising on user experience.
Checkbox: Checkbox, a no-code Expert Process Automation (EPA) platform, enables business users to develop their tools and software using intuitive ‘drag and drop’ technology.
Cooby: Cooby is reimagining sales management for a messaging-first world by building the best-in-class engagement and team management solutions on top of popular messaging apps like WhatsApp and LINE.
Grupin: Indonesia-basedsocial commerce platform Grupin offers an interactive community-based shopping experience to consumers, along with the benefit of large discounts on bulk consumer products.
HelloMida: Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) fashion brand HelloMida is built on a real-time retail model that empowers Southeast Asia’s digitally native Gen Z consumers to express and celebrate their individualism.
IIMMPACT: IIMMPACT is a one-stop platform for payments and data aggregation for Southeast Asian companies. It aims to help Southeast Asian companies build fintech solutions by providing a full suite of world-class APIs, ranging from mobile top-ups, utility bills, government services, insurance, and travel under one umbrella.
Infina: Retail investing app Infina makes it easy for young tech-savvy Vietnamese to start their investing journey with minimal risk.
Manatal: Theend-to-end recruitment and onboarding SaaS platform is on a mission to transform how the world recruits. Using an AI-powered Applicant Tracking System, Manatal helps companies onboard in minutes, leveraging the latest technologies to win the war for talent.
Peakperformer: Peakperformer aims to democratise leadership coaching for managers at all levels and help them build behavioural skills in an engaging, measurable, and continuous manner. The digital coaching platform enables organisations to create strong leaders at all career levels.
ScanPay: ScanPay aims to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) accept payments from customers seamlessly using just a smartphone.
Shajgoj Limited: Shajgoj is on a mission to inspire every woman to celebrate beauty with confidence by providing authentic products at reasonable prices from renowned brands and local distributors through its physical stores and online platforms.
Toplyne: Toplynehelps revenue teams at product-led SaaS companies to convert freemium users to paid subscribers. The plug-and-play platform enables sales teams at product-led growth (PLG) companies to identify accounts most likely to convert by analysing user behaviours within a product and determining which users have shown high intent to buy.
Edited by Suman Singh
Author :- Sindhu Kashyaap ( )
Source :- https://yourstory.com/2022/01/sequoia-capital-india-announces-launches-surge-06-sixth-cohort-rajan-anandan
Date :-January 25, 2022 at 06:00AM
In a matter of just 16 trading days in 2022, since January 3, the S&P BSE Sensex has seen a huge bout of volatility.
On January 24, at the day’s low of 56,984.01, the 30-stock Sensex was down 1,326.08 points – or 2.27 percent – compared to 2022’s opening value of 58,310.09 on January 3.
Just five trading days back, on January 18, the Sensex had touched 61,475.15 points – its highest in 2022. In comparison, at Monday's low, the index was down by a whopping 4,491.14 points – or 7.31 percent.
And if one compares the Sensex’s 52-week high (and also its recent life-high) of 62,245.43 points, on October 19 last year, at Monday’s low point, the benchmark index has seen a fall of 5,261.42 points – 8.45 percent – in a matter of just 68 trading days.
Clearly, the recent bout of volatility shows steep moves on the benchmark index, and the same has its bearing on the market performance of eight tech startups that took the public route through their initial public offerings (IPOs) in 2021 – also hailed as the best year ever for IPOs.
On Monday, alongside the 1,545.67 – or 2.62 percent – decline in the S&P BSE Sensex, the eight tech startups witnessed an erosion of Rs 38,171 crore ($5.1 billion) in their total market value. It stood close to Rs 2.70 lakh crore ($36.3 billion) on Monday, as compared to Rs 3.08 lakh crore ($41.4 billion) on Friday.
At YourStory, we analysed these eight tech startups’ listing day closing prices and the value at which the S&P BSE Sensex closed on the respective listing days.
And, after rebasing the closing prices and the Sensex’s close to 10,000 on the respective listing days, we have arrived at the invested value’s performance at the close of trade on January 24 (Monday). Read more.
The Interview
FarEye CEO Kushal Nahata deep-dives into the journey behind building a global end-to-end logistics startup from India and outlines the company’s expansion plans, and the road ahead.
Founded in 2013 by Kushal, Gaurav Srivastava, and Gautam Kumar, FarEye is gunning for an enhanced delivery experience for end-customers through its intelligent delivery management platform.
Editor’s Pick: Techie Tuesday
Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc), Bengaluru, has developed several patented voice technologies using Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Augmented Reality (AR). His love for science and technology developed early on when he was in school.
In this week’s Techie Tuesday, we feature Prasanta, whose work in speech recognition is transforming many lives. Read more.
Started in 2016 by XLRI graduates Kunal Malik and Maneesh Dhooper to disrupt the unorganised private tuition sector in India, PlanetSpark sought to transform traditional KG to Class 8 tuitions by combining physical teaching with mobile technology.
However, the platform pivoted to online classes in October 2019 after seeing the dramatic rise in demand for edtech. With over 2,000 tutors and 22,000 students trained so far on its platform, the Gurugram-based startup aims to make children between 4 and 16 years confident communicators. Read more.
Fullerton India and One97 Communications Limited, the parent company of Paytm, have partnered to provide lending products to MSMEs. The initiative aims to fulfil the credit needs of MSMEs across small cities and towns to help them scale up their businesses.
Ezetap has announced that Byas Nambisan, CEO since 2019, has now been elevated as a Co-founder by the Board. This is in recognition of his leadership in bringing the company to the forefront of India’s dynamic fintech landscape.
Flipkart has ramped up its grocery operations to now service consumers in 1,800 cities, including Ajmer, Amritsar, Bhuj, Dehradun, and Kanyakumari, among others. With this expansion, Flipkart is now present in 23 states, taking its reach to 10,000 pin codes.
Before you go, stay inspired with…
Deepinder Goyal, Founder & CEO, Zomato
“Anything good and meaningful takes decades to build.”
Author :- Team YS ( )
Source :- https://yourstory.com/2022/01/indian-listed-startups-stock-market-planetspark-deepinder-goyal
Date :-January 25, 2022 at 06:00AM
Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc), Bengaluru, has developed several patented voice technology using Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Augmented Reality (AR). But his love for science and technology developed early on when he was in school.
“As my father days had struggled significantly to get the right education, he made sure that I was well educated and had the right tutoring and mentorship. But what really excited me in my high school days in 1996 was electronics and the work that ISRO was doing then,” Prasanta tells YourStory.
His father was a government employee and his mother was a homemaker. For Prasanta, the aim was to get a job immediately after graduation. Despite his love for the work ISRO was doing at that time, he, however, couldn’t take up the organisation’s offer as he was already working in a different organisation.
“After graduating in electrical engineering from Jadavpur University in 2003, it was exceedingly important for us that I find a job. I had started applying everywhere I could, which gave me job offers from different places, and I started working at Usha Comp Private Limited in Kolkata,” he narrates.
However, he was never interested in taking up a job and rather wanted to research and work on electrical engineering and newer technologies. “I explained to my father that quitting the job may seem like a tough call, but in the long run, it would pay more dividends,” explains Prasanta.
Thereafter, he attempted the IISc entrance exam to pursue post-graduation studies.
“My rank was 489, thus I missed out on a lot of IITs and even IISc. My friends joined IISc and they kept telling me that there was a vacancy for a research position at the institute. I cleared the exam in 2004, and then was selected for the programme,” he says.
It was during this time that he got an offer from ISRO. While pursuing his MSc at IISc and simultaneously working there, he realised he could build and work on solving significantly larger problems.
“The faculty members at IISc were nothing short of inspirational. Their style of teaching and the way they inspired people to pursue research made me fall in love with the field, and I decided to take on the role of a researcher,” adds Prasanta.
This meant putting in a lot of hard work academically. Despite having a job offer from a startup, Prasanta decided to continue on the academic route. He went on to become a research intern at Microsoft Research India where he focused on the area of audio-visual speaker verification in 2006.
Prasanta Kumar Ghosh on commencement at the University of Southern California in 2011.
“I focused my research and work on speech compression. When you speak on a phone today and record the conversation, the voice is transmitted to your friend after compressing the audio. My work is around non-uniform sampling-based compression. Any waveform can be sampled across three key locations. You don't have to look at the whole signal or all the samples, but the key locations are compressed and reconstructed,” explains Prasanta.
He went on to publish his research which fetched him a thesis award. It also made him realise that he could do more work in the space. “It got me to look at the other options in the field of speech and I started looking at places in the US where I could do my PhD,” he adds.
He went on to receive his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles in 2011. It was there he learned how different interdisciplinary work can be done.
Multipdisiplinary approach
“I worked at the intersection of science and technology. I worked with linguists, engineers, mathematicians, and others to build speech-recognition technology. I understood how an FM (frequency modulation) transmitter generates signals and this was the base for understanding how human speech worked,” explains Prasanta.
He also had experience working on a special electromagnetic programme at USC that would record and track the motion of the lips and tongues, and jaw movements while speaking. This further led to building the different voice recognition modules.
“I had this idea when I was at LA which has a large Hispanic population that preferred speaking Spanish than English. I had a project where the speech of the doctor, which was in English, could be translated to Spanish so that the patient could understand them,” he explains.
During 2011-2012, Prasanta was with IBM India Research Lab (IRL) as a researcher. He was also awarded the INSPIRE Faculty Fellowship from the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India in 2012.
“At IBM I worked more around intent classification in speech. For example, if someone asks ‘should I carry an umbrella tomorrow’, they actually want to know the weather for tomorrow,” says Prasanta. He also worked on text analytics and its intent.
He again joined IISc after his stint at IBM. After having worked on speech recognition, the next level was working on audio-visual speech recognition.
“We speak with gestures, and it is important to understand how gestures can create realistic animation. We have an optitrack motion camera device that can record someone’s gestures when they speak, which can help in understanding speech behaviour,” he explains.
Prasanta receiving honourable mention at MHI Research Festival for paper titled "Processing speech signal using auditory-like filterbank provides least uncertainty about articulatory gestures"
Prasanta has also worked with hospitals like NIMHANS, St Johns, Bengaluru, etc. “Using the sound of your voice, we can, for example, try and understand how much the lung is congested. With HCG Hospital, we are trying to understand if you have a problem with your voice box. Many cancer patients have lost their voice box; we are trying to convert their speech into natural speech. Other than that, we are working to detect and improve the condition of patients with neurological problems who have a problem in speaking,” says Prasanta.
Now, he is working on speech recognition and voice technology using AI, ML, and AR. It offers the promise of improving livelihoods, especially in rural parts of India.
However, while India is home to 22 official scheduled languages, and a total of 6,661 mother tongues, leading internet companies in India are currently focusing only on five or six Indian languages.
Although the market is still nascent, the lack of investment in local languages and dialects is one of the fundamental bottlenecks for the growth of voice technology in the country. Prasanta’s project aims at addressing this bottleneck by reaching out to the wider Indian language base and laying the foundation to make it beneficial for the masses.
Advising young techies, Prasanta says, “Find out what you are really passionate about and focus on that. Once you decide to go all out to build and work on your project, find the support of the right people. Anything you do today needs multiple people coming together, and then everything will fall in place.”
Edited by Kanishk Singh
Author :- Sindhu Kashyaap ( )
Source :- https://yourstory.com/2022/01/techie-tuesday-iisc-prasanta-kumar-ghosh-speech-recognition-ai-ml
Date :-January 25, 2022 at 05:55AM
Hyderabad-based HRtech startup Darwinbox raised $72 million in a funding round led by Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), along with participation from existing investors Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia India, Lightspeed India, Endiya Partners, 3One4Capital, JGDEV, and SCB 10X.
The company’s valuation post the Series D round has crossed the $1 billion mark, with the total investment raised thus far crossing $110 million. The company has grown 200 percent since the last fundraise from Salesforces Ventures, around a year ago.
Founded in late 2015 by Chaitanya Peddi, Jayant Paleti and Rohit Chennamaneni, Darwinbox aims to use the funds for global expansion by accelerating its platform innovation agenda, strengthening its product, engineering, and customer success teams, along with scaling its go-to-market (GTM) presence in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and MENA (Middle East and North Africa).
The team added that they aim to take Darwinbox public by 2025.
In a conversation with Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO, YourStory, Rohit, Jayant, and Chaitanya spoke about Darwinbox’ journey to becoming a unicorn. When asked what does the coveted status means for the team, Rohit said,
“It is a milestone; we will feel happy about it for maybe a day, but after that, it is going back to business. It is just a milestone and not the destination. The journey has been a humbling one, with customers believing and taking bets on us at different stages. Also, our employees took the faith and belief in Darwinbox in the early days, and the right investors came at the right time.”
The new unicorn is a cloud-based HRtech platform that caters to an organisation’s HR needs across the employee lifecycle, including recruitment, onboarding, core transactions (leaves, attendance, directory), payroll, travel and expenses, employee engagement, performance management, rewards and recognition, and people analytics.
The new-age platform combines highly configurable workflows, intelligent insights, and smart interfaces to help enterprises unleash the true potential of their workforce.
“Valuations are an outcome and these are generally tough to handle. What we can control is the product. Building for extraordinary agility and delivering stellar employee experience have been critical in defining success for Darwinbox’s customers. We will continue to invest in new and innovative technology to deliver a frictionless experience for the work-from-anywhere workforce,” said Chaitanya.
The trio worked for the likes of McKinsey and EY, as well as their clients, and realised that those companies did not have the best HR systems. The main asset for these companies were the people, and they needed the best systems for HR.
So, they decided to start Darwinbox in 2015 with an investment of less than Rs 30 lakh. Their first breakthrough came in the form of Delhivery. Now, the company is expecting the overall team to grow by 100 percent and is also preparing to launch in the US this year.
“Among those who gave initial feedback was Mohandas Pai, an early investor in the startup, who said, ‘if you are building something in the HR space, can you build something for the employee? At least someone needs to build for them.’ Many previous HR systems have been built for the IT function, but our system touches everyone in the company – from the CEO to the fresher,” explained Jayant.
He added that the idea is to focus on what kind of problems you are solving for the last mile. “It was this hypothesis that gave us the courage to go head-on against larger giants who possibly have funds that can rival the GDP of a small nation,” he added.
"Investing behind technology to manage talent has become inevitable for organisational success. Darwinbox demonstrated the ability to build agile, innovative, and user-friendly solutions along with deep customer-centricity – which has made them a platform of choice for several leading enterprises,” added Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, and a Venture Partner at TCV.
Adding further, Chaitanya said, “The product’s focus is on solving the challenges of people function in large and diverse organisations with complex structures using the best of technologies. We will invest heavily in further strengthening our platform, especially our analytical layer with AI and ML capabilities to aid decision-making.”
Competing with giants
The founders said what helped them in their journey was keeping up with the pace of change happening around them. They added that agility and building around customer needs are important for success.
The company also stated that over 1.5 million employees from large conglomerates, fast-growing technology giants, and leading global brands like Nivea, Starbucks, Dominos, T-Systems, AXA, Tokio, Cigna, JSW, Adani, Vedanta, Mahindra, Kotak, NSE, Ujjivan, Makemytrip, Swiggy, and Tokopedia were able to adapt to the new normal with Darwinbox.
“SaaS is a new opportunity today, and it is India’s next big opportunity for the world. It is a convergence of multiple factors coming together – talent, ability to sell, and multiple things coming together at the same time,” Jayant said.
Edited by Kanishk Singh
Author :- Sindhu Kashyaap ( )
Source :- https://yourstory.com/2022/01/hrtech-saas-startup-darwinbox-unicorn-series-d-funding-valuation
Date :-January 25, 2022 at 06:00AM
Running a company is always challenging, with all the tasks that need to be done. You need a motivated, loyal, and productive workforce to help maximize the company’s resources and output. However, motivating and retaining great employees can challenging, considering the salaries and other benefits that you have to provide them in exchange for their services. This is where an Employee Share Option Plan (ESOP) comes into play.
If this is the first time that you’ve heard of this concept, no worries. This article summarizes what ESOP is and how it can help business owners like you.
Simply put, an Employee Share Option Plan or ESOP is when a company offers its employees the option to buy a specific number of shares in the company, at a specified price that is typically lower than the market price, within a particular date.
In other words, this is an employee share option that allows employees to have an ownership interest in the company they’re working for. There are two types of share options that can be offered:
Incentive Stock Option (ISO) – This type of option allows an employee to get rid of taxes on the shares they own until the shares are sold. After getting the option grant, they will hold the stock for at least two years, and after a year of exercising the option, they can be eligible for a long-term 20% capital gains tax. This option is not transferable to anyone, even within the family.
Non-Qualified Stock Option (NSO) – This type of share option requires an employee to pay an income tax on the difference between the price at which you avail of the option and the grant price. Furthermore, the employer can agree if the employee wants to transfer the shares to the employee’s offspring.
Benefits of an Employee Share Option Plans for the Companies
With that general idea of what ESOP is, if you now want to know how an employee share option benefits your company, then the four (4) most common benefits of granting an Employee Share Option Plan to your workforce are summarized here:
Attract and Retain Talented Employees
Hiring and keeping talented employees is never easy and this is more of a truth in today’s world, where companies and startups abound. With the fierce competition in the business world, companies are competing with one another to get the staff they want for their company. Aside from attracting the best applicants, offering employee share option plans can also motivate workers to give their best, knowing that their output affects their shares.
Ideally, with an employee benefit plan such as ESOP in place, applicants will be attracted to join the company while current employees will be inspired to work and stay longer. Considering the fact that they have an ownership interest in the company, they will tend to be more loyal and committed to their job and for a longer period of time. As a result, your organization will be more productive and prosperous today and in the coming years as your employees work together in helping the company grow.
Boost Employee Morale
Having shares in the company in which they’re working can help boost the employees’ morale. Instead of seeing themselves as salaried personnel, they’ll feel like they’re owners of the organization and that they have a say over important aspects. They’ll become more inspired and committed to the best interests of the company considering that one of the benefits of availing of the ESOP is that they will get a share of the company’s profits in the form of dividends.
Cost-Effective
As mentioned, most companies are looking for ways to reduce the costs of employee benefits, searching for less-cost solutions that offer high value for their staff. This is how offering ESOP becomes an ideal addition to employee benefits.
Although these share option plans for employees are rarely considered as an alternative for compensation, they’re still a good part of your company’s benefits packages because they can make employment opportunities in your company more appealing.
Despite the lost chance to sell the shares at the best market price and the cost of executing the plan, you can still get the most out of this benefit option by keeping staff motivated and loyal to stay with the company.
If you’re a small business owner, administering ESOP can be a cost-effective way of competing with more prominent corporations in your area.
Offers Tax Advantages
Including employee share option plans in your employees’ benefits program comes with some tax benefits too for your business. Generally, not until they’re exercised, ESOPs are considered worthless on your company’s book of accounts. This means that you’re not required to list down these options pending as a cost.
Moreover, once the employees exercise their options, your organization is authorized to deduct a tax equivalent to the difference between the market price and the strike price (fixed price at which the owner can buy the shares) as compensation expense.
Some other advantages of ESOPs or employee stock ownership plans for the companies can be summed up as:
ESOPs helps boost productivity
They save companies from immediate cash outflow
They help ageing owners to exit from the company
ESOPs help reshuffle ownership
They enhance employee retention
They help companies attract new employees
They are excellent for startups and companies operating in a low to moderate budget
The employee share option schemes also helps increase the intrinsic value of the cmpany
ESOP Benefits to Employees
ESOPs certainly help the companies and startups grow in ways more than one but not without benefitting the employees. After all, it is centring the employees that the concept of ESOPs are built. According to the recent survey conducted towards the end of 2021, it has been discovered that the employees working with startups have made more than $335 mn solely with the help of employee stock option strategies.
Thus, ESOPs definitely help the employees to a great extent. So, let's have a glimpse into how the employee option plan for stocks prove to be a boon for the employees themselves:
ESOPs help enhances the job security of the employees
Startup ESOPs extend retirement benefits
ESOP in startups improves the employees' overall commitment to work
Share option plans make the employees wealthy
ESOP benefits the employees by boosting their professional growth
Company Share Option Plans and the Indian Companies
Company share option plans are growing more than ever all around the world. Therefore, the Indian markets are not an exception to it. The Indian ecosystem has seen around 44 companies turning unicorn in 2021. Acording to the reports dated December 2021, the Indian startups have raised a total of $39 Bn till the first week of December, which is an increase of around 225% from $11.8 Bn in 2020. All these fundings are also enabling a huge growth for the startup companies and an outstanding era of growth and innovation for the country as well. Along with the funding it usually boils down to the employees that companies have as far as growth is concerned. It is the talent that a company nurtures, which helps distinguish a great performing company to an average performing or a low-performing company. Here, implementing overwhelming employee stock option strategies comes in extremely handy to boost the employees. While the companies can certainly resort to giving cash bonus, freebies, week offs or gifts to their employees to motivate them, the ultimate motivation comes in with the administration of lucrative share option schemes as offers that the employees simply cannot refuse.
ESOPs are not only growing in numbers but also expanding in terms of the size. If you are now more curious to learn about the major Indian companies that have been promising decent employee stock options for the empoyees, then let's have a quick rundown along the best ESOP buybacks that the Indian companies has seen in 2021.
Well, Flipkart leads the Indian companies with the biggest ESOP buyback amount of $125 mn. The Walmart-led company has been succeeded by:
Browserstack - $50 mn
Swiggy - $40 mn
UpGrad - $29.5 mn
Zerodha - $27 mn
Udaan - $23 mn
Sharechat - $19 mn
Phonepe - $18 mn
CRED - $19.3 mn
Spinny - $12 mn
HealthifyMe - $12 mn
Unacademy - $10.5 mn
Chalo - $10 mn
Khatabook - $10 mn
Razorpay - $10 mn
Zetwerk - $8.3 mn
Urban Company - $7.3 mn
Simplilearn - $6.4 mn
Meesho - $5.5 mn
Takeaways
As you can see, ESOPs can be a perfect tool for businesses that are looking to attract the best talents, and for those who want their business to grow and succeed. For your convenience, this article summarizes information for you to know when you should consider ESOP for your business and more importantly, to convince people about the growth potential of your company.
FAQs
What is an employee share scheme?
An Employee Share Option Plan is when a company offers its employees the option to buy a specific number of shares in the company, at a specified price that is typically lower than the market price, within a particular date.
What are the pros of offering employee stock options?
ESOP acts as a tool of motivation for the employees that once they own a stock they feel responsible for the performance of the company, as it determines the value of the stocks of the company.
It helps the employer to retain the company and assure a good level of performance in the work.
How do I avoid tax on ESOP?
To avoid paying taxes and potential penalties consider a rollover for your ESOP distribution. The rollover process takes place when tax-deferred funds from your ESOP are transferred to another tax deferred account such as an IRA or 401(k).
How ESOP is taxed?
The shares is short-term when held for less than 3 years and long-term when sold after 3 years. The period of holding begins from the exercise date up to the date of sale.
What is the full form of ESOP?
The full form of ESOP is an employee share 0ption plan.
Ever since its listing on July 23 last year, the share price of foodtech decacornZomato never went under the three-digit figure.
On BSE, the Zomatostock touched a low point of Rs 112.55 apiece, on Friday, January 21, and that did not seem abnormal given the volatility that Indian equity markets have witnessed in recent weeks.
For the record, just five trading days ago, on January 18, the Sensex had touched 61,475.15 points – its highest in 2022. In comparison, at Monday's low of 56,984.01 points, the 30-stock index was down by a whopping 4,491.14 points – or 7.31 percent.
In the Monday mayhem, the Sensex lost 2,053.17 – or nearly 3.5 percent – to touch the day’s low, compared to Friday’s close of 59,037.18. At the end of the day’s trade, the benchmark index shredded 1,545.67 points – or 2.62 percent – to close at 57,491.51 points.
And Zomato was anything but an exception in the volatile correction of Monday. On the 127th trading day since its listing, Zomato breached the psychological three-digit barrier, and fell to Rs 91 apiece.
Apart from touching its lowest point since listing, the 20 percent single-day fall triggered the lower circuit on the stock.
After market-hours, a note addressed to Zomato employees from Deepinder Goyal, Zomato’s Founder and CEO, started making rounds among market circles, as well as on social media.
If one wonders why a CEO of a recently-listed tech startup wrote to his employees on a choppy day in the stock market, there are three reasons behind it.
One; Zomato has got accustomed to stock price movements – both downward and upwards – but not a steep fall breaching the three-digit mark.
Two; open communication makes startups stand out as compared to larger corporations, and Deepinder personified this belief.
Three; according to Zomato's shareholding pattern for the quarter ended December 2021, Zomato’s Employee Benefit Trust holds over 233.39 million shares, which works out to be 2.97 percent of Zomato.
Compared to Deepinder’s 4.69 percent shareholding through 369.4 million shares, the employee benefit trust’s holding is a little over 63 percent of Deepinder’s personal stake in Zomato.
“Employees are the very crucial assets in technology-run businesses, and communicating with them during a crisis takes the trust in management to another level,” says the chief executive of a boutique wealth management outfit in Mumbai.
Coming back to Deepinder’s note, he started with the mention of Zomato’s stock price coming down by nearly 30 percent over the past week to Rs 94. Going by the timestamp of Zomato’s price movement on BSE, the time of price reference is expected to be after 9:55 AM, post which the stock fell below Rs 100 apiece.
“We have no idea whether we have hit the bottom yet,” Deepinder wrote. Clearly, he would not have imagined that the stock was going to hit its 20 percent lower circuit as the trading day was approaching its close.
Deepinder added that Zomato’s market capitalisation is down by nearly $10 billion, from the peak of nearly $17 billion. “But still above our IPO valuation of close to $8 billion,” he wrote.
“This is likely on account of global sell-off in growth tech stocks which has led to numerous stocks like Doordash, Delivery Hero, Netflix, Peloton, Zoom (and the list goes on...) being down 40-80 percent over the past 2 months,” Deepinder added.
“Valuations can swing massively without any change in the fundamentals of the business depending on macro-economic factors like inflation, interest rates,” he further noted. “We had no control on our valuation going up from $8 billion in the IPO to $17 billion at our peak, and vice versa now.”
For the record, at $9.67 billion on Monday, Zomato’s market capitalisation fell by $7.2 billion – or 42.7 percent – from $16.88 billion on November 25 last year. That’s near -43 percent correction in a matter of 43 trading days.
In his note, Deepinder added that there is an important lesson here for all of them, which he wanted to reiterate. “We cannot control the market’s sentiments or the macro-economic factors which also significantly impact our valuations,” he wrote.
“What we do control is our execution and the value we create for our internal and external customers. Focus, and execute, in the long term, our stock price, amongst other things, will take care of itself,” Deepinder added.
He went on to reveal a secret in his note. “I have been waiting for the bear market for a long time now – that is when funding dries up for everyone, and companies with the most solid teams and execution rise to the top.”
However, the timing of Deepinder revealing his secret love for bear markets – which causes drying up of funding – and Zomato hitting its lower circuit turned out to be an irony of sorts.
Deepinder, towards the end of his note, spelt out that he is confident about Zomato’s overall strategy as a business. “Let’s continue executing… creating value, cutting costs, and like always, not look at the stock price,” he noted. “We are adequately capitalised and don’t have much to worry about except execution.”
Edited by Kanishk Singh
Author :- Rajiv Bhuva ( )
Source :- https://yourstory.com/2022/01/zomato-lower-circuit-deepinder-goyal-letter-stock-market
Date :-January 24, 2022 at 11:20PM
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by POPxo.
POPxo is India's largest online community for millennial women to read, watch, purchase, and hang out, which was founded in 2015. POPxo brings a welcoming and empowering environment that encourages women to live their best lives.
POPxo is aimed to merge content and commerce, which started as content and eventually had its own private label brand. POPxo's articles, videos, and social networking material are in six languages - English, Hindi, Marathi, Bangla, Tamil, and Telugu - which has attracted over 39 million monthly users who spend over 3 million hours across all of the company's platforms.
POPxo also partners with the leading companies to increase its reach and engage its audience. The whole platform runs on the basis of content that fascinates young girls. Furthermore, it also features on its website, Bollywood news, life hacks, retail listicles and more.
POPxo was acquired by MyGlamm's parent, The Good Glamm Group on August 7, 2020. The six-year-old company's investors - Chiratae Ventures, Kalaari Capital, and Neoplux Venture Capital have joined the board of MyGlamm soon after the acquisition. Furthermore, Priyanka Gill, the founder of POPxo also joined MyGlamm as a cofounder. Here's all about POPxo, its Founders and Team, Business Model, Revenue Model, Services, Funding, FAQs, and more.
POPxo - Company Highlights
Startup Name
POPxo
Legal Name
Luxeva Limited
Headquarters
Gurgaon, Haryana
Sector
Beauty, Health & Lifestyle
Founded
March 2014
Founders
Priyanka Gill and Namrata Bostrom
Parent Company
The Good Glamm Group
Operating Revenue
$1.61M in FY19
Funding
$12.4 mn (2021)
Number of Employees
251 to 500
Website
www.popxo.com
Popxo - Latest News
January 24, 2022 - Popxo parent, The Good Glamm Group acquires Organic Harvest, a beauty and personal care D2C startup led by Rahul Agarwal.
October 1, 2021 - Popxo enters the Indian cosmetic industry with a Makeup Collection from Myglamm.
POPxo has been founded in 2014 as India's largest online community for women that offers discussions, content, and products across a wide range of domains including fashion, beauty, lifestyle, work, and more. Founded by Priyanka Gill and Namrata Bostrom, PopXo offers millennial women an excellent platform where they can read, watch, shop, and hang out. Along with exclusive products across brands, PopXo also offers text and video content in a manner that is accessible via social media on mobile and PCs across the web. PopXo has last reported having crossed the 9 million mark in terms of user acquisitions every month and has boasted of witnessing over 102 million monthly engaged content views.
Popxo was acquired by MyGlamm in August 2020 and has since served as a subsidiary of MyGlamm, which eventually turned into The Good Glamm Group in September 2021. The Popxo parent, MyGlamm includes The Moms Co, St Botanica and Sirona, along with other content platforms - POPxo, Scoopwhoop, and BabyChakra, as per January 2022's reports, and has already turned unicorn in November 2021, thereby being hailed as the first beauty commerce unicorn company of India.
Popxo - Industry
The Indian industry comprised of online personal care and beauty brands and products are estimated to reach $4.4 billion by 2025. There is also likely to be a 4X increase witnessed in the number of shoppers of beauty and personal care products online, which was last reported to be 25 million in FY20 and would be going up to 110 million in FY25.
Popxo - Startup Story
The Popxo is founded by two dynamic women - Priyanka Gill and Namrata Bostrom. During 2012-13 there was no content platform at scale in English for women. So, this was the point when they thought of creating a useful platform for women and began Popxo in March 2013. Priyanka Gill first started Estylista in September 2013 in London for the NRI women, which is popularly known as the base of PopXo. For the first few years, the company started working out of London and raised its first institutional round of funding.
Initially, Popxo created content that enthused women who love to delve into fashion, beauty, lifestyle, wedding, relationships, work, fitness et cetera. The most popular things that attracted women to the Popxo website are hair and skin protection, and other products.
The greatness of the website lies in the production of 1500+ articles in six languages that the Popxo website was last recorded to be publishing every month. The team understood the audience well and presented articles in the same way, which lead to content creation to adding relevant videos. Today, the platform produces 60-70 videos a month and generates 100-150 million views a month. The duration of videos is between 3-7 minutes. Furthermore, they even produce web series.
Priyanka is the Co-Founder and President of MyGlamm and the Founder and CEO of POPxo and Plixxo. She lives in London with her husband and two children as a digital media entrepreneur and storyteller. She enjoys working with creative and entrepreneurial people, particularly women, and considers it a privilege to be in their company. She is now enrolled in a joint London Business School and Columbia Business School EMBA - Global program, said her Linkedin profile post dated May 24, 2021.
Her passion for writing merged with entrepreneurship when she started her own site, Estylista, which is now known as POPxo. She returned to India in 2014 to create POPxo, envisioning her company as a safe and engaging community that helps Indian women lead their lives. Influencer marketing seems to be on the verge of breaking out in India. As a result, she began developing a tech-enabled platform to take advantage of this enormous opportunity. Plixxo was released in 2017 and is powered by PopXo. It was here that India's first generation of influencers grew up. Priyanka Gill has experience serving as a freelance writer and editor and an investor and board member for several companies. She eventually served as an advisor at PolkaRare and a seed investor of Kalamint, a role that she is still continuing with. She co-founded The Good Glamm Group on Darpan Sanghvi and Naiyya Saggi in September 2021 initially with the merger of MyGlamm, PopXo, and BabyChakra.
POPxo's Plixxo also joined MyGlamm, India's premier beauty conglomerate, in 2020, marking a watershed moment and a watershed year. Three powerful brands merged to form one incredible enterprise that goes by the name The Good Glamm, the parent company of MyGlamm in August 2020 and since then, Gill has been appointed as the Cofounder of the latter.
Namrata Bostrom was the co-founder of PopXo, who has also been the CEO of the company as well from the initial phase of the company and stepped down from the role in March 2017. Bostrom is an Economics student who has The University of Oxford and London Business School as her alma mater. Bostrom earlier served as a Consultant at The Boston Consulting Group, and as a Sales and Product Strategist at EDITED before co-founding PopXo. After leaving the role at PopXo, Namrata joined Facebook, the company that she is still aligned to as the Product Management Lead.
PopXo initially had a team of 15 people working together, which eventually grew to include more than 200 employees strong.
POPxo Founder and CEO - Priyanka Gill talks about POPxo
PopXo's vision has always been "to build a content-community-commerce platform for women."
The mission of the company was to help the users find their inner natural glow. Now, as a part of The Good Glamm Group, PopXo's mission is aligned with the mission of its parent, which aims to build the global Digital FMCG Conglomerate of the Future.
Popxo - Name, Tagline and Logo
PopXo Logo
PopXo's tagline has said, 'Take it up a POP!' - and we live and breathe it with everything we do.
Popxo - Business Model
Popxo targets millennial women aged between 18-35 with a range of products across diverse industries including fashion, beauty, lifestyle, wedding, wellness, and entertainment. The company has recently forayed into the cosmetics industry. The social community platform for women has entered the cosmetics industry, which is currently valued at $20 billion with a Makeup Collection by MyGlamm. MyGlamm has acquired Popxo towards the end of last year, and this development has come almost a year after that.
This new makeup collection is termed POPxo Makeup Collection by MyGlamm and will include nail kits, face kits, eye kits, and lip kits in order to cater to all makeup needs. The entire range is reported to be priced under Rs 499 per product in an effort to stay within the affordable limits for younger women. The Popxo Makeup Collection powered by MyGlamm will be sold on the MyGlaam app and website along with being available at popular company stores and kiosks across the country.
Popxo - Revenue Model
Sponsored content is the initial source of revenue. The company approaches brands and claim to have a large audience. Popxo knows what people want and can assist you in selling. The company made content for them, including social media and video content. That comes first while influencer marketing comes in second. Ads come in third, and e-commerce comes in fourth.
Popxo’s money comes from sponsored material, which accounts for half of our total. Influencer marketing accounts for 40% of income. They started selling online in the fourth quarter of the previous fiscal year.
Fashion- POPxo allows you to stay up to speed on the latest fashion trends by reading fashion articles and watching videos. Thefashion experts of the company provide the users with everything they need to stay on-trend, from styling advice to shopping hotspots and must-have items. The platform also offers the latest news on fashion in both western and Indian. It also provides the best tips and fashion hacks that suit you. This platform also offers the latest updates on celebrity attires (both Bollywood and Hollywood).
Beauty- The team of beauty specialists is committed to providing the users with the best services available in the industry. The beauty section has it all, from unbiased product reviews to makeup hacks to skin and hair care advice. The users get updates on skincare, makeup, hair, bath & body, nails, hair products, beauty products and DIYs.
Lifestyle- POPxo also offers related content from a wide range of topics. It provides the consumers with popular articles across all categories, from travel and education to sex and relationships.
Wedding- Wedding planning can be as stressful as you imagine, which is why Popxo is also there to assist. The wedding area keeps young brides-to-be up to date on the latest trends. POPxo has all you need to know about weddings, from bridal makeup to honeymoon ideas.
Wellness- Overall wellness, according to POPxo, is at the heart of a healthy lifestyle. So, if the consumers want to live a healthier life, check out Popxo’s wellness section which has articles on managing stress and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
Entertainment- Popxo will make sure the users get the best of everything from the comfort of their homes on laptops or mobile phones, from movie recommendations to what's going on in the lives of their favorite celebrity.
Popxo is home to all feminine things. POPxo's online store, which includes items such as home decor, beauty, clothes, face masks, mobile accessories, stationery, rakhi presents, and more, is an attempt to make online shopping for women in India more enjoyable!
POPxo has raised a total funding of $12.4M in over 7 rounds of funding. POPxo is funded by 21 investors. Neoplux, IDG Ventures, Summit Media, Oppo, Kalaari Capital, STRIVE, Chiratae Ventures are the lead investors of POPxo.
Date
Round
Amount
Lead Investors
Apr 25, 2018
Series C
$5M
Neoplux, Oppo
Mar 1, 2018
Series B
$750K
-
Mar 16, 2017
Series B
$3.3M
Chiratae Ventures, STRIVE
Nov 5, 2015
Series A
$2M
500 Startups, Chiratae Ventures, Kalaari Capital
Nov 1, 2014
Angel Round
$500K
--
Jul 1, 2013
Seed Round
$300K
--
Popxo - Growth
PopXo grew considerably with a well-knit team of 33 people in its textual content team. Let's look at some of the prominent milestones that PopXo managed to attain throughout the years:
It has drawn over 39 million users per month
PopXo has delivered content in over 6 languages
The startup has seen over 10.18 mn visiting its content across the mobile app in a month
PopXo claims to have 1.6 bn monthly social media impressions
Popxo - Startup Challenges
Founded by Priyanka Gill and Namrata Bostrom, ideating, founding, and growing PopXo was difficult for two independent women entrepreneurs, which both of them managed really well, earning themselves quite a name in the industry. The first challenge for PopXo was to expand the content it produced and the kind of content produced by the website. The challenge that followed was the creation of an app. Even here PopXo absolutely nailed it. The website witnessed an overwhelming 500K initial downloads!
Popxo - Competitors
Though Popxo, when it was launched, was the sole platform focused on confident and educated women, which speak to them directly without taking down to them, PopXo has been a lot of companies competing with it once it started achieving milestones. Some of the PopXo competitors can be noted as:
ScoopWhoop
Polka Cafe
BuzzFeed
The Business of Fashion
nippon.com
Luxe Radio
The Canberra Times
Popxo - Future Plans
Popxo forayed into the beauty segment with POPxo Makeup Collection by MyGlamm, where both MyGlamm and PopXo are a part of The Good Glamm Group in October 2021 and is currently targeting a revenue run rate of Rs 100 crore in the upcoming 12 months.
Popxo - FAQs
What is POPxo?
POPxo is an Indian online platform specially for women to read, watch, shop and hangout. POPxo covers content related to beauty, weddings, health and lifestyle.
Who started POPxo?
Priyanka Gill has founded POPxo in 2015.
Who is the owner of MyGlamm?
Darpan Sanghvi owns MyGlamm.
Does POPxo creates videos along with content?
Yes, POPxo is able to create over 2000 pieces of content along with 150 videos, 800 stories and a large number of social media graphics.
Author :- Chaitra S
Source :- https://startuptalky.com/popxo-success-story/
Date :-January 24, 2022 at 03:59PM
NowPurchase, a procurement technology company for the metal manufacturing industry, recently raised $2.4 million in a seed funding round led by Orios and InfoEdge Ventures. Angel investor Neeraj Arora, former WhatsApp global business head and Co-founder HalloApp, also participated in the round.
For founder Naman Shah, the fundraise is a validation of the business from investors. “It is a validation that large businesses could be built in a vertical domain-specific approach in the business-to-business (B2B) segment,” he told YourStory.
Naman, along with his cousin Aakash Shah, launched the startup in 2017 with an initial capital of $300,000 from family business Nipha Group.
With the latest round of funding, the Kolkata-based company plans to expand its geographical presence in the country including Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Delhi NCR and also increase its supplier base, adding global suppliers in its portfolio, to provide more efficient materials, Naman said. It has already added a supplier in Turkey.
“We've been at it for around four years. But in the last two years, since a pivot, things have been going really well. We are very excited to bring on board a set of investors who are specific to the seed stage, but also think long term,” said Naman.
NowPurchase started as a B2B horizontal ecommerce platform that helped companies across various industries but pivoted to the metal manufacturing market starting December 2019.
“We realised that we are not being able to differentiate enough or become a real procurement partner for our customers, where they value us beyond just the price and delivery. We wanted to become a critical piece of their supply chain,” Naman added.
The startup decided to work with foundries (factories for casting metal) in West Bengal, where the company already had a presence.
Over time, during the pandemic, it saw another opportunity in helping manufacturers improve their efficiency and productivity. This led NowPurchase to build manufacturing intelligence software to help small and medium businesses decide how to use their raw materials efficiently to make their end product.
Ankan Adhikari, who had previously founded Pyoopil Education and later sold it to upGrad in 2016, helped to build the startup's tech offering as its Chief Technology Officer since January 2021.
“Digitising procurement is a critical milestone and one of the most important gaps that remain to be filled in India's manufacturing sector,” Vinit Bhansali, Senior Vice President at Orios Venture Partners, said in a statement at the time of the funding, “NowPurchase's tech-first platform will be a game-changer in this space.”
The startup claims to have 100 customers at the moment including Kejriwal Castings, TATA Metaliks, MBK Castings, Crescent Foundry, AMIK Metals. About 65-70 of them place orders every month, the company said.
Going forward, it plans to add more functionalities to the product, build its technology team, and work on its adoption and scale, and grow its business three times by volume by December 2022.
In addition, NowPurchase expects to grow to a 100-member team by the end of 2022 from about 35 at the moment.
Edited by Saheli Sen Gupta
Author :- Malvika Maloo ( )
Source :- https://yourstory.com/2022/01/nowpurchase-seed-funding-global-suppliers-expansion-technology-team
Date :-January 24, 2022 at 08:02PM
