Bitcoin is back 👊
AI hardware moves, NCPI surprises, and latest from Venture Street
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Market summary: 📊
Turning out to be a LIT week globally by far, with India making a solid comeback and technology stocks particularly gaining big ground in the west.
US:
S&P 500 - up 1.95%
Nasdaq 100 - up 2.56%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 1.78%
Sensex - up 1.78%
Taming a wild dragon ☝️
The National Payments Corporation of India (NCPI) yesterday announced a cap on transactions a single app provider can facilitate via UPI, limiting volumes at 30% per provider.
In simple terms, no app (Google Pay or Phone Pe or any bank’s UPI app for example) will be allowed to process more than 30% of the total UPI payment volumes. The cap will be calculated based on payment volumes of the last 3 months. Hmm.
Why the throttling—NCPI is concerned that over-reliance on one particular app to process payments could lead consumers to be exposed to risks of failure—like apps crashing or being hit by cyber attacks. Like for example, Google Pay or PhonePe are estimated to have nearly 40% each of the total share right now, and if each of these services go down someday, consumers will be thrown into a limbo.
Reactions to the news were mixed. Those supporting regulators claimed this will help limit the power of individual platforms, while those tilting on the side of developers highlighted that continuous regulatory meddling does nothing but hurt innovation. 👎
Bottomline: clearly the success of unified payments infrastructure has blown past expectations of the NCPI or the government—with payments growing nearly 100%+ year-over-year for the month of October. Something needed to be done to keep order. But such sudden surprises do nothing more than discourage builders who have invested a LOT in driving consumer adoption.
Now if we’re talking about putting cap limits, 🥱
...perhaps Reliance is a good place to start. In the latest fund raise, the company’s Retail arm picked up another check from the Saudi PIF for $1.3 Billion, in exchange for a little over 2% stake.
The retail arm’s valuation has topped $62 billion, and post raise RIL’s stake will be reduced to about 85% roughly. Just last week the Saudis invested in Jio Fibre and then a couple months ago in Jio Platforms.
I mean at this point, one can’t help but wonder the impact of this capital glut, all at once, on mainstreet merchants and vendors -- who will be at the receiving end of this assault from Reliance’s digital platforms, all when they’re being devastated by a pandemic already.
Quick glance at Venture Street 💰
Edtech boys keep getting the moolah. English learning platform Freadom scooped up $2.5 million in a round led by Unreasonable Cap, and its LP Goldhirsh Foundation.
Freadom’s platform teaches 3 to 12 year olds basic English with ways to enhance their reading, speaking, and conversation skills. The platform expects to scale up to 10 million children by 2021 and new funds will go to improve the platform’s adaptive learning offerings using AI tools. Bravo, but we feel for the kids bro.
Turning heads to the gold rush in TikTok’s wake,
Mitron TV, one of the short video apps that took off post the TikTok ban, got a check for an undisclosed amount from 9Unicorns as part of its ongoing $5 million round led by Nexus Venture Partners.
Mitron has been funded by angel investors including MMT’s Deep Kalra, Pine Labs’ Amrish Rau and others. Expectations are high but the platform has some incredible engagement numbers already—with over 39 million downloads and an average of over 11 billion monthly views! TF.
Intel made small moves 💪
Intel has acquired an Israel based AI operations company called Cnvrg.io, hoping to strengthen its lagging artificial intelligence portfolio. Deals and terms of the acquisition weren't disclosed but the Cnvrg team is expected to remain standalone for now.
What do they do—Cnvrg provides an end to end data-science operations platform where developers and researchers can build models, deploy them, and comfortably scale them without getting bogged down by the fine details of optimizing performance. Here’s a link if data-folks want to nerd out.
Anyway, for Intel, this is a go big or go home moment, as competition in the AI hardware field keeps heating up. Just last week Intel had acquired another AI optimization startup called SignOpt, which plays in a similar field. Analysts are now trying to decode if “optimizing” the last bit of performance from expensive hardware is where Intel is looking to build its shtick.
Bottomline: it's an uphill fight for Intel as Nvidia, AMD and other semiconductor vendors tune up competition in the AI hardware arena. Nvidia particularly with its CUDA architecture for AI workload processing has mounted a solid hurdle, building massive loyalty within the developer community for its products.
Intel has just recognized the shift, and putting together a meaningful and holistic (hardware + software) response will take a lot of patience.
Proof gayab 📱
1️⃣ Whatsapp has globally rolled out ephemeral messages, diving nose first into a trend fashioned by Snapchat, allowing users to make text and images messages disappear in 7 days. Conversations taken out of context often end up doing irreparable damage, and this sounds like a big win for some of the fundamental problems FB’s apps struggle with. 👏
2️⃣ Also, NCPI has approved Whatsapp Pay, putting Whatsapp’s 2 year long struggle to rest, allowing the company for now to expand to about 20 million users. Consumers, Merchants, B2B users—all who were waiting desperately for the feature can now rest easy.
3️⃣ On last note, Bitcoin is back with a bang baby, breaking $15,000 levels last night. 2020 feels so complete.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🚲 eVehicles humming along - Indian ebike startup Alpha Vector has launched its first e-bicycle in at a price point of ₹30K. India’s e-bike market is surprisingly showing a lot of promise, with several investments and market entries in this segment lately.
💉 SII supports neighbors - Bangladesh has signed a deal with Serum Institute of India to secure 30 million doses of potential coronavirus vaccine which is being developed by Astrazeneca. The British vaccine is seen to be the most advanced candidate in the race against COVID-19.
👎 No disinfectant tunnels for people - The Supreme Court has directed the centre to formulate and issue directions to ban the use of disinfectant tunnels, fumigation and UV rays at various public and private locations, after a PIL was filed by a final year law student who argued that the WHO has warned about the dangerous effects of UV rays in such settings.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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