Grocery delivery app Grofers’ ambitious expansion plans have hit a roadblock. After the company recently raised $120 million which saw its valuation rise threefold in less than a year, the company has decided to scale back its operations. It has shut down in operations in 9 Indian Tier 2 cities, including Ludhiana, Bhopal, Kochi, Coimbatore and Visakhapatnam.
Quikr, which is rapidly expanding from its initial model of being a goods exchange marketplace, is now looking to enter the home services market in a big way. The company has readied a Rs. 250 crore war-chest to fulfil its plans.
Zomato saw its food ordering service Zomato Order crash on New Years Eve. Zomato was inundated with orders from hungry revelers on 31st December, seeing record levels of orders on the site.
Rahul Yadav has found another high profile backer for his new startup Intelligent Interfaces – it’s Indian cricket legend Yuvraj Singh. “Proud to back Rahul Yadav and Intelligent Interfaces (ii) in helping the Government govern 100x better with the help of technology. Get ready for the (r)evolution!”, posted Yuvraj on Facebook.
India’s startup community has joined the ongoing clamour against Facebook’s Free Basics program. A total of 9 influential startup founders have written to TRAI voicing their concerns about Facebook’s move. These include CEO of Indian unicorn startups Flipkart, Paytm and Zomato.
Carpooling is the flavour of the season. The established players in the cab hailing market Uber and Ola have launched their own versions, and a slew of carpooling apps have come up. Now the oldest cab-hailing service has jumped on the carpool bandwagon. Meru has launched its own ridesharing service. The pilot version of the project will be kicked off in Delhi-NCR.
The layoffs in India’s food tech sector are well on their way to continuing onto 2016. After Zomato had fired 10% of its workforce, and TinyOwl had let go of 100 employees which resulted in its cofounder being held hostage in their Pune office for 2 days, Foodpanda has fired around 300 of its staff in India. This represents 10% of its workforce.
Flipkart has another addition to the ever-expanding list of items available on its site. Soon, buyers will be able to buy motorcycles and cars from the online retailer.
Telangana and Andhra Pradesh are slowly cementing their place as the locations of choice for IT firms setting up offices in India. After Google, Amazon and Uber had announced plans of setting up major offices in Hyderabad, Microsoft promised to set up a Centre of Excellence in Visakhapatnam. The company will also work with Telangana government’s startup incubator T-Hub.