Google doesn’t seem to be content with Google Pay being India’s largest UPI app — it now seems to what to turn what was a simple payments platform into a whole new ecosystem. Google today announced the launch of the Spot platform, which runs within the Google Pay app. The platform will help merchants build customized experiences for their customers using Google Pay. The Spot platform supports HTML and Javascript, and Google claims that businesses can convert…

When UPI had been first introduced in 2016, it was seen primarily as a workaround for the cash crunch that India was facing following the demonetization exercise. But as the payments system has matured and become more mainstream, it’s finding its place in interesting new uses. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has allowed PhonePe to let its customers make their bids for Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) through its UPI implementation. This will make PhonePe…

After restaurant partners logged out of Zomato Gold last month, its delivery partners are now logging out too. Six thousand Zomato delivery executives across Mumbai and Bangalore have logged out of the app, protesting the reduced payments from the food delivery company. Zomato’s executives earlier made Rs. 40 for each delivery, but now have seen their payment reduced to Rs. 30. The protesting delivery executives allege that Zomato has also reduced incentives — executives were…

Most Indian startups are currently unprofitable with their current business models, but they appear to be working with each other to unlock some synergies. Oyo Rooms has tied up with self-driving startup Drivezy to have its vehicles parked at Oyo properties around the country. The partnership is commercial in nature, but the exact nature of the revenue sharing was not disclosed. Drivezy has already stationed 1,200 two wheelers in Oyo’s properties in Bangalore and Hyderabad,…

At this point, you might as well have monkeys throw darts at a dartboard than predict which startup will enter which space next.  After Flipkart started selling flight tickets, Paytm started selling mutual funds, and Oyo started its own cloud kitchens, Zomato has perhaps managed the strangest startup crossover yet — the restaurant aggregator and food delivery app has now entered the video streaming space, and will launch 18 original shows on its app over…

From starting off as a website that aggregated hotels, to buying them outright, Oyo Rooms seems to have come a long way. Oyo has made several high-profile hotel purchases over the last few weeks. Starting with buying a Oyo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas last month, to the purchase of a 4-star hotel in Jaipur from Emaar, to the acquisition of a 64-suite hotel in Ahmedabad, Oyo Rooms appears to be aggressively expanding its owned hotel portfolio. …

The math behind how startups work is weird, but it’s easy to forget how weird it really can be. Paytm’s parent company spent Rs. 7,278 crore to earn revenues of Rs. 3,319 crore last year. This meant that the company’s overall losses were 3,959 crore, up 2.6x from losses of 1,490 crore last year. In comparison, revenues only rose 8 percent from Rs. 3,229 crore last year. Losses rising 165 percent and revenues going up…

Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s banking dreams didn’t quite come to fruition with Paytm Payments Bank. He’s now looking to up the ante with something much bigger. Paytm’s parent company, One97 Communications, is in preliminary discussions to pick up a stake in private lender Yes Bank, multiple outlets have reported. Paytm will buy the stake from Yes Bank founder Rana Kapoor, who along with his family owns a 9.64 percent stake in the bank. The…

All these years, cab aggregators like Uber and Ola have imposed penalties on users when they cancel a booked ride. But the Madhya Pradesh government is looking to even the playing field. Cabs in Madhya Pradesh will no longer be able to cancel rides or refuse services as they’ve done all this while — each time they cancel a ride, they will be fined Rs. 1000, as per a new law that will soon come…

It’s been a hard couple of months for Zomato. After courting controversy with its stand on a customer requesting a partner of a particular religion to deliver his order, then seeing a strike in Howrah by its rider partners over delivering beef and pork, and as many of its 1,200 partner restaurants logging out of its loyalty program Zomato Gold, Zomato has now fired 541 employees from its Gurgaon office. The employees were from Zomato’s customer,…