As things stand, Uber now has a virtual monopoly in India’s tech capital. Ola has been banned from operating in Bangalore for six months by the state’s transport department. Ola’s license to operate in Karnataka has been suspended after it repeatedly ignored government warnings and continued to run its bike taxis. As per Karnataka’s laws, bike taxis are illegal and cannot operate in the state. The ban, however, extends to the entire company, which mean…

Sometimes innovations come about when a customer gives feedback, sometimes they come about when someone within the company has a great idea. But in this case, an innovation seems to have come about thanks to a viral video that was viewed millions of times. Zomato has introduced tamper proof packaging for its food deliveries, months after a video surfaced which showed its delivery executive eating an order en-route to its destination. On 11th December, a Zomato delivery…

Thus far, Homigo’s cofounders were being pursued by the startup’s tenants whose security deposits hadn’t been returned. Now they’re being pursued by the Bangalore police. The Bangalore police has formed three special teams to nab the absconding cofounders of coliving startup Homigo, who’re untraceable after the startup shut down its offices and fired all its employees. IIT Kanpur alumni Jatin Mitruka, Aaskash Verma and Nikunj Batheja, who’d cofounded Homigo in 2015, are on the run after allegedly…

Startup shutdowns are never pretty, but this one seems to be worse than most — it has left lots of young Bangaloreans without a roof over their heads. Co-living startup Homigo’s tenants have been told to vacate their homes after the company has reportedly gone bankrupt. The original property owners have apparently not been paid by Homigo, and they in turn have asked tenants to leave their homes. Homigo acted as an in-between between homeowners…

Oyo’s scale of ambition isn’t just limited to a rapid overseas expansion — it’s moving into industries other than hospitality too. Oyo has acquired coworking startup Innov8 for between Rs. 150 and Rs. 200 crore, Business Standard reports. Oyo has hired all Innov8 employees and will continue to run Innov8 as a separate brand. Innov8 has 13 coworking spaces across 4 cities in India. It had been founded in 2015 by Ritesh Malik, Shailesh Gupta and…

Over the last few years, many in the e-commerce industry felt that the final frontier was taking over what they’d initially set out to displace — offline stores. Not content with the progress that they were making online, several large players had attempted to move into the real world to capture an even larger section of the market. But there are now signs that not all these initiatives are working out as planned. Myntra has shut…

There was a time when India’s unicorns were all e-commerce players, but some interesting companies are now getting into the mix. Logistics startup Delhivery has become India’s latest unicorn after raising $350 million (Rs. 2450 crore) from Softbank and existing investor Carlyle Group. The round has valued Delhivery at $1.6 billion (Rs. 11,200 crore), and turned it into India’s first unicorn of 2019. Unlike other Indian unicorn startups, Delhivery doesn’t often make the news. This…

Paytm Mall is discovering just how fickle India’s customers really are. After the company had cut back on its cashbacks late last year, the traffic on its website has dropped precipitously. According to SimilarWeb, PaytmMall’s site saw only 5.5 million visits in February 2019. This is a near 90% drop from visits in October last year, when the site had seen 45.5 million users. In December 2018, Paytm Mall had decided rein in the cashbacks…

Tech companies find it easy to quickly garner a lot of users — it’s possible to build an app sitting in your home, fire it up, and see it being used by millions of people. But there’s a rarefied club of tech companies that have cracked the billion club — seeing their products being used by nearly one-seventh of humanity. There are only 6 products which have reached the milestone. Here’s how long they took…

Flipkart’s Big Billion Days is the company’s most anticipated sales event of the year. The company spends millions in ads promoting the event, and makes many months’ worth of revenue during the few days of the sale. But the 2015 edition hadn’t started off exactly as planned.  Exactly at midnight on 14th October 2015, just as the sale was about to go live, Flipkart’s site had crashed. Mobile phones were going to go on sale, and…