India’s food-tech sector has been routed by the coronavirus — nearly 10 percent of restaurants have already shut down, and another 30 percent could shut down going forward. But while there’s been plenty of attention being paid to the plight of formal restaurants, there hasn’t quite been as much focus on India’s millions of street vendors, who’ve seen their businesses be hit. But the Indian government appears to be thinking of creating a solution that…

All manner of companies and startups have been embracing the remote work concept that was necessitated by the coronavirus lockdowns — tech giants have said they’ll let employees work from home for as long as a year, smaller companies have said that they’re giving up their offices and going remote-first, and even established IT giants have said that remote work might be the way forward. But a discordant voice has now emerged around the remote…

Softbank has often been thought of responsible for pumping up the valuations of Indian startups — by buying up large stakes in companies at aggressive valuations over the last few years, it has created many highly-valued startups. It’s now transpiring that it’s gone ahead and done the same thing in the US stock markets. Softbank was the “Nasdaq whale” that bought billions of dollars’ worth of US equity derivatives that caused the recent rally in tech stocks,…

Indian startups are beginning to rein in their losses, which had been spiraling out of control for the longest time. Paytm has narrowed its losses by 37% to Rs. 2,597 crore for the financial year ended March 31 2020. The company posted revenues of Rs. 3,629 crore, which was 1.4 percent higher than last year. “Optimizing expenses resulted in a 40% reduction in losses compared to last year,” a Paytm spokesperson said. “The company has expanded its financial services…

The coronavirus hasn’t come as good news for most companies — theatres, ride hailing startups, and events companies are all suffering. But the virus has brought with it unexpected success to those who happened to be in the right place in the right time. Zoom has reported a 355% increase in quarterly revenues compared to the same period last year. Zoom reported revenues of $663.5 million (Rs. 5000 crore) for the March-June period. Zoom had approximately…

The coronavirus lockdown has devastated several different kinds of businesses — the hospitality sector, theatres, and events companies have all been hard hit. But not everyone’s complaining. Ed-tech startup Unacademy has entered the unicorn club after raising $150 million from the Softbank Group. The deal values Unacademy at $1.45 billion. Existing investors Facebook, General Atlantic, Sequoia India, Nexus Venture Partners, and Blume Ventures also participated in this funding round. “Learning from the best experts to achieve…

It’s 2020, and keeping up with how other things have been this year, tech demos aren’t quite the same either. Elon Musk today showed off the progress of his brain interface startup Neuralink using three live pigs. Musk first showed off a normal pig, then a pig which had had Neuralink’s chip embedded in its brain for over 2 months, and a third pig, which had a Neuralink implant for a while which was subsequently…