Jyoti Bharadwaj is a mompreneur who left the Shark Tank judges and the audience visibly impressed with her sharply delivered and well-detailed pitch on TeaFit. TeaFit produces zero-calorie healthy drinks made with natural herbs and ingredients, but without sugar or sweetener. It also sells instant premixes. A mother of two, Bharadwaj started TeaFit in 2021 and achieved sales worth ₹15.5 lakh in FY22 itself. She walked away with an investment of ₹50 lakh, for an 8 percent stake in the company, from four judges - Vineeta Singh (co-founder, Sugar Cosmetics), Anupam Mittal (founder, Shaadi.com), Peyush Bansal (co-founder, Lenskart) and Aman Gupta (co-founder, boAt).
Founded in 2020, Pharmallama is a “full-servicing pharmacy and comprehensive medication management platform”, headquartered in Bengaluru. The startup aims to simplify the management of medicines and supplements - especially for senior citizens. Customers can upload the prescription on the Pharmallama app and a team of pharmacists verifies and organises the medications in personalised sachets, labelled by date and time. The medicines are packed in easy-to-use dispensers and delivered to the customer’s doorstep. The team bagged an investment of ₹2 crore for 5% equity from all five sharks - Mittal, Gupta, Jain, Bansal and Thapar.
Paradyes claims to be India’s first semi-permanent hair colour brand, manufacturing and selling hair colours that last for 8-10 washes. After its appearance on the show, the brand’s website saw a 20x spike in traffic, while its sales doubled, claimed the founder, Yushika Jolly, in a LinkedIn post.
“Following our airing, our sales have almost doubled on our website and in a few specific marketplaces. Our website has seen a 20x spike in traffic. Numerous distributors and detailers have contacted us. In the last two days, our Instagram has gained more than 9k followers,” stated Jolly.
Founded by husband-wife duo Siddhartha Raghuvanshi and Yushika Jolly in March 2021, Paradyes had the sharks fighting for a stake in the business, making up one of the season’s most dramatic episodes. However, Jolly also revealed on LinkedIn that her decision to walk away with a lower valuation but the ‘right sharks’ drew the public’s ire, with people bombarding her (but not her husband) with hate messages online.
Shah Rukh Khan, also known as the King Khan of Bollywood, has 26% stake in Kidzania, an edutainment platform for children. Apart from investing in Mumbai’s Kidzania, the actor invested in Noida’s branch as well.
The team behind viral content company WittyFeed built hyperlocal OTT platform STAGE and pitched it on Shark Tank India S2. STAGE uploads content in Indian dialects like Haryanvi and Rajasthani and is positioned as ‘Boliyon ka Netflix’.
A five-member team consisting of Srikanth Velamakanni, Pranay Agrawal, Nirmal Palaparthi, Pradeep Suryanarayan and Ramakrishna Reddy founded Fractal in 2000. The firm’s main offerings include solutions across artificial intelligence and advanced analytics. Over five rounds of funding Fractal received $685 million which helped the firm cross $1 billion valuation. The latest round of funding helped Fractal enter the unicorn club in 2022, making it the first enterprise to do so this year.
In spite of more established players offering quick deliveries, Zepto is adding more users. According to a recent report by Bobble AI Data Intelligence Division, Zepto witnessed a whopping 946% user growth between December 2021 and March 2022. It was followed by Dunzo and Bigbasket.
Zepto might also be gaining from the low-base effect since it’s a new player. Bigbasket was founded in 2011, Blinkit in 2013 and Dunzo in 2014 offering groceries with multiple delivery options for the customers. However, for the latter three, 10-minute delivery is a step up from their existing delivery services whereas for Zepto, it is the main offering.
Swiggy Instamart, which too offers 10 minutes delivery, has not been included in the report.
Ambiga Subramanian was the first Indian woman to have led a company into the unicorn club. She — former chief executive (CEO) of data analytics firm Mu Sigma — also became the youngest of India’s eight richest self-made women, according to the Hurun India rich list of 2017.
The same year, she had sold her 24% shareholding in Mu Sigma to her former husband Dhiraj Rajaram following their divorce and he then emerged as the controlling shareholder of the firm. She then turned into an investor and invested in companies like Shuttl, Box8, Piper Biosciences and others.
Ten Indian startups have made it to the unicorn club in the first two months of 2022, all thanks to the momentum the tech ecosystem gained all through last year. A unicorn, in the startup parlance, is a company valued at or over billion dollars.
Fintech, along with ecommerce, was one of the most popular segments for investors based in India as well as abroad. The country saw 11 Indian fintech companies — including BharatPe, Cred, Groww, Upstox and Acko — turn into a unicorn in 2021.
The same trend is likely to continue in 2022 too, as more users get comfortable in transactions online and try out digital financial services offered by these platforms. Clear (formerly known as ClearTax) has already made its mark in financial services related to tax filing, but it now also focuses on wealth management and lending both in India and abroad.
Jupiter is making banking simple with its digital solutions, OneCard is pushing for financial inclusion with easy credit and Rupeek is helping users get gold-based hybrid loans. Smallcase bagged Amazon’s investment this year to help customers find the right investment portfolio for them.
Global Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product Officer at OYO | Shareholding: ₹1100 crore ($147 million)
A record high of 42 Indian startups were valued over $1 billion this year, surpassing the United Kingdom (UK) as the third largest ecosystem with the most number of unicorns.
A unicorn, in startup purlance, is a company valued at over $1 billion.
The United States of America (USA) is currently leading the world with the most number of unicorns, followed by China, as per Hurun Global Unicorn Index for 2021. India proudly stands at third rank this year, with Bengaluru as the seventh biggest unicorn hub in the world.
Kunal Bahl, cofounder and chief executive of Snapdeal, was appointed as the executive director this year. He is bound to receive a fixed compensation of ₹3.5 crore and a performance bonus of ₹1.5 crore, as approved by shareholders in a meeting held on December 8. Bahl is entitled to this remuneration for a three years period starting from April 1, 2021 to March 31, 2024.
He was paid ₹3.5 crore in FY2021.
The plan is to just focus on driving growth. We've got our core car business in India, which is now the largest by far in the country, but, at the end of the day, we still have a 5% market share.
I think the priority is just building the India auto business and making sure we scale it while driving customer experience. Simultaneously, I think a very important element that supports the group is our personal finance.
Right now, how many Indians out there will have ₹5,00,000 of cash liquidity in their bank account to actually go out there and buy a second-hand car. So our NBFC (non-banking financial company) has been scaling up quite aggressively to help support the growth. So that's the second piece.
The third piece is that online car ownership in India stands at 2% penetration, including both new and old, in India. A lot of our customers are moving in from bikes, so we're building a bikes business as well.
PharmEasy would use the proceeds from this IPO to prepay or repay its outstanding debt of ₹1,929 crore, the DRHP highlighted. The company will be looking to invest ₹1,259 crore to fund organic growth initiatives.
It has also set aside another ₹1,500 crore would be spent on inorganic growth initiatives through acquisition and organic growth initiatives.
PharmEasy has already made three big acquisitions this year to grow its business. This includes rival Medlife, publicly listed diagnostics chain Thyrocare and Aknamed, which is a cloud-based hospital supply chain management startup.
The issue size of PolicyBazaar’s IPO is ₹5,709 crore consisting of a fresh issue of ₹3,759 crore and an offer for sale (OFS) of ₹1,959 crore by its existing shareholders.
The company will offer shares within a price band of ₹940-₹980 pre share, with a lot size of 15 shares. The allotment will be announced November 10 and the IPO will be listed on November 15.
Paytm IPO will open from November 8 to November 10, at a price range of ₹2,080-₹2,150 per equity share. The lot size has been set at six shares.
The company will list on the stock exchanges on November 18, 2021.
Designation: Founder and chairperson at OYO
Ritesh Agarwal founded OYO in 2012. He was appointed as the global chief executive officer (CEO) of OYO Singapore in 2019, which entitles him to a gross remuneration of ₹1.06 crore. This is in addition to perquisites for subsistence such as accommodation, provision for vehicles, domestic help and others. His annual salary was raised by an additional sum of ₹4.45 crore by OYO Singapore with effect from January 1, 2021.
FY2021: ₹1.6 crore
FY2020: ₹21 lakh
FY2019: ₹69 lakh
The top 10 funding rounds this week amounted to $825 million this week (between August 2 to August 7).
Falguni Nayyar, chief executive officer (CEO) and founder of fashion e-commerce platform Nykaa, received a remuneration of ₹10.8 crore in the financial year 2021.
This represents a five-fold increase in the last year, from ₹2.7 crore in FY19. She also owns shares in the company through Falguni Nayar Family Trust and Sanjay Nayar Family Trust, fund managed by KKR India head Sanjay Nayar and Nayar part of will be sold in the public issue.Zomato launched its IPO between June 14-16, at a price band of ₹72-76. The issue attached bids for 2,751 crore compared to the issue size of 71.9 crore shares. The company also raised ₹4,197 crore from 186 anchor investors on Tuesday, July 13. Reports suggest that the issue got about 30-35 times more bids from anchor investors than it intended to sell in the first place.
Rahul Jaimini, co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Swiggy, announced his official exit from the food aggregator business in May last year. He took up a co-founder’s role in edtech startup Pesto, which upskills engineers. Jamini has been an investor in Pesto since May 2019.
Jio investor KKR acquired 54% stake in Gujarat-based Vini Cosmetics, the maker of Fogg brand of deodorant. The deal cost KKR about $625 million, and private equity firm WestBridge Capital also participated in it. The investment has provided partial exit to existing stakeholders — Sequoia Capital and Vini Cosmetics’ founder group led by the father-son duo Darshan Patel and Dipam Patel.
Delhi-based merchants-focused payment company BharatPe will be taking over the scam-hit Punjab Maharashtra Cooperative (PMC) bank, in a joint-venture with financial services company Centrum Group. The startup’s cofounder Ashneer Grover noted that the duo will be collectively infusing $250 million-$300 million into the bank over the next two years.
Meanwhile, Suhail Sameer, BharatPe’s group president added that the company has studied the small and medium businesses’ (SMB) lending behavior over the last couple of years and knows exactly what criteria to give out loans on to these merchants. Talking at the Business Insider’s MSME Exchange 2021 he added that they plan to do things differently to provide better offerings to MSME and enable them to grow.
Not everyone needs a large ticket loan from the bank. And, many can’t go to the bank because they either have no, or at best limited, credit history.
Jai Kisan, a Indian startup trying to help farmers and others without documented credit scores secure loans, raised $30 million in its Series-A round of funding led by Mirae Asset. Existing investors include Blume, Arkam Ventures and Better Capital.
Other startups are trying to make the process more convenient with the ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ (BNPL) framework. While it is dependent on having tie-ups with banks and non-banking financial corporations (NBFCs), it has unlocked a new way of doling out unsecured credit, where you don’t have to put up collateral.
The only catch is that the interest rates are higher, which may not be ideal for the borrower, but good for the lender.
According to Credit Suisse, postpaid and ‘pay later’ offerings have a gross margin of 0.7% for a 15-day tenure. This means that every ₹1,000 rupees lent, yields a profit of ₹70. Assuming at least 100 million customers exercise their option, the bottom line expands to ₹7 crore.
Players like Simpl, LazyPay, Amazon Pay, Paytm and others have extended pre-approved credit lines worth ₹10,000 up to ₹1 lakh for over 200 million customers.
Capital Float alone, an eight-year-old startup that plays in the same BNPL arena, has crossed 2 million customers. The bulk of the Elevation Capital and Sequoia Capital-backed startup’s new customers were added in the first three months of 2021, according to a statement from the company.
Goyal started Zomato in 2008 and now holds a 5.5% stake in the company. While Goyal has a basic salary of ₹3.5 crore per annum, the co-founder has taken a pay cut owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the financial year ended March 31, 2021, Goyal had a salary of ₹1.96 crore. Goyal also announced that he will not be taking any money home for the next three years, as salary.
According to the DRHP filing, “Deepinder Goyal has voluntarily waived his remuneration for a period of 36 months starting from April 1, 2021 and shall continue to discharge his roles and duties as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer during this period.”
An interesting fact is that the seed for Zomato was in Goyal’s head when he was in his last year of engineering at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Delhi. “It was towards the end of my five years at IIT that I was ordering a Dominos pizza and back then, you had to call and place an order. So while in college I started a food ordering company, it didn’t work. It was way too early,” Goyal had said during a Twitter live chat with the Shiv Nadar Foundation.
Baiju Bhatt along with his friend at Stanford University, Vladimir Tenev, founded the stock trading app Robinhood, that’s all the rage in the US. Bhatt was born to Indian immigrants from Gujarat in Virginia. Bhatt’s net worth is a billion dollars, according to Forbes.
Founded in 2013, Robinhood has over 13 million users and is valued at over $40 billion. The company has also confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the US. Robinhood was in the eye of a storm, as it was at the centre of the GameStop short squeeze saga in the US markets.
The US-based food-tech giant, which started trading in US stock exchange Nasdaq in December last year, today has a market capitalisation of $47.6 billion. In the latest fourth quarter earnings report, DoorDash said that its sales jumped by 226%, with 273 million orders, as compared to 82 million orders in the same quarter the previous year. Its revenue in the fourth quarter stood at $970 million.
One of the most-talked about IPOs would be that of Indian foodtech unicorn Zomato. Currently valued at $3.9 billion, Zomato has also closed a pre-IPO funding of $660 million. With the latest round 10 new investors including Tiger Global, Kora, Luxor, Fidelity (FMR), D1 Capital, Baillie Gifford, Mirae, and Steadview joined Zomato’s board which already had the likes of Info Edge, Ant Financial, Temasek etc.
According to reports, Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal in an email to his employees said that the company is looking to list publicly in the first half of 2021.
Even while Zomato faced the test of times in 2020, it also brought the food tech startup closer to profitability. VCs believe this ability to bounce back from a crisis where companies even saw no revenue, would only give startups more strength to face the unforgiving public market. “Startups also emerged as winners post-lockdown with increased adoption by consumers while low investor confidence has forced startups to fine tune business models towards profitability, making them more appealing to retail Indian investors,” Bansal told Business Insider.
Indian edtech startup WhiteHat Jr, which has found itself in a potboiler of controversies recently, had a bug in its system, making its data of over 2.8 lakh students vulnerable. On November 25, the Quint quoted a security researcher who reported the bug to WhiteHat Jr, who said, "According to what I found out the personal data of over 2.80 lakh students including names of their parents were lying exposed due to a vulnerability on the company's server-side."
WhiteHat Jr said that all vulnerabilities were fixed within 24 hours and stressed that there was no data leak.
According to the security researcher, WhiteHat Jr's back-end server was left open, allowing access to student names, age, gender, images, user IDs, parents' names, and progress reports. The report also said that access to the company's AWS servers was restricted as of November 20.
Deepika Padukone runs her own family office through which she does her startup investments. The actress had last year invested in the yogurt company Epigamia. And most recently, the actress is back with another investment in learning and community platform FrontRow. The actress was joined by marquee investors like Lightspeed and Elevation Capital (SAIF Partners) to invest $3.2 million in the startup.
Frontrow’s learning platform focuses on creative arts and sports and that’s what attracted Padukone’s investment in the startup. “Growing up, I wasn’t exactly academically inclined. My interests lay in diverse spheres and activities outside of the traditional classroom- dance, sports, music, modelling & performance arts, to name a few. And if there’s one thing I wish I had access to while growing up, it would be a platform like ‘FrontRow’ - one that gives individuals access to abundant knowledge in non-academic fields as well as connects them to a community of peers and professionals in their field of interest,” she said.
Digital payments startup Bharatpe has been upping its game in the fintech landscape. The startup claims to have 40 lakh merchants across 35 cities in India. In 2019, the startup claimed to have grown by 30 times. It currently accounts for a total payment volume of $3.5 billion. The three-year old startup has raised a total of $142.5 million so far.
