2 weeks Ago
Happy Friday! Digital payments spiked during the festival of Diwali. This and more in today’s ETtech Morning Dispatch. Also in the letter: ■ US tech cos rely on H-1B ■ Canva’s India plans ■ ETtech Done Deals This festival of lights, UPI lit the biggest fireworks Digital payment transactions saw a steady uptick with Indians going on a consumption spree during the festive month buying clothes, apparel gifts for their pets, and booking holidays.
Numbers game: Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the most popular retail payment platform, reported a record 644 million transactions on October 31 , the day of Diwali. Across the board, payment aggregators who process payments for online merchants saw anywhere between 50% and 60% jump in transactions across multiple categories of merchants. Macro report: Japanese financial services major Nomura, in a report on India’s Diwali spends, pointed out that compared to 2023, growth this year was muted but consumption trends were steady across rural and urban India.
Overall sales grew 15% between 2024 and 2023, with growth primarily driven by online merchants. Credit transactions: Similar to the Dussehra festive week , the entire month of October saw credit-based transactions driving much of the sales. Amazon Pay saw a 50% year-on-year (YoY) jump in transactions by Amazon Pay-ICICI Bank credit cards.
Fintech startup Kiwi said that RuPay-powered credit cards saw major growth in neighbourhood stores, with consumers using their credit instruments to pay via UPI. Also Read | Festive sales end with a bang, after Rs 1 lakh crore of clicks ED sifts through carts of Amazon, Flipkart sellers The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday conducted searches at the premises of sellers of ecommerce giants Amazon and Flipkart for alleged foreign exchange violations, sources in the know told us. Driving the news: The searches stem from the CCI’s probe on online marketplaces, which found that both Amazon and Flipkart were giving preferential treatment to some of their larger sellers.
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these searches are based on the recent findings of Competition Commission of India’s (CCI) antitrust investigations. Certain irregularities have been found in the inventories and books of the sellers under probe, and the same is being studied,” said a government source. Tell me more: The agency initiated its investigation based on several complaints against the ecommerce marketplaces alleging they have been violating foreign investment norms “by directly or indirectly influencing the sale price of goods or services and not providing a level playing field” for all the sellers.
Recap: In August, commerce minister Piyush Goyal alleged that Amazon's proposed $1-billion investment in India was to compensate for its huge loss that “smells of predatory pricing”. He also questioned the impact of ecommerce on crores of small retailers. Also Read: ETtech Explainer: Timeline of CCI's antitrust probe into Amazon and Flipkart US MNCs leaned on H-1B visas more in the past eight years Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple are among US technology giants hiring more H-1B visa-holding employees in the last eight years even as Indian IT services firms cut their reliance, an ET analysis showed.
Driving the news: India’s top seven IT services companies, including TCS, Wipro, Infosys, and HCL, have brought down their dependency on H-1B employees by 56% in the last eight years. In the same period, the use of the US’s premier work visa soared by 189% at Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple combined, an analysis of H-1B beneficiary approval data from US Citizenship and Immigration Services showed. Current state: The anti-immigration stance of newly elected US President Donald Trump could affect not only new H-1B worker visas but also renewals for current holders, the employability of H-4 visa spouses, temporary intra-company transfers on L1 visas, and extraordinary talent categories like EB1 for researchers.
Also Read: IT sector upbeat despite fears over revamp of immigration laws Expert take: Immigration lawyers are bracing up for a complete overhaul of the Immigration and Nationality Act, with a particular focus on the highly sought-after H-1B work visa category. Some experts are even forecasting country-specific quotas based on the US's bilateral relationships, which could place India in a favourable position. Canva is leveraging its Facebook India communities to build deeper inroads Cliff Obrecht, cofounder, Canva Design software startup Canva is betting on localisation of its design templates and features to cater to the growing population of social media influencers and content creators in India, said Cliff Obrecht, cofounder of the Australian startup.
Plans for India: In the last one year, India has doubled in growth and contributed ‘significantly’ to the $2.5 billion annualised revenue run rate the startup has achieved. Canva is using its Facebook-based communities of more than 240,000 freelancers and 10,000 teachers to build deep inroads into the country.
India is the fifth-largest market for the software giant. Global growth: Canva has around 200 million monthly active users worldwide, which has grown exponentially over the last year or so. The company recently undertook a major secondary transaction that valued the startup at around $32 billion.
Enterprise biz: Canva has seen its revenues from the enterprise sales business jump 300% in the last one year. Around 95% of Fortune 500 companies are using Canva, including the likes of Atlassian, HP, NYSE, and DHL Express. Also Read: India is our fifth largest market; one of the fastest growing: Melanie Perkins, CEO, Canva ETtech Done Deals Haldiram Bhujiawala secures Rs 235 crore from Pantomath's Bharat Value Fund; sells minority stake: Kolkata-based snack brand Haldiram Bhujiawala has raised Rs 235 crore from private equity investor Bharat Value Fund (BVF), managed by financial services firm Pantomath Capital Management, in exchange for a minority stake.
AI software firm Thesys raises $4 million from Together Fund: Artificial intelligence (AI) software platform Thesys has raised $4 million in seed funding led by Together Fund, with participation from 8vc. SaaS-focused agentic AI platform Pulse raises $1.4 million: Software-as-a-service (SaaS)-focused agentic AI platform Pulse has raised $1.
4 million in a seed funding round led by Endiya Partners, with participation from a group of angel investors, including the founders of SaaS platform Zluri and customer service startup Yellow.ai, along with other entrepreneurs. Travel startup 30 Sundays raises $770k in round led by InfoEdge Ventures: Travel startup 30 Sundays has raised $770,000 in a funding round led by early-stage-focused venture capital firm InfoEdge Ventures.
Other Top Stories By Our Reporters Alakh Pandey, founder, PhysicsWallah PhysicsWallah revenue tops Rs 2,000 crore in FY24; loss jumps: Edtech unicorn PhysicsWallah crossed the Rs 2,000-crore revenue mark during the financial year ended March 31, 2024, but its loss widened in a big way. Freshworks to lay off 660 employees amid global restructuring: Nasdaq-listed software-as-a-service (SaaS) major Freshworks is reducing its workforce by 13%, impacting about 660 employees globally, as part of its efforts to streamline operations, the company's CEO Dennis Woodside wrote in a letter to the company's staff. The firm currently has a workforce of more than 5,000 employees.
Google Cloud partners with DeliverHealth to enhance healthcare documentation with AI: Google Cloud on Thursday announced a collaboration with DeliverHealth , a healthcare clinical documentation company, for healthcare providers to document patient care. Global Picks We Are Reading ■ What Big Tech CEOs want from a second Trump presidency ( FT ) ■ Why AI could eat quantum computing’s lunch ( MIT Technology Review ) ■ Elon Musk is now X’s biggest promoter of anti-immigrant conspiracies ( Bloomberg ).
