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"We can’t have non-state actors or China or folks who we don’t want accessing our cloud to train their models" — US Government wants to bring in tough new regulations to keep tabs on AI

TechradarTechradar · 1y ago
"We can’t have non-state actors or China or folks who we don’t want accessing our cloud to train their models" — US Government wants to bring in tough new regulations to keep tabs on AI
Medial

The Biden administration plans to introduce new AI regulations using the existing Defense Production Act. This would require companies to report when they train new AI models and potentially ban foreign entities from training AI models on US data. The aim is to protect against poisoning and theft of AI models by foreign powers. The regulations would also give the government access to AI pioneers like Google and Amazon to enforce AI safety rules. Additionally, the administration seeks to regulate access to cloud computing companies to prevent unauthorized foreign access.

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No hurry to sell, indefinite horizon on Zomato holding: Sanjeev Bikhchandani

EntrackrEntrackr · 1y ago
No hurry to sell, indefinite horizon on Zomato holding: Sanjeev Bikhchandani
Medial

Info Edge, India’s largest and most storied recruitment portal, has had a stellar run in the last three years with its portfolio company Zomato’s market cap surging almost 2.3X since its stock exchange debut. The firm’s bet on fintech unicorn Policybazaar is also paying off well. The company has made it clear it is in no hurry to book profits on these investments, even as it continues to nurse its own brands beyond Naukri to profitability. The firm, one of the few to survive the dotcom boom and bust cycle of 2000, has been led by founder and chairman Sanjeev Bikhchandani for a large part of this journey. And today, Bikhchandani has earned the right to be looked up to as the statesman for the sector. Entrackr caught up with Bikhchandani in his Gurugram office and he spoke on a range of topics including Naukri, Info Edge’s investments, serial entrepreneurs and corporate governance. Here are the edited excerpts. As a listed firm that carries a heavy overhang from its investment portfolio, does it worry you that it might impact the valuation of the core Naukri business? Not really. Institutional investors are smart. We give them adequate data so that they analyze Naukri thoroughly before making a conclusion about valuation. We don’t run Naukri for valuation every day or month or quarter. We look at how we create value for our shareholders in the long run. And that’s how we run our businesses. So, this hypothesis about our core or even group business doesn’t stand. Info Edge has been an investor in Zomato for over 14 years and despite the latter’s share price rising nearly 14o% from its listing price, Info Edge didn’t sell its shares. What level of return are you anticipating from Zomato? Actually, we don’t calculate Investment Return Rate (IRR). Info Edge invested in Zomato because of our conviction that it could become a great company. And if you are convinced about your conviction then it will happen. So, IRR is the happy incidental outcome of investing early behind companies that you want to help. That’s my belief. We are not in any hurry to sell and have an indefinite horizon. Every VC firm has a fund cycle and pressure to return capital to their limited partners but that’s not the case with Info Edge as you are investing from your own balance sheet. Could you elaborate on this? That pressure does not make this choice. We have a long term horizon and we call it patient capital. To be a successful early stage investor in India, you have to be quite patient because companies take anywhere between 10-15 years to go to IPO from seed stage. So if you have funds for only 6-10 years, you will not realize the full fruits of your investment. If you have a 20 year fund, you tend to perform better. However, such a horizon could be possible only when you’re investing from your own whole balance sheet. Do you believe that Blinkit could become bigger than Zomato? I think both are large but Blinkit is going to be fairly large. If we look at Zomato’s quarter-on-quarter numbers, online food ordering appears to have stagnated in top 10-15 cities. What’s your take on this? Obviously, there is the base effect. But, we don’t see stagnation. Also, you need to compare year-on-year, not quarter-on-quarter. When YoY numbers are compared, there is growth. I think full fiscal year performance is more important than quarter. We used to commonly hear about Naukri’s recruitment business that it was not the online presence, but your sales force or feet on the street that made the difference. Does that still hold true? Online sales have never been a big part of our strategy. When you want to sell more expensive products, you need face-to-face contact. At Naukri, we have clients whom we bill several crore rupees for annual subscription and such accounts need heavy offline touch. While the product will be consumed online, the stuff around it very often will be offline. Over the years, several players have tried to crack the recruitment business in the blue collar segment but most of them died. What are the challenges in the segment? Blue collar segment has broadly three challenges. First, it’s hyperlocal. The job seekers in this segment don’t move to different cities as they look for opportunities in and around their locality. Second, very often there isn’t a detailed text CV which makes the process slow and inefficient. Third, potential workforce in the segment do not search for jobs on the laptop and use vernacular languages. They are mostly on mobile. So you’ve got to adapt to all these things and still somehow get revenue and profit. We have been trying to get inroads in the blue collar segment for over two years now but we have just started monetizing it. Our future position in the segment depends on monetization. Some of the celebrated entrepreneurs are launching a second or third company without their first startup churning profit. How do you see this trend? I think this isn’t a progressive trend. As an entrepreneur, you need to focus on one thing and do really well. Once you’ve cracked that you can add on a second thing in the same company. Over the past couple of years, we have witnessed corporate governance issues with some startups. Even Info Edge saw serious lapses at 4B Networks. What’s your opinion about this? By and large, my belief is that 95-98% of Indian founders are genuine but there will be a few bad examples. Investors make sure that when something wrong happens in their portfolio, it is highlighted and actions are taken to ensure that such incidents do not repeat. Any governance issue isn’t good for anyone including limited partners, investors, founders and the startup ecosystem. What factors contributed to the lack of success with Info Edge’s e-commerce investments 99labels, MyDala, and Happily Unmarried? Limitation of raising foreign direct investment (FDI) and heavy investment into competition were two major reasons for failure of 99labels while MyDala had a product market fit (PMF) issue. Happily Unmarried is now a part of VLCC and we are still a shareholder there.

Invest4Edu makes education planning easy for parents

EntrackrEntrackr · 1y ago
Invest4Edu makes education planning easy for parents
Medial

Not everyone can afford to pay for high-quality education for their children. Whether it’s about studying in a premier institution in India or colleges abroad, it’s expensive. The complexities of accessing education loans have also been a significant pain point for parents. Of late, quite a few startups have begun working in this space. For instance, GradRight helps make higher education abroad accessible and affordable. Other notable names are Leap Finance and Propelled. Another startup trying to tap into this space is Invest4edu. Based in Mumbai, Invest4Edu aims to address common anxieties around the rising cost of education, college planning, and long-term payment. We spoke to the company co-founder and CEO Peeyush Agrawal to learn more about the ‘ed-fintech’ startup, how it operates, and more. Here are the edited excerpts: What are the key challenges in the industry that have not been addressed yet? And how do you plan to address them? There has been a surge of edtech and fintech companies, and all of them are doing a great job in their respective horizons, but we have found that India still lacks tech platforms offering comprehensive education financial solutions. Only partial solutions are being offered by existing Edtech and Fintech companies. There is a lack of focused unified solutions in the market, and an absence of education goal-based planning leading to insufficient funds for education. Less than 30% of parents use money for their child’s education from dedicated education savings. Inadequate planning leads to insufficient funds for education, restricting a child’s ability to achieve their real potential. Two out of three Indian parents cannot plan for retirement due to the higher education financing needs of their children. With smart AI-based tools, we want to empower parents and students to discover and plan their education goals. Early planning with mandate-based early savings and great career-building services will help Indians manage education inflation and fulfill their commitment to quality education. We are offering an array of education services to help students and parents discover ideal career paths in the increasingly changing environment. What are the key highlights of your platform? We at Invest4Edu offer an AI-based education journey, essentially a digital toolkit aiding parents in crafting career-centric education goals from nursery to university. The toolkit is aimed to simplify learning requirements, skill development, assessments, and counseling with precise expense details. There is also a free planner that ensures holistic education. Subscription plans offer services like career counseling, skill-building, and financial investment guidance for achieving goals. We also have a College cost calculator, EduAbacus, which helps deliver informed decisions on future education costs. Subscriptions or standalone services from this tech-driven platform streamline education planning for parents and students. How do you generate revenues? Invest4Ed offers a unique blend of educational and financial services to B2C and B2B2C markets. We have an annuity-based revenue model with high customer retention. The revenue is generated from commission on financial products like MF, FD, Insurance along with fees from educational solutions and subscription plans. What are your short-term and long-term goals in terms of product and business expansion and diversification? Over the next two years, our company aims to spearhead a transformative initiative in education planning that prioritizes and enhances while ensuring accessibility for a diverse student population of more than 2 Lakh students. Our long-term goal is to create 1.5 Million User Base and 0.5 Million Families Empowered In this endeavour. We will be building a $250 Million Mutual Fund AUM & Monthly SIP Book of $60 Million. We have recently expanded our core team aimed at launching our global business.

Exclusive: No appraisal for Unacademy employees in 2024

EntrackrEntrackr · 1y ago
Exclusive: No appraisal for Unacademy employees in 2024
Medial

Employees of edtech unicorn Unacademy will receive no appraisal in 2024, co-founder and chief executive officer Gaurav Munjal said at the firm’s virtual town hall. Even in 2023, it had not given cash appraisal and instead provided performance-linked stock options to employees. “I think 2023 was an average year for us. But 2024, if not great, was above average. But we did not hit our growth goals. The good part is that the burn is extremely low now, and we have a huge runway. And I kept saying that we don’t have a survival risk,” said Munjal in the town hall. Entrackr has reviewed the video of the virtual town hall. As per Munjal, the company won’t be able to do any appraisals this year as it didn’t hit the projected growth numbers. “I know I said that we will do appraisals two, three weeks ago, but when we started the process, we realized that we made a mistake,” he said in the town hall. Munjal urged its workforce to look at the bigger picture. “We are the ones who are still standing while our competitors are going down one by one,” he said. Entrackr has reached out to Munjal for comment. The development comes soon after the company laid off 250 employees citing efforts to streamline operations and enhance efficiency. Last month, Entrackr also reported that the SoftBank-backed firm was in early-talks to merge with K12 Techno which runs the chain of Orchids International Schools. Unacademy raised its last equity round of $440 million at a valuation of $3.44 billion in August 2021. Since then, the firm has gone through mass layoffs, shutting down acquired verticals and exits of key employees including co-founder and CTO Hemesh Singh. Though, it has also launched several offline centers. The firm recently forayed into the language learning segment with a new app. In the beginning of FY24, the company claimed that it was close to achieving profitability at the group level. While the firm is yet to file the audited annual report for the last fiscal year (FY24), it recorded a 26% jump in its operating revenue to Rs 907 crore in FY23 while controlling losses by nearly 40% to Rs 1,004 core. Edtech companies have been going through hard times whether it is once-most valuable edtech company Byju’s or several growth stage startups. As per data compiled by TheKredible, edtech companies managed to raise only $138 million across 21 deals during the first half of 2024. In 2023, edtech startups raised $456 million while 2022 and 2021 saw $2.3 billion and $5.8 billion deployment in the space, respectively.

X to withhold certain accounts, posts in India following govt orders

EntrackrEntrackr · 1y ago
X to withhold certain accounts, posts in India following govt orders
Medial

X, formerly known as Twitter, disclosed on Thursday that it will withhold certain accounts and posts in India following executive orders from the Indian government. “The Indian government has issued executive orders requiring X to act on specific accounts and posts, subject to potential penalties including significant fines and imprisonment,” Global Government Affairs, an affiliate of X, said in a post on the social networking site. The company added that it will block these accounts and posts in India, but it disagrees with the actions and maintains that “freedom of expression should extend to these posts.” Moreover, affected users have been informed about the actions taken by the company. “Due to legal restrictions, we are unable to publish the executive orders, but we believe that making them public is essential for transparency. This lack of disclosure can lead to a lack of accountability and arbitrary decision-making,” it said. It further said that a writ appeal challenging the Indian government’s blocking order is pending. It may be recalled that the Karnataka High Court had dismissed X’s plea challenging the Indian government’s orders to block accounts and posts. It is likely the first time X and the Indian government are at loggerheads since Elon Musk took over the micro-blogging platform. Last year, Musk had hinted at a more cooperative arrangement with local governments, especially in India. “The rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict and we can’t go beyond the laws of the country… If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws…,” Musk told BBC during an interview when asked about the country banning a documentary on the 2002 Gujarat riots. Before Musk came in, Twitter and the Indian government went head-to-head multiple times over the blocking of content. In some cases, Twitter did not comply with the government directives to blocking accounts and posts. The public spat reached its peak during the farmer protests a few years ago. Police raided the offices of Twitter India in Delhi and Gurgaon after the social networking platform labelled “manipulated media” to one of tweets by a BJP leader. Jack Dorsey claimed that India had threatened to shut down the platform if the company did not comply with the government requests. “It manifested in ways such as: ‘We will shut Twitter down in India’, which is a very large market for us; ‘We will raid the homes of your employees’, which they did; and this is India, a democratic country,” Dorsey said in an interview. That said, X’s latest disclosure on government requests to block certain posts and accounts comes at a time when farmer protests have resumed in certain parts of the country. The government has not responded to X’s revelations yet.

Qila aims to lead the charge for blockchain-as-a-service industry

EntrackrEntrackr · 1y ago
Qila aims to lead the charge for blockchain-as-a-service industry
Medial

In India, the adoption of blockchain technology is steadily growing across various sectors, including finance, supply chain management, healthcare, and government services. As the Indian blockchain ecosystem continues to evolve, Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) is expected to play a significant role in driving innovation and digital transformation across various sectors. Qila, founded by Sid Ugrankar and Vishal Malhotra, aims to provide secure identity storage to enterprises using blockchain technology. They believe that their solutions could be a game-changer for enterprises. In a chat with CEO Ugrankar with Entrackr, he talks about the growth of BaaS in India, the challenges in implementation of the technology and the outlook of the industry. Here are some edited excerpts from the conversation. Please simplify what blockchain-as-a-service means. Please help us understand with an example of its application. A blockchain network is a group of machines that are able to communicate with each other using cryptography while storing the data in the form of a chain or ledger. The information is then distributed on different nodes within this network. It is very complicated to set up and manage a dedicated blockchain network as it takes a lot of effort to ensure that all the data is preserved. Blockchain as a service is where the platform is set up and managed by 1 single entity and being accessed by multiple users without the users having to set up their own blockchain network. This is similar to Email As A Service like Gmail or Infrastructure as a service like Amazon Web Services or Software as a service like Salesforce. What are the key services you provide? Our platform allows enterprises to integrate features of blockchain such as Smart Contracts and NFTs by buying a monthly subscription. The customer can buy a subscription for a shared service which is called Ark. With this subscription, the customer is provided with a dedicated channel but on a shared network setup. We also offer a dedicated network setup called Ark+. Here the customer is able to store their data on a dedicated network setup and is not sharing any resources with any other customer.vData is Smart Contracts, NFT tokens and their associated digital asset. Blockchain has been around for a while. Why has the technology not become mainstream yet? What do you think are the challenges in terms of its implementation? Blockchain came into prominence because of the explosive rise of Crypto and namely Bitcoin. But after the volatility of Crypto and NFTs, enterprises started to shy away from Cryptocurrency and blockchain was an unintended casualty. In addition to this, the recent scam of FTX and the Sam Bankman Fried controversy has worsened the sentiment towards blockchain. Blockchain association with Crypto has been the single most reason for not becoming mainstream. Blockchain is not an easy technology to set up and manage as well. Especially for the enterprise which is why they have to use a lot of Public networks such as Binance and Ethereum to implement their use cases. Using public networks is expensive as the cost of storing data on them, also known as gas fees, is very high. Private blockchain services, where a company sets up their own network, requires a lot of planning and is a software development approach where the effort outweighs the benefit. What is your outlook for the blockchain industry, especially in markets like India? My outlook for blockchain in India is not very good. This has a lot to do with the government’s stance on blockchain as a whole and its relationship with crypto currency. After applying a 30% blanket tax on crypto along with making crypto trading illegal, the government has been regressive by introducing regulations for new market opportunities such as real estate fractionalisation. This is the reason that many companies related to this field have moved to crypto friendly countries such as the UAE. What are your long-term and short-term plans in terms of business growth and product diversification? We want to make Qila.io the ubiquitous cloud offering for enterprise blockchain. To put this into perspective, we want to become the AWS for layer 3 blockchain. We are focusing on markets such as Europe middle and Africa and soon will venture into the east markets namely Singapore Thailand and Indonesia. By offering our out-of-the box tokenization solution PrivaSea, we want to drive blockchain adoption for real world use cases. We believe that blockchain will anchor the data world by providing privacy and provenance of data and will be the funnel for technologies such as AI. User consent will be the key driver for the internet of tomorrow. Qila Blockchain runs on the Qila Private Cloud and not AWS, Azure or GCP. We are busy extending this cloud in other markets as well so that data and information can be localized as per local laws.

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