One important thing: Xiaomi India's problems continue to mount. Raghu Reddy, the company's chief business officer in charge of both offline and online sales, has resigned to pursue new "growth opportunities."

• This exit comes at a time when the company, which currently leads the smartphone market in India, is under intense government scrutiny. It is also locked in a fierce battle with rival Samsung and other Chinese smartphone manufacturers such as Oppo and Vivo.

In today’s newsletter: 

• Ashneer Grover, family treated firm like personal fiefdom: BharatPe
• There is a robot making your biryani!
• OfBusiness gets an up round?

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Today, the BharatPe saga took another twist when the company filed a criminal complaint against estranged co-founder Ashneer Grover and his family.

The company also filed a civil suit against Grover and his family, seeking Rs 88 crore in damages. BharatPe claimed that the founder and his family treated the company as their "personal fiefdom."

The fintech unicorn's 2,800-page lawsuit detailed numerous instances of Grover and his family misappropriating company funds.

• The lion's share of the alleged wrongdoing — approximately Rs 72 crore — was due to payments to nearly 30 'non-existent' vendors

• In another instance, BharatPe paid Rs 7.6 crore to 8 vendors related to the Grover family for recruitment services. However, these firms never provided those services
  
  
• Contracts to renovate the BharatPe office were awarded to Madhuri Jain, Grover's wife and former BharatPe head of controls
  
  
• BharatPe has also sought Rs 5 crore in damages from the Grovers for causing harm to the company's reputation

According to BharatPe, the Grover family's misdeeds were not limited to syphoning off company funds through fake bills and related party transactions.

• The lawsuit claimed that the founder’s family used BharatPe funds to pay for family vacations to Dubai and the US
  
  
• The Grovers allegedly rented a duplex in South Delhi as a company guest house, but used it as a family home
  
  
• BharatPe also stated that Jain sought reimbursement from the company for her skincare treatment

P.S. If the WeWork web series is called WeCrashed, could a potential BharatPe web series be called WePaid? Any thoughts?

Were you learning how to make biryani from popular YouTube channels? Don't bother with that. You will soon be able to buy a kitchen robot to do this task.

Most cloud kitchens and restaurant chains are increasingly reliant on machines to prepare food. A few Indian startups, such as Mukunda Foods, Xook, and On2Cook, are attempting to build the so-called food-as-a-service (FaaS) business, which promises to prepare food faster and with greater consistency without or with less human labour.

This market is relatively new, and demand began to skyrocket when online food delivery became popular.

Kitchens like TinyOwl and Foodpanda, which were early entrants in the space, had a difficult time maintaining food quality. That is when kitchen automation became popular. Dosas, burgers, biryanis, and dozens of other cuisines can now be produced by machines.

• These machines can cost anywhere from thousands to lakhs of rupees.

Some of these startups are trying to solve problems for households as well as businesses. Up⤴, a consumer hardware startup, has created a device that comes with an app and helps you chop, stir, and prepare food faster.

Go deeper

Investors are fleeing high-growth tech startups. However, this SoftBank-backed startup, which has grown more than sixfold in the last year, appears to be attracting investors.

The reason is simple: The startup is profitable, and it has maintained its profit growth while expanding, which is a rare feat for high-growth tech companies.

OfBusiness, which runs an online marketplace for construction materials and financing for small and medium enterprises, is about to get a valuation boost.

• The SoftBank-backed unicorn is in talks to raise a $50-100 million secondary funding round at a valuation of $8-9 billion
  
  
• As of December last year, OfBusiness was valued at $5 billion
  
  
• The round may give an exit to some of OfBusiness' early angel investors and institutional investors

OfBusiness has been considering an IPO since December 2021, when it raised a large round of $325 million, quadrupling its valuation to $5 billion.

• The company is now aiming for a high valuation in order to establish a valuation benchmark for its IPO.

The development comes at a time when many high-growth tech startups have either delayed or abandoned their plans to go public, with public shareholders selling shares in new-age companies.

Many listed unicorns, such as Paytm, Zomato, and others, have been trading below their private market valuations on the public markets, bringing valuations of new-age technology companies into the spotlight.

On this day in 2004, IBM, which revolutionised the global computer industry with the introduction of its first desktop computer in 1981, sold its PC division to China's Lenovo Group for $1.75 billion.

Quick trivia: In early 1981, IBM sold its first computer for $1,565.

• ZebPay chairman Rahul Pagidipati has returned as CEO of the Crypto asset exchange, as Avinash Shekhar leaves to launch his own Web3 startup. He will oversee operations and collaborate with current leadership to expand existing and new lines of business.
  
  
• Federal prosecutors are looking into whether FTX's founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, manipulated the market for two cryptocurrencies, TerraUSD and Luna, causing their collapse and setting off a chain reaction that led to the implosion of his own cryptocurrency exchange last month.
  
  
• Celsius Network LLC has been ordered by US Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn to return cryptocurrency that never touched the lender's interest-bearing accounts to its customers.

Everyone is feeling the pinch of high inflation, especially those living in New York and Singapore. 

According to the Economist Intelligence Unit's Worldwide Cost of Living report, both cities are tied for the title of the most expensive city in the world.

• New York has topped the charts for the first time while Singapore has taken the pole position for the eighth time in ten years, it notes. 

The average cost of living is up 8.1% this year across the 172 cities covered by the report, the highest rate in 20 years.

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