Just in: SoftBank is reportedly selling 1.17% stake in Zomato for Rs 940 crore via a block deal.

One quick thing: India’s tax department is investigating FirstCry founder Supam Maheshwari for alleged tax evasion of $50 million

In today’s newsletter:

• 3 top executives say Bye-ju’s
• A third of India's food delivery riders are graduates
• Jio’s fintech play: Shake-up for startups?

P.S. With three medallists from three different sports, it has been a week to remember for Indian sports. We have something special for sports enthusiasts. Scroll below for more deets!

• Chess player Pravin Thipsay also writes for us on how Praggnanandhaa’s rise symbolises India’s emergence as a global chess powerhouse

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“If there are real issues on the ground, first you see top-level exits,” a confident Byju Raveendran had told us in an interview in Davos this January “Those who are closest to the action, they are not anxious at all.”

• But the tide has turned for India’s most-valued startup in the last seven months. Byju’s auditor and its investor board members have resigned. The company has come under the scanner of government ministries and its issues with lenders have gotten worse.

All this seems to have made “those closest to the action” anxious.

Three senior executives, who headed key functions at Byju’s, have resigned from the company adding to the turmoil at the edtech giant.

Prathyusha Agarwal, who headed the K-3 vertical, Mukut Deepak, who was in charge of the class 4-10 vertical and Himanshu Bajaj, head of Byju’s Tuition Centers, have put in their papers, sources told us.

• Last week, Cherian Thomas, Byju’s Senior Vice President for international business also quit 

Also read: Nearly 60% of Byju’s Tuition Centre customers have requested refunds in the last two years

The departure of these folks comes as a setback for Byju’s, which is trying to rebuild itself from the current crisis.

• Agarwal, Bajaj and Deepak headed the most important verticals–core K-12 business and Byju’s Tuition Centers, which was once touted as the company’s next growth engine.

The company has also restructured operations and would be consolidating four verticals into two - K-10 and Exam Prep.

• Ramesh Karra now leads the K-10 vertical, while Jitesh Shah is heading the exam prep business, Byju’s said in a statement.

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What if the guy who just delivered your Zomato or Swiggy order was a former head of a technical training institute, or an accounting professional? 

That’s exactly what a team of researchers from the National Council of Applied Economic Research found when they surveyed 924 such workers. 

Food delivery workers in India were found to be more academically qualified than required, according the report.  And, this trend exacerbated in the smaller cities.

• More than a third of the food delivery workers had a graduate degree, a number that rose to 39.7 percent in tier-2 cities, the study found.

• A significant share (12.5 percent) had a technical and vocational degree or diploma.

The average monthly real income of food delivery workers dropped almost 11 percent in 3 years to Rs 11,963 in 2022, the report said. Real income or real wage refers to earnings after adjusting for inflation.

• The decline was primarily due to two reasons — rising retail inflation and fuel costs eating into as much as 40 percent of a rider’s earnings.

• Even though some workers saw their gross incomes rise when they shifted to food delivery, the wages were almost always lower, net of fuel costs.

These platform workers also earned lower than their peer group of workers with higher secondary education covered in the government’s Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2021-22. 

• The food delivery workers were working 23 percent more hours than their peers, while earning 8 percent less than them, according to the report.

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For fintech startups, new entrants are a dime a dozen. But this deep-pocketed new player is definitely a head-turner.

After Reliance’s 46th Annual General Meeting (AGM) yesterday, it is evident that Jio Financial Services (JFS) will likely be a key pillar of Reliance's ecosystem of customer-facing businesses – like Jio Platforms and Reliance Retail.

“JFS will consolidate its payments infrastructure for both consumers and merchants, and also explore path-breaking features, such as blockchain-based platforms and the central bank digital currency (CBDC),” Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Industries said. 

• Jio Financial Services was demerged from RIL in July and became a publicly listed entity in August. 

As of today, JFS has a net worth of Rs 1,20,000 crore and the company is said to be one of the world’s highest capitalised financial service platforms at inception. 

• The company aims to compete with fintech startups in areas like payment gateways, UPI payments, Point of Sale (PoS) devices, consumer durable lending, insurance broking, payments banking and investment products,as per multiple analyst reports.

• JFS will also enter the insurance segment, likely in partnership with global players to offer products in life, general, and health insurance space.

JFS’s ambition in the wide gamut of financial services does seem like a serious threat to many fintech startups, given the heft and deep pockets the group has, along with RIL’s ability to execute new businesses at scale, like it did in the retail and telecom sectors.

• Each segment that JFS wants to enter has independently created fintechs valued at multi-billion dollars in the public and private markets like Paytm, Razorpay, BharatPe and others. 

• Startups are however cautiously optimistic, as they believe that the entry of JFS will open new doors for them, even though competition is likely to intensify in the space.

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Disclosure: Moneycontrol is a part of the Network18 group. Network18 is controlled by Independent Media Trust, of which Reliance Industries is the sole beneficiary.

• OpenAI has introduced an enterprise version of its popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, that promises to offer more security, privacy, and unlimited higher speed access to GPT-4.

• The CEOs of top technology companies including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai are set to attend an artificial intelligence forum hosted by US Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer on September 13.

Indian sports have had a phenomenal run in the past few days.

From R Praggnanandhaa's silver medal at the FIDE Chess World Cup 2023 to Neeraj Chopra's gold medal and the Indian men's 4x400m relay team setting a new Asian record at the World Athletics Championships and HS Prannoy winning the bronze medal at the Badminton World Championship.

As we celebrate National Sports Day today, to commemorate the birth anniversary of hockey legend Major Dhyan Chand Singh, we have curated a list of Indian sports documentaries that you must definitely watch

Ladies First: An inspirational documentary on the life of Deepika Kumari who rose to become the No.1 female archer in the world at the age of 18. Watch on Netflix

Maitanam: A 40-minute documentary that explores Kerala's special relationship with football through a collection of six stories. Watch on YouTube 

Break Point: The series traces the professional and personal journey of Indian tennis icons Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi, from their meteoric rise to their shocking split. Watch on ZEE5

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