One quick thing: In a major development, First Citizens Bank & Trust has agreed to acquire all deposits and loans of the troubled SVB Financial Group’s Silicon Valley Bank.

• Silicon Valley Bridge Bank, formerly known as Silicon Valley Bank, had approximately $167 billion in total assets and about $119 billion in total deposits as of March 10.

In today’s newsletter: 

• PhysicsWallah and Adda247 lock horns over poaching
• Oyo plans to cut IPO size
• A day inside Whitefield metro

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Over the years, students across India have put in their best efforts to crack NEET and JEE exams with the belief that graduating from top engineering or medical colleges will secure them high-paying jobs.

Who knew that one day, due to competition within Indian edtech, the teachers who prepare these young aspirants will earn just as much or even more?

PhysicsWallah and Adda247, two edtech companies backed by WestBridge, are at loggerheads over their educators.

• Adda247, which also counts Google as an investor, allegedly spent Rs 100 crore to poach five teachers from PhysicsWallah to start a YouTube channel called Sankalp. (We know what you are thinking: "Time to reconsider my career?")

Adda247 started the channel to foray into NEET-JEE test prep, a segment that includes Unacademy, Vedantu, Byju's, and PhysicsWallah, according to sources.

Regarding the launch of Sankalp, however, there has been no official communication.

“If Adda247 launched the platform under its name, it would have received a lot of backlash from students for poaching star teachers at such aggressive packages… Once the dust settles, Adda247 will claim Sankalp,” a source told us.

Sankalp has around 3,36,000 subscribers and over 9.5 million views across seven videos. However, only two of the videos are related to course content, while the others feature teachers explaining their reasons for leaving PhysicsWallah.

In one of the videos, the five teachers broke down, yelled, and were visibly upset about bribery allegations levelled by a former colleague, PhysicsWallah's Pankaj Sijariya.

“It is disheartening to see how educators… have now resorted to jeopardising the brand & its honesty. All this emotional drama in a ‘recorded video’ is a concerted & highly insincere attempt to turn the sentiments of the students in their favour,” said Abhishek Mishra, chief strategy officer of PhysicsWallah.

Go deeper

It's never easy to list in a rising interest rate environment, and India’s technology startups are certainly understanding it.

SoftBank-backed Oyo, one of India’s poster boy startups, is considering reducing the size of its planned IPO, while Mamaearth, a skincare startup backed by Sequoia, has delayed its listing plans.

Meanwhile, Sequoia Capital is connecting its portfolio companies with potential public market investors as some of its heavily-funded startups prepare for an IPO.

Oyo is reportedly planning to reduce the number of shares it intends to sell through a stock-market debut by roughly two-thirds, in an effort to list the company on bourses despite falling tech valuations.

• The company is preparing to file a fresh initial public offering document as soon as this week
  
  
• Oyo will outline plans to sell just a third of the new shares it originally planned
  
  
• No shares will be offered for sale by Oyo’s current investors

Sequoia Capital, one of India’s most aggressive tech investors, conducted an event named ‘Sequoia Horizon’ recently, which provided an opportunity for public market investors and equity research analysts to interact with various of its portfolio companies that are getting ready for a potential IPO. 

A majority of Sequoia's portfolio unicorns and soonicorns (soon-to-be-unicorns), according to a note by brokerage firm JM Financial, are heavily focusing on profitability, pausing or even cancelling new initiatives that typically have a long and uncertain gestation period for return on investment in the face of a worsening funding winter.

Mamaearth, a direct-to-consumer brand that filed draught papers with the Securities and Exchange Board of India in December last year, is now in a "wait and watch" mode due to global stock market volatility and concerns about banks' financial health.

In an exclusive interview with Network 18, Mamaearth co-founder Varun Alagh said that the company was “still some time away from finalising valuations”.

The Whitefield-Krishnarajapura section, unveiled by PM Narendra Modi on March 25, is now officially open to the public. Eager to experience this latest addition to Bengluru's Metro network, we wasted no time in embarking on a thrilling ride on this route on Day 1.

We kicked off our adventure by boarding a feeder bus from Krishnarajapura to Byappanahalli and then hopped on another Metro train from Byappanahalli to MG Road in the Central Business District.

Needless to say, our Day 1 experience was nothing short of spectacular. 

Passengers were welcomed by the beautiful sight of pink trumpet flowers in full bloom and rows of massive tech parks and office buildings along the Whitefield-KR Pura section. 

With operations in this 13.7 km section starting, Bengaluru now has a total metro network of 69.66 km with 63 stations, making it the second largest metro network in the country after New Delhi's 350 km long Delhi Metro which began operations in 2002, and followed by Hyderabad Metro, a 67 km network that came into existence in 2017.

• It's worth noting that the new section in Bengaluru is still missing a critical link - the Byappanahalli-KR Pura section - and is still disconnected from the existing Purple line

Users complained about the lack of parking at stations and the absence of feeder bus connectivity from stations to surrounding areas.

• Six of the Whitefield Metro section's twelve stations had their names changed just before the inauguration, but maps inside most stations still show the old names
  
  
• The buses operated by the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) currently do not offer technologically advanced features such as UPI/QR-code ticketing, NCMC compatibility, or real-time bus tracking capabilities

Meme makers are getting creative and using Michelangelo's famous "Creation of Adam" fresco to humorously highlight the missing Metro link between Byappanahalli and KR Pura. In the original painting, God and Adam's fingers are almost touching, but in the meme, the two fingers represent the two stations that are not yet connected.

Go deeper

On March 27, 1884, the first long-distance telephone call was made between Boston and New York. The conversation between Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, and his assistant Watson lasted approximately 90 minutes.

For increased signal strength, the 378-kilometre-long telephone line was built with copper wires rather than galvanised iron. (Picture credit: High Tech History)

• Venezuela's energy supplier shut down crypto mining facilities nationwide as part of a crypto department reorganisation and ongoing corruption probe involving the country's oil company. 
  
  
• Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon has appealed a Montenegrin court's decision to extend his detention for up to 30 days following his arrest.

Generative AI platforms have revolutionised creative industries in recent months, but can they design furniture? 

Space10, an Ikea-funded Swedish design agency, attempted to answer this question by training a text-to-image model to generate retro-futuristic furniture designs inspired by vintage Ikea pieces from the 1970s and 1980s. 

While the AI-generated designs were visually striking, some of the chairs lacked practicality and safety features, with missing legs and unstable centers of gravity (something that Ikea would definitely want to avoid). 

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