One important thing: Facing allegations of covering up a $7.5 million hack, crypto exchange BitBNS’ founder Gaurav Dahake said today that some part of the firm’s funds did get compromised on February 1, 2022. 

• Dahake, however, played it down terming it as a "small incident" and not an "abnormal scenario"  

In today’s newsletter:

• Zomato’s Blinkit wants to eat Urban Company's lunch
• India tech sector revenue to top $245 bn this year
• Nexus readies $700 mn war chest for startups 

You're invited to Moneycontrol's India Fintech Conclave. We have a star-studded lineup featuring a Union Minister, RBI official, policymakers, bankers and top founders who are reshaping the fintech landscape in India. 

• It's happening on March 7 in Mumbai. RSVP here.

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It’s another day. And another experiment is being planned in the house of Zomato.

Zomato-owned quick commerce company Blinkit is mulling a foray into the home services category such as chefs and beauticians, according to sources.

• In light of this, Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal has resigned as a board member of Urban Company, a Delhi NCR-based unicorn in the home services space

Blinkit has already started offering home chef services through a Gurugram-based company called ChefKart, sources tell us

"But it hasn't been decided yet what will be the shape and form of the foray. It might also be just advertising on the Blinkit platform... Also, there's no clarity yet on which specific services will be there," said a source.

Zomato has piloted multiple new services over the past year even as industry experts have said that the growth of the food delivery sector – a metro city phenomenon – is expected to slow down.

• While Zomato's gross order value expanded 85 percent to Rs 5,500 crore between Q3 FY21 and Q3 FY22, the growth lost steam to come in at 21 percent between Q3 FY22 and Q3 FY23

• In the last year, it has started inter-city food delivery, 10-min food delivery and refurbished its loyalty programme

The Indian technology industry's revenue will reach $245 billion in fiscal year 2023, according to a report released by the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom). 

In fact, the industry body even expects it to reach $500 billion by 2030 — on the back of forward-looking policies, strong governance, talent, and digital trust.

The tech industry is a net creator of jobs according to the report — with 2.9 lakh jobs being created in FY23. Of the total 54 lakh employees in the sector, 20 lakh are women. 

• On a net basis, over 1,40,000 women employees were added during the year.

However, the report included one interesting tidbit: the net addition in FY23 was higher than pre-Covid levels. This comes at a time when net additions in IT services companies have fallen sharply in each quarter of this fiscal year.

“It is true that there are a lot of storm clouds gathering. It doesn't seem to rain yet, but the fear that it is going to rain is very palpable and very present…We are cautiously optimistic, and the reason there is caution is all there to see because of the recession, macroeconomic and geopolitical risks that are there,” said Krishnan Ramanujam, Nasscom Chairperson.

The days of authoritarian leadership are diminishing while the prevalence of vulnerable leadership is on the rise, said Wipro Chairman Rishad Premji during a session at the Nasscom Technology Leadership Summit (NTLS) 2023.

• He also said that it is important to encourage an environment of risk-taking and celebrate failures.

More from our Nasscom Technology Leadership Summit coverage:

•  Saving seats for an easier start: How Wipro is bringing moms back into the workforce?
  
  
• We are heading towards a creative economy and India is unprepared for that: Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia

Indian startups are having a hard time raising funds. But Indian venture capital (VC) firms seem to be doing it with ease.

Since 2022, a number of VC firms, including Sequoia Capital, Accel, and Elevation, among others, have raised large sums of money to invest in startups, and the latest to join the fray is Mumbai-based Nexus Venture Partners.

Nexus Venture Partners has closed a $700 million fund called Nexus Ventures VII, the second-largest corpus raised by an India-registered VC.

• Sequoia Capital India raised the largest-ever fund with a corpus of $2.85 billion in mid-2022

With the new fund, Nexus Venture Partners plans to invest in India and US-based startups and in sectors like artificial intelligence (AI), SaaS (software-as-a-service), fintech and commerce.

Nexus Venture Partners is among the earliest homegrown VC firms to have started investing in India and US-based startups. It was founded in 2006 by former entrepreneurs--Suvir Sujan, Sandeep Singhal and Naren Gupta.

• With the new fund, it now has $2 billion in assets under management

The company has invested in close to 200 companies in India and US to date and counts eight unicorns on its portfolio. Six of the VC's portfolio companies are publicly traded, including Delhivery and Zomato.

Go deeper

Don't be surprised when your search engine autocompletes UPI every time you type 'U' to search for something on the internet. That could be because there is a lot going on around India's homegrown real-time payments system.

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is leapfrogging to create multiple use cases and there is a lot of buzz around UPI’s diversification lately. Just a week ago, India kicked off its first cross-border real-time payment system connectivity with UPI.

In addition to facilitating cross-border payments, multiple use cases have been developed from UPI, including UPI Lite, UPI123 Pay and UPI Autopay.

India's businesses and citizens are looking forward to what UPI 3.0 can bring on board.

Go deeper

On this day in 1976, Steve Wozniak, then an employee at Hewlett Packard, completed the basic design for a personal computer circuit board.

The very next day, he showcased it at the Homebrew Computer Club, where his future partner in crime, Steve Jobs, was in attendance. Jobs saw the potential and convinced Wozniak not to give away his schematics for free but rather to mass-produce printed circuit boards to sell.

The two Steves then founded a company, naming it Apple, and used Wozniak's design as the foundation for the revolutionary Apple I computer.

• Indian-origin Nishad Singh, who was part of Sam Bankman-Fried’s inner circle that ran his crypto empire FTX, pleaded guilty to US criminal charges and agreed to cooperate with the investigation. 
  
  
• Voyager Digital Holdings, a crypto lender that filed for bankruptcy last year, said 97% of its customers voted for a chapter 11 restructuring plan that will see Binance US acquire some of its assets.

Remember those spy movies where the hero had x-ray vision glasses, and we wished we could have them too? Well, thanks to the team at MIT, that technology could soon become a reality!

Introducing X-AR, the futuristic augmented reality headset that uses computer vision and wireless perception to locate objects that are hidden from view.

When the researchers tested X-AR in a warehouse-like setting, the headset was able to locate hidden items to within 9.8 centimetres on average. It also confirmed that users picked up the correct item with 96% accuracy. (Picture credit: MIT)

Watch how it works

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