Breaking: In a major leadership overhaul, Tata Consultancy Services managing director & CEO Rajesh Gopinathan has stepped down from the country’s largest IT firm. He will stay on with the company till 15 September 2023.

• K. Krithivasan has been nominated as the CEO Designate by the company board, with effect from 16 March 2023

One important thing: Freshworks, a Nasdaq-listed Software-as-a-Service firm, has undertaken another round of layoffs across teams in its offices in India and the US.

• The company said this layoff is aimed at boosting efficiency and is unrelated to Silicon Valley Bank's collapse.

 In today’s newsletter: 

• Lenskart gets flat top-up from ADIA
• Vishal Sikka on India’s AI responsibility
• Inside IIT Madras: A deep tech haven

Bonus: It might be a time of austerity in the tech and startup world, but India’s luxury housing market is booming! Scroll below for more deets!

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Has Lenskart managed to defy the funding winter? 

Well, it did raise one of the largest funding rounds of the recent past, but didn’t get a valuation markup.

Lenskart has raised $500 million from Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), the second-largest funding round of 2023 after PhonePe’s proposed $1 billion fundraise.

• Lenskart raised the new funding at its existing valuation of $4.5 billion
  
  
• The funding was a mix of primary and secondary sales, and upon completion, ADIA will hold about 10% of the eyewear firm
  
  
• With the latest round, Lenskart has raised $750 million since 2022

The Peyush Bansal-led startup plans to use the funds to expand its Indian and global presence.

• Lenskart currently claims to have over 2,000 stores, with 1,500 in India and the rest in Southeast Asia and the Middle East

Lenskart said that its new factory, which will produce 20 million pairs of eyewear that the company plans to ship next year, will be operational soon.

The company also claims that its revenue has increased by more than 60% for two consecutive years and that it is profitable.

• In FY22 (2021-22), Lenskart slipped into losses after achieving a profit of Rs 29 crore in the previous fiscal year

There is a saying in Tamil which goes something like, 'It's very difficult to search on Google to know more about Kamal Hassan, but you can search on Kamal Haasan to know more about Google'. IYKYK! The man has the longest description on Wikipedia as an Indian actor, filmmaker, screenwriter, playback singer, television presenter, and politician. 

ChatGPT, for sure, is giving Haasan tough competition!

A platform like ChatGPT is an example of generative AI, and it comes with immense opportunity as well as the potential for misuse, according to Vishal Sikka, the founder of Vianai Systems and former CEO of Infosys.

(During his tenure, Infy made a donation to ChatGPT maker OpenAI. What made him do that? Read more)

Sikka’s tryst with AI goes way back to his PhD days in 1994. Since then, the technology has gone through several boom and bust cycles, but it’s the last few months that have captured people’s attention, he says.

• People are currently using AI to help them with work-related tasks, be it writing a letter, an essay, or a piece of code
  
  
• But will it replace humans? If people want to stay idle and not learn these new technologies, it will, he says

But each time Sikka talks about AI’s promise, he also points out its limitations and pitfalls. 

Sikka believes that AI is less regulated than cigarettes or seat belts, which concerns him given the technology's power and the vast potential for harm.

India has a unique opportunity and even ‘responsibility’ to create a workforce that can develop, deploy and understand AI, according to Sikka. 

• The number of people who understand and can deploy AI systems in the world is extremely few, and this is where India can train people, he says.

ChatGPT is finding use cases for those working in product, marketing and design. ChatGPT is used by professionals in a variety of fields to analyse and summarise information, as well as to eliminate tedious tasks.

• A brand designer at a SaaS startup, for example, uses ChatGPT to better articulate her design decisions, designers use it to create user flows, writers use it as an assistant and editor, and so on.

Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala, who serves as President of the IIT Madras Research Park, has often pointed out that many Indian scientists are content with publishing their research and receiving promotions, without focusing on commercialization efforts. 

To tackle this problem, faculty members at IIT Madras, including Director V Kamakoti, former Directors MS Ananth and Bhaskar Ramamurthi, and Jhunjhunwala himself, are now working to promote translational research at the institute.

IIT Madras and its associated research park are responsible for the incubation of more than 200 deep tech startups with a combined valuation of over Rs 50,000 crore.

• It has also played a role (in some way) in the development of at least eight unicorns

The technological and research-related requirements of deep tech startups necessitate a significant amount of academic intervention, which the institute does not shy away from.

• Kamakoti says almost 40% of the institute's faculty are entrepreneurs

Jhunjhunwala is pleased with the contribution IIT Madras has made to India's innovation ecosystem, but he believes that more needs to be done.

• He said that more efforts must be made to develop solutions that emit fewer greenhouse gases and to achieve net-zero goals.

Discover more about IIT Madras and its innovation ecosystem in the first article of our special series. 

On March 16, 1995, the world's first user-editable website, also known as Wiki, was created. The website, named WikiWikiWeb, was developed by Ward Cunningham, who derived the database's name from the Hawaiian word "wiki," meaning "quick." The site was launched on March 25 of that same year.

This concept eventually led to the creation of Wikipedia six years later.

• Indian crypto exchanges are seeing a slow but steady recovery in monthly trading volume since January 2023. The overall monthly average of trading volume across exchanges grew by over 53% between December 2022 and February 2023. 
  
  
• FTX made transfers of about $2.2 billion to company founder Sam Bankman-Fried through related entities, the company's new management said.

Rs 8,000 crore in 72 hours! 

That's how much real estate developer DLF has clocked from the sale of 1,137 luxury flats in Gurugram. DLF said the luxury project, called The Arbour, is now sold out even before its official launch. 

What's driving this growth? After the Covid-19 pandemic forced many people indoors, they are now looking to upgrade their homes with upscale amenities such as concierge services, spas, large open spaces, and after-sales maintenance.

• Luxury housing accounted for 16% of overall housing sales in the top seven cities between April-December of FY23, according to rating agency ICRA.

This growth has also resulted in branded real estate developers now making a beeline with their own luxury projects.

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