One quick thing: E-commerce companies should respect FDI laws, says commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal.

In today's newsletter:

• Tiger Global on the prowl again
• Meta hits back at CCI
• 10-min food delivery has a new challenger

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It appears Tiger Global is stretching its legs and is back in the market after an 18-month long snooze during the funding winter.

After backing Captain Fresh, Infra.Market, EatClub, and Meesho this year, Tiger Global is prowling back to India's startup world — but with a twist.

• Gone are the days of quick moves and fast exits 

The New York-based investor is slowing down investments, spending more time with its founders in India and keeping an eye on more exits. 

“I did not expect Tiger to get so involved honestly,” Souvik Sengupta, co-founder of IPO-bound Infra.market, told us.  

Tiger Global’s key fund managers like Deep Verma, who leads India and Southeast Asia (SEA) investments, are now spending more time with founders in India.

• Verma visits India at least once every quarter, seven founders we spoke to said.

Tiger is also keen on taking some chips off the table. 

"For growth stage investments, Tiger is pretty clear now that it wants to invest or double down on older bets only if there's visibility on a liquidity event in six-eight months,” a founder, who has raised money from Tiger, told us. 

Along with that, the prolific startup investor has also shown comfort in cutting smaller cheques than it did previously.

• SoftBank’s Sumer Juneja had echoed this and said the firm is not finding promising founders to back

Go on a hunt

Image: Meta.ai

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and WhatsApp, looks set for a lengthy confrontation with India's antitrust regulator.

Meta said today that it disagrees with the Competition Commission of India (CCI)'s decision and plans to appeal against the antitrust order related to WhatsApp's 2021 privacy policy update. 

• Yesterday, CCI directed WhatsApp to stop sharing user data collected on its platform with other Meta products or companies for advertising purposes for 5 years, along with other remedial measures. It also fined Meta Rs 213.14 crore for abusing its dominant position.

CCI launched an investigation into WhatsApp's revised privacy policy in March 2021. The policy required users to mandatorily share data with Meta and its companies along with expanded data collection without an opt-out option.

• After an investigation of over three and a half years, CCI stated that it found WhatsApp's ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ policy update was unfair. 

It also noted that sharing WhatsApp users' data between Meta companies for reasons other than providing the WhatsApp service creates an entry barrier for Meta's rivals, making it harder for them to compete in the display advertising market.

The social networking giant said the policy update did not affect the privacy of people’s personal messages and it was offered as a choice for users at the time. 

"The update was about introducing optional business features on WhatsApp...We also ensured no one would have their accounts deleted or lose functionality of the WhatsApp service because of this update" a spokesperson said. 

India is Meta's largest market in terms of users, with a combined user base of over a billion monthly active users. WhatsApp alone has more than 500 million monthly active users in the country.

• The country is also a key priority for Meta's business messaging ambitions, as the firm seeks to diversify its revenue sources beyond traditional digital advertising. It has been a major growth driver for the company in India.

Go deeper

Hold on to your forks—looks like the 10-minute food delivery race is getting extra spicy with the arrival of a new contender!

Swish, a rapid food delivery startup has raised $2 million from Accel and a bunch of angel investors.

• These include former Swiggy executives such as Karthik Gurumurthy and Karan Arora, Urban Company co-founders Abhiraj Singh Bhal and Varun Khaitan, Scapia’s Arindam Roy and Anil Goteti.

Accel, which recently made a whopping 26X return on its $19.85 million investment in Swiggy, looks to replicate its success by betting on Swish.

With Indian consumers quickly adopting 10-minute grocery delivery, it seems that rapid food delivery is poised to be the next big thing. 

Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal recently told us in an interview that 10-min food delivery can be a gamechanger.(P.S. Zomato did try it unsuccessfully a couple of years ago. Time’s different now, though)

Zepto also launched Zepto Cafe for the same 10-minute food delivery service and clocked an annualised revenue run rate (ARR) of Rs 160 crore. The segment is projected to touch Rs 1,000 crore by FY26.

• Swiggy also entered the fray last month with the launch of Bolt, that promises to deliver meals to customers in 10 minutes

Will 10- min food delivery see the same success as grocery delivery? Only time will tell.

Read More 

• Amazon has held talks with Instacart, Uber, Ticketmaster, and others for help on its new AI-powered Alexa.

• Mistral introduced a new, large foundational model named Pixtral Large. The company has also added image generation and web search capabilities to its AI chatbot Le Chat.

An AI fashion stylist, a personalised news app, an action multiplayer title, and a puzzle adventure title -  these are some of the apps that Google Play has picked as part of its list of the best apps and games of 2024. 

• What's particularly noteworthy was that 5 out of 7 winners in the list of best apps were developed by Indian companies. 

Read the full list