Month: December 2022

Liquidity is your company’s lifeline. With it, you have a fighting chance of achieving your vision, but when you’re out of money, you’re on the course to ruin.

It’s no secret that the startup funding environment isn’t what it was a year ago. As interest rates have climbed, debt has become more expensive, and the bar for securing it has only grown taller. According to CB Insights’ latest State of Venture report, total venture funding declined 34% in Q3 2022 compared to the previous quarter.

The fundraising environment isn’t getting easier, and that’s adding even more pressure on founders and startup teams to make the most of their current cash reserves. Treasury management is one way to do that.

Whether you need to extend the runway you’ve secured so far or just closed an extension, here are a few reasons treasury management should be at the top of your list of priorities as a founder and what you can do today to get started with it if you haven’t already.

Your office space isn’t the only thing impacting your runway

Inflation has made everything more expensive, meaning your current cash reserves won’t go as far as they would have a few years ago.

Treasury management should be top of mind for startup founders by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

In the last week or so, a web app named Instafest went viral. Instafest lets you generate festival posters from your Spotify listening history. Millions of people started generating their own festival posters before the official Spotify Wrapped dropped earlier in the week. In order to take advantage of the trend, the LineupSupply app — which lets you generate Spotify playlists from posters — added similar functionality.

To generate a new poster, go to the LineupSupply app, tap on the “Create Playlist” button, and select the “Rewind” option.

You can generate your Rewind for the last four weeks, six months or a lifetime based on your most listened artists on Spotify. The festival poster generated by the app is pretty basic compared to the Instafest poster. In terms of customization, you can just change the background color, the title, and hide your profile name.

The developer of the app, Brett Bauman, said that he’ll soon add different styles and an option to share the poster to your Instagram stories. He is also planning to introduce poster generation using top tracks instead of top artists in a future update.

Currently, LineupSupply only supports Spotify with support for Apple Music coming soon. In contrast, Instafest lets you generate posters through your Spotify, Apple Music, and your Last.fm listening history.

Bauman said that after Instafest was launched, he posted a TikTok on how to generate a playlist on LineupSupply through Instafest-generated posters. This resulted in a massive spike in the app’s downloads. He also gave a shoutout to Instafest developer Anshay Saboo for making poster generation a hit trend.

Conceptually, Instafest and LineupSupply are the Yin and Yang of the music festival generation. But with the latest update, LineupSupply users won’t feel left out.

LineupSupply updates its app to generate Instafest-styled posters via your Spotify by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

India won’t enforce a cap on the market share for players operating on the homegrown payments network until December 31, 2024 in a surprising move that analysts say is a major a win for Google Pay and Walmart’s PhonePe.

The National Payments Corporation of India, the payments body that oversees the Unified Payments Interface payments network, said on Friday that it is taking the move in part to ensure existing players have enough time to comply with the rules.

“In view of significant potential of digital payments and the need for multi-fold penetration from its current state, it is imperative that other existing and new players (Banks and Non-Banks) shall scale-up their consumer outreach for the growth of UPI and achieve overall market equilibrium,” it wrote.

NPCI initially planned to enforce the market cap rules in January 2021, but has delayed the timeline several times since. It originally saw the need to enforce a market cap check to address the “risks” and “protecting the UPI ecosystem as it further scales up.”

UPI is a payments infrastructure built by large banks in India and is backed by the Indian government. It has become the most popular digital payments method in the country in recent years.

PhonePe and Google Pay command over 80% of the UPI market share. The new move is seen as a loss for rivals such as Paytm, which were hoping that the NPCI, which is a special unit of the country’s central bank, will introduce the rail-guards much sooner.

(More to follow)

India won’t enforce market share cap on UPI until 2025 in a win for Google and Walmart by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

The digital loans business in India has been the subject of a lot of controversy, not least for over-predatory and un-transparent practices, yet that’s existed alongside the rise of a handful of startups that hoping to apply tech to build products that are clearly understood and fill a need in the market for quick, short-term access to capital. Today, one of these — KreditBee, which provides instant personal loans to users — is announcing that it has raised $80 million in a Series D funding round.

The funding is notable coming at a time when raising capital has become more complicated due to the economic slowdown in markets worldwide.The startup projects to cross an assets under management (AUM) mark of more than $1 billion over the next six to nine months; currently that figure is $492 million.

KreditBee has gained popularity in a market where a large number of people do not have a credit history. However, the startup has faced regulatory challenges as the central bank recently brought updates including the restriction for loading non-bank prepaid payment instruments (PPIs) using credit lines. It is also getting competition from several loan apps that are freely available in the market despite measures taken from the regulatory side and companies including Google due to their predatory behaviour.

Azim Premji’s Premji Invest, Motilal Oswal Alternates, TPG-backed NewQuest Capital Partners, and Mirae Asset Ventures — all previous backers — invested, as did Japan’s MUFG Bank. The company said it’s keeping the Series D open, meaning more might be coming into the round. It declined to provide further details on that front.

It’s also not disclosing its valuation. Dealroom pegged it at $375 million although a spokesperson said this figure was not accurate. KreditBee has to date provided loans to 6 million customers and said it currently has more than 2 million active loan customers.

Previously, in 2021, KreditBee raised $75 million in a Series C round. KreditBee has raised over $280 million to date. The startup said it is planning to use the fresh funds to invest in its product development, specifically to expand from unsecured personal loans to secured loans, home loans and credit lines, and to start work on adjacent services such as insurance, credit score reports and merchant-side offers. The platform said it reaches over 400 million users across India — although it’s not clear if that’s an active customer number — and that it has partnerships with more than 10 financial institutions.

“The investment adds more weight to our vision of encouraging financial independence through a smart digital experience, which is what India stands for today. With the current round, we look forward to expand our set of solutions to serve our growing consumer base,” Madhusudan E, co-founder and CEO, KreditBee, said in a statement.

“KreditBee is run on the ethos of enabling underserved customers an easy access to financial products through tech-enabled underwriting. We are very excited to partner with KreditBee in their growth journey of providing financial services to millions of customers,” said Shashank Joshi, Deputy CEO and Head Global Corporate Banking, MUFG India.

KreditBee today offers instant personal loans of up to $3,700 (3 lakhs Indian rupees) as well as loans for salaried individuals and purchases via e-commerce platforms. Providing a complement to the longer process of applying to banks directly for loans, to facilitate lending on its platform, KreditBee works both with non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) and banks registered with the Reserve Bank of India, including Krazybee Services, IIFL Finance, Incred Financial Services, Vivriti Capital, Northern Arc Capital, PayU Finance, Poonawalla Fincorp, Piramal Capital and Housing Finance and Cholamandalam Investment and Finance.

“The KreditBee growth journey since inception has been remarkable, and it has spearheaded many innovations in the consumer lending space. We’re confident of KreditBee further consolidating its market leadership position in the coming times,” mentioned Atul Gupta, a partner at Premji Invest.

India’s KreditBee raises $80 million from Azim Premji’s Premji Invest, Motilal Oswal Alternates, among others by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

It’s probably not a secret to those doing a lot of focused work in the space, but when it comes to generative AI, it’s quickly becoming apparent that how a user interfaces with generative models and systems is at least as important as the underlying training and inference technology. The latest, and I think best example comes via OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which launched as a free research preview for anyone to try this week.

In case you haven’t seen the buzz around ChatGPT yet, it’s basically an implementation of their new GPT-3.5 natural language generation technology, but implemented in such a way that you just chat with it in a web browser as if you were slacking with a colleague or interacting with a customer support agent on a website.

OpenAI has already made waves with its DALL-E image generation technology, and its GPT series has drawn attention with each successive release (and occasional existential dread on the part of writers). But the latest chat-style iteration has seemingly broadened its appeal and audience, in some ways moving the conversation from “wow, undergrads are going to use this to submit bad but workable term papers” to “wow, this could actually help me debug code that I intend to put in production.”

Examples so far in the wild seem to show that it’s actually getting much better at the term paper thing, but that it still has work to do when it comes to avoiding a few typical pitfalls for AI chatbots, including presenting misinformation as fact. But obviously its engagement is through the roof, and people seem to be much more impressed with ChatGPT than they were with GPT-3, at least (though that is in part due to the fact that it’s a new release with improved core inference technology as well as a new interaction paradigm).

My own example of why I think this is so powerful is timely, if mundane: I asked ChatGPT to provide me with all the various Pokémon Type strengths and weaknesses, and it delivered exactly what I always hope Google will every time I enter a Tera Raid in the new Pokémon Scarlet game and have to try to remember what counters what.

To wit:Notice I wasn’t at all fancy with my query; it’s about as simple as I can get while still being clear about my request. And the result is exactly what I’m looking for — not a list of things that can probably help me find what I’m looking for if I’m willing to put in the time, which is what Google returns:

The potential for something like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to eventually supplant a search engine like Google isn’t a new idea, but this delivery of OpenAI’s underlying technology is the closest approximation yet to how that would actually work in a fully fleshed out system, and it should have Google scared.

ChatGPT is also the best yet expression of something startups and entrepreneurs looking at the space should already know: The gold rush in generative AI will be driven by developing novel, defensible businesses built around how it shows up, less so than what’s under the hood.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT shows why implementation is key with generative AI by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch