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Amazon will be shutting down Amazon Academy, an online learning platform it launched in India for high-school students last year, the company said Thursday.

The retailer says it will wind down the edtech service in the country in a phased manner starting August 2023. Those who signed up for the current academic batch will receive a full refund, it said.

Amazon officially launched Academy, previously called JEE Ready, early last year, but had been testing the platform since mid-2019. Academy sought to help students prepare for entry into the nation’s prestigious engineering colleges.

The service offered curated learning material, live lectures, mock tests and comprehensive assessments to help students learn and practice math, physics and chemistry and prepare for the Joint Entrance Examinations (JEE), a government-backed engineering entrance assessment conducted in India for admission to various engineering colleges in the country.

The comprehensive offering from the firm had prompted some to believe that Amazon might be making a major foray into the education market and may pose threat to upstarts such as Byju’s, Unacademy and Vedantu.

More than 260 million children go to school in India and much of the population sees education as a key to economic progress and a better life. Facebook alsoinvested in Unacademy, a Bangalore-based startup that offers online learning classes. Google, whichinvested in Indian edtech startupCuemath,also partnered with CBSEto train more than 1 million teachers in India and offer a range of free tools such as G Suite for Education, Google Classroom and YouTube to help digitize the education experience in the nation.

“At Amazon, we think big, experiment, and invest in new ideas to delight customers. We also continually evaluate the progress and potential of our products and services to deliver customer value, and we regularly make adjustments based on those assessments,” an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch.

“Following an assessment we have made the decision to discontinue Amazon Academy. We are winding down this program in a phased manner to take care of current customers.”

The company did not share why it’s winding down Academy, but ET Prime (paywalled), which first reported the development, said the move was part of the its ongoing cost-cutting measures.

Amazon is planning to cut about 10,000 jobs, according to media reports, and began eliminating roles in some divisions including devices and services earlier this month. Amazon also shut down teams that make AWS tutorials and other online courses, Business Insider reported.

In a memo, which Amazon has since made public, chief executive Andy Jassy said more layoffs will come next year.

Amazon to shut down its online learning platform in India by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Visa and Mastercard payments are convenient for customers, but can cost merchants high processing fees. Atoa Payments wants to provide a cheaper alternative that is still easy for customers to use. The London-based fintech announced today that it has raised $2.2 million in pre-seed funding.

The round was led by Leo Capital and Passion Capital, with participation from angel investors like GoCardless and Nested co-founder Matt Robinson, Moon Capital Ventures and MarketFinance co-founder Anil Stocker.

Atoa co-founder Sid Narayanan told TechCrunch that he and co-founder Cian O’Dowd developed the idea for Atoa after selling their previous startup, expense management platform KlearCard, to Singapore fintech Validus in 2021.

Their barber, who initially accepted card payments, started asking for cash payments or bank transfers because he wanted to reduce his card processing fees, which were around 1.6%. Narayanan and O’Dowd were used to card alternative payments after living in Singapore, and saw an opportunity to use the U.K.’s open banking payments stack to build a Visa and Mastercard alternative, Narayanan told TechCrunch.

Mastercard and Visa payment rails can cost small merchants and their customers net margins of 51%, with card machine fees of about 1.75%, Narayanan said. Atoa, on the other hand, charges a fixed percentage fee billable to merchant each months that is up to 70% lower than debit cards. It also does not have hardware rentals, service fees or PCI attestation of compliance charges.

To use Atoa, merchants download an app that connects to their bank accounts. Customers don’t need to download Atoa’s app to use the service. Instead, they can use Atoa as long as they have a U.K. mobile banking app. According to Narayanan, the majority of adults, or about 80% in the U.K., already have a mobile banking app on their phone, removing the main source of friction. Merchants send a link for payment by SMS, PayBay or offer a QR code to scan.

To incentivize more customers to use Atoa, the startup also plans to add rewards and loyalty benefits, like digital scratch cards that can let them get cash rewards into their existing U.K. bank accounts.

Once customers pay with Atoa, merchants to receive payment instantly through Instant Bank Pay. They also get funds in their bank account right away, instead of waiting for up to 1 to 2 business days.

Atoa says since it went live in June, it’s gotten more than 100% month-on-month total payment volume (TPV) growth and merchant customers. Its most direct competitors include card machine providers like SumUp, Zettle, Square and Barclaycard, Narayanan said. Atoa differentiates by offering lower fees and enabling merchants to receive funds more quickly than the three days typically required by card machine providers. It also charges lower fees than players that are intermediated by Visa and Mastercard.

In a statement about its investment, Passion Capital partner Robert Dighero said, “Atoa has come to the UK market at the right time to leverage open banking and bring to small and medium sized merchants a truly viable alternative to payment cards and card machines that can be deployed in-store within minutes. We’re delighted to work with the Atoa team after their first fintech success and look forward to partnering with them as they achieve even greater heights with Atoa.”

Atoa helps UK merchants cut down on card processing fees by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

How many VC funds can you name where the three partners all had babies whilst raising the fund, have deep connections in Asia as well as Europe and the US, and include actress Anne Hathaway as an LP? Not many I’d hazard.

But that’s the profile of Pact, a new Seed VC fund launched with a £30 million ($36 million) pot of cash to back early-stage startups across Europe. Pact will aim at ‘mission driven’ startups in what it calls the “ABC” categories: Access (economic inclusion), Betterment (personal and professional well-being), and Climate. (That’s a much more interesting way of addressing ‘doing good’ areas, instead of that trotting out the UN SDGs, IMHO). Pact’s investment tickets will range from around £1m to 1.5m.

As well as Anne Hathaway (she’s not ‘just’ an Oscar Award Winning Actor, but also a UN Woman Goodwill Ambassador), other LPs include Jeff Dean, the Head of AI at Google, and Keith Teare, a founding (and former) shareholder of TechCrunch and former tech entrepreneur in the UK and US.

They are joined by Anchor investor Campden Hill Capital; Yeming Wang, the former head of EMEA of Alibaba; Fahd Beg, the COO of Naspers; Todd Ruppert, the retired CEO of T. Rowe Price Global and venture partner at Greenspring Associates, and Tilo Bonow, CEO of PIABO.

The three female partners — Tong Gu, Reem Mobassaleh Wyndham, and Monik Pham — were former VCs in other funds. Gu was an investor at ADV (of which Teare was formerly a part) and built a data analytics startup in Shanghai which she exited. Wyndham was also an investor for ADV and a former founder. Pham was part of the founding team of the early-stage fund Fuel Ventures and launched several social enterprises in Africa and India.

Speaking to Reem Mobassaleh Wyndham, she told me they’d been raising the fund for a little over a year (during their pregnancies and first children) but the idea had been “in the works” for about five or six years: “We both joined ADV the same week. And we met Monik around the same time. What we observed within the early stage landscape in the UK was a few key things that were missing. There are very few early-stage fund managers that have both operational experience and deep operational experience abroad in emerging markets. And that’s something that the three of us, in a very complimentary way, bring to the table.”

“We believe that capitalism should and can be inclusive while still producing huge results,” she added. “And we really want it to be able to back companies at the early stage that are really positively shaping the future. We’ve all built our careers with that Northstar as a guide for us. It’s a value that we’ve always espoused, but it’s only now at this point that the market is really coming around to it. There shouldn’t be a trade off between socially sustainable, environmentally sustainable and commercially sustainable outcomes. You have to think about both. And that’s a value that all three of us came together on,” she said.

Tong Gu told me: “I grew up in China, and I witnessed how entrepreneurship and technology have enabled a large population of people who used to be under the poverty line to become wealthier and make their lives better. I started a tech company enabling independent small brand owners to compete with the larger ones. And for me, that was the experience of really driving economic inclusion, but in sort of a tech-enabled way.”

Wyndham admitted “it’s not a huge fund”. However, she said the £30 million should get them enough companies to get the “healthy diversification” needed for fund returns: “We could do 18 to 20 companies, either leading or co-leading. We’ve been very thoughtful about how we have curated our LP base. So the LPS that have come in are strategic and they provide domain expertise, and market access, but they also provide capital continuity. The vast majority are looking for access to deal flow. So in that sense, this is actually scaling our firepower beyond the 30 million.”

On having a Hollywood moviestar among their LPs, Wyndham added: “She’s actually a friend of mine and mentor of about 12 years and since then we’ve become friends and have shared values. One of her big causes is childcare, and lack thereof, as the final frontier for gender parity. And that’s something that we’ve experienced firsthand as three female GPs who all had our first children while raising this fund. We had to figure out how to overcome the structural headwinds to be able to do both. That’s very much one of the lessons that we hope to share with the ecosystem, and that’s sort of where Anne comes in.”

Pact’s first investment has been made into Growth Kitchen, a London-based company that launches sustainable food brands based on data insights.

Past investments for the team members of Pact include Clause acquired by DocuSign. Onto, an electric vehicle subscription service; Perlego, an online learning platform; and Yoco, an African FinTech company.

Anne Hathaway backs Pact, an all-women led VC for mission-driven startups, from West to East by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch