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This week’s funding Notion: https://www.notion.so/W10-Q2-FY24-9a82554864044b1ca3f2511e83d132d4
FY24 funding notion: https://honored-hospital-c65.notion.site/cea977c397b346af91a022250b7654e3?v=205740096cff4378a51bb0a05bd0ee85
Notion graph: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12Gugm80lFfI6jvJsWtDmL138XBFwxyA4560E6nfKtyI/edit#gid=0
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00:00 Ola vs Ather
04:24 Grip Invest initiates legal action against BigSpoon
06:14 Zoho becomes the first bootstrapped company to cross 100 million users
07:31 Fold Money and Dukaan
11:56 Byju’s situation update
12:79 Gameskraft receives a big blow
13:57 Funding news
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Ola vs Ather:
1. Ola Electric and Ather Energy have raised $140M and $108M respectively from their investors.
2. In the calendar year of 2022, India sold 6,15,365 two-wheeler EVs.
3. Ola was at the top with 1.08 lakh EVs sold, while Ather came in at #5 with just 51,192 sold.
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Grip Invest initiates legal action against BigSpoon:
1. Back in 2021, Grip Invest’s investors had invested $2 million in a lease financing deal with BigSpoon.
2. The investors were supposed to get a return of IRR (internal rate of return) of 21% over the course of 24 months on their investment and one rental payout as part of the deal was supposed to happen on 4th September 2023.
3. Grip Invest team was at BigSpoon’s office in Ahmedabad to get the payout. But, Kapil Mathrani, the co-founder and CEO of BigSpoon was untraceable.
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Zoho becomes the first bootstrapped company to cross 100 million users:
1. Indian SaaS giant Zoho just became the first-ever bootstrapped SaaS company to cross 100 million users.
2. It took them 12 years just to reach their first 1 million users in 2008.
3. The last 50 million came in just 5 years.
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Fold Money and Dukaan:
1. old Money is an app that uses the account aggregator platform to connect users bank accounts – to give them a complete picture of their finances.
2. . On 2nd September, a Twitter user @dushybag posted a critical feedback of the app – which wasn’t received too well by the app.
3. However, after the app received a backlash for their irresponsible response – they did apologize.
4. But that wasn’t the only startup controversy that was brewing on Twitter this week. Dukaan’s co-founder Suumit also faced backlash when he abused one of his customers.
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Byju’s situation update:
1. With the exit of Byju’s- owned Akash’s former CEO Abhishek Maheshwari, the company had set up an executive council to find a new CEO.
2. There have been reports that Byju’s had not cleared the payment to Salesforce, Tableau and Toolject – which amounted to around Rs 50 crore for the last two months.
3. Due to which, their team had lost access to these tools further disrupting their already crumbling operations.
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Gameskraft receives a big blow:
1. The Supreme Court has stayed the Karnataka High Court’s judgement, which had quashed the ₹21,000 GST evasion notice against Gameskraft.
2. In September 2022, the GST intelligence unit had issued a show case notice against Gameskraft – alleging that the company had failed to pay Rs 21,000 crore in GST for a period of 2017 to June 2022.
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Funding News:
1. This was by far the second best week for the Indian startup ecosystem this year (FY24) – raising $325.11 million.
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