Amazon infuses additional funds into Amazon Pay, Foodpanda picks new strategy head, Instagram tests new video calling feature

With Whatsapp cranking up its digital payments engine in India, it was expected that Amazon Pay would follow suit. And it has. On Tuesday, Amazon Pay (India) received Rs 195 crore from its parent, to fight the digital wallet battle. Also, Foodpanda has appointed a new head of strategy to drive its business forward. The foodtech business has seen some tough times of late, and Foodpanda needed a mentor like Gautam Balijepalli, wao was earlier with Ojas Ventures, to steer the ship. Plus, in another interesting story, we feature Bengaluru-based Helpforsure, which has built an AI-backed chatbot. Read on.

Cheers,

Shradha

Online food ordering and delivery platform Foodpanda announced the appointment of Gautam Balijepalli as its Head of Strategy, reports Sameer Ranjan. An alumnus of IIT Chennai and London Business School, Gautam was earlier a venture capital investor at Ojas Ventures, where he invested in a number of companies and helped them scale.

He has also been an investor and mentor to businesses, such as WarmOven, in the food space.

Amazon has pumped in an additional Rs 195 crore into its Indian payments arm Amazon Pay (India) Private Ltd, reports Sameer Ranjan.

The recent funding comes just five months an infusion of Rs 260 crore in September. Globally, Amazon has been ramping up its payment platform is in early talks with financial institutions to help launch checking accounts, aimed at customers without bank accounts.

Instagram is testing a voice and video calling feature, codes in its Android app have revealed, writes Sohini Mitter. While the photo-sharing network hasn’t made anything official yet, files titled “call” and “video call” with phone and camera icons, respectively, have been spotted in its Android application packages.

Southeast Asia’s online budget hotel booking chain RedDoorz has raised pre-Series B funding of $11 million, reports Sindhu Kashyap. The fundraise comes in as an additional investment from earlier investors Asia Investment Fund of Susquehanna International Group, International Finance Corporation (the private investment arm of World Bank Group), InnoVen Capital, Jungle Ventures, as well as new investors DeepSky Capital, FengHe Group and Hendale Capital, and others.

One wedding season, Vasundhara Mantri and Aayshya Jhunjhunwala got caught in the wedding frenzy, helping friends and cousins in every way possible, writes Neha Jain. They realised all weddings tend to be stress-filled, and turned this into a business opportunity with Shaadilogy, which provides solutions for wedding shopping and planning.

Seeing more niche use cases for chatbots, Bengaluru-based Helpforsure has built an Artificial Intelligence-backed repair chatbot that helps businesses and end-users automate electronics repair jobs with a Do-It-Yourself solution, writes Harshit Mallya. Founded in late 2016 by Rajesh Bhatia, Kusum Shukla and Vinay Shekhar S, the founders bring complementary skill sets to the table.

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