Mukesh Ambani is Asia's richest person; with Zopper Retail, PhonePe marks its first acquisition

Tuesday July 17, 2018 , 2 min Read

Asia has a new richest man - Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani overtook Alibaba founder Jack Ma to the top spot on Friday. Ambani’s wealth swelled to $44.3 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, surpassing Ma’s $44-billion fortune. Reliance Industries shares gained 1.8 percent to a record-high of Rs 1,106 on the National Stock Exchange, adding $4 billion to Ambani’s wealth.

Amazon has pumped in an additional Rs 230 crore into its Indian digital payments arm Amazon Pay (India) Private Ltd, documents filed with Registrar of Companies reveal. The recent funding comes just four months after the infusion of Rs 195 crore in March this year. The development comes days after Amazon gave away a lump sum of cash-backs as a “thank you” gesture to customers in their Amazon Pay wallets while celebrating its fifth anniversary in India.

Apart from various deals and offers to members, Amazon Pay users will also receive 10 percent cash-back into their account

Bengaluru-based payments player PhonePe announced it had acquired hyperlocal service Zopper’s Point-of-Sale (PoS) business, Zopper Retail. As a part of the deal, Neeraj Jain, Founder and CEO of Zopper, along with the startup’s engineering leadership team, will join PhonePe. He will be heading product for offline merchant solutions for the payments player.

Founders of PhonePe (L to R): Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari

Edtech platform Unacademy has raised Series C funding of $21 million led by Sequoia India, SAIF Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners. Existing investors Blume Ventures also participated in this round of funding. The total funding raised by Unacademy has now touched $38.6 million.

Blume Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV) and Emergent Ventures have announced the launch of a first-of-its-kind India-US cross-border accelerator platform, Arka Venture Labs. Currently, open only to B2B startups that have a minimum viable product (MVP) with a strong potential in the US or European region, Arka will operate out of Blume’s India office and BGV’s Valley office.