Zoomcar shutting down Pedl; Moglix raises $23M; India 2nd most mobile spam affected country

Wednesday December 19, 2018 , 3 min Read

Car rental platform, Zoomcar is shutting down the operation of Pedl, its dockless cycle sharing platform. “While Zoomcar has iterated on several cycle designs with a variety of different cycle manufacturing partners, we are yet to arrive at an optimal solution that will help us to deliver a consistently excellent customer experience at a meaningful scale,” said Zoomcar in a statement.

Ola invests $100 million in Vogo

Ride-hailing unicorn Ola has just invested $100 million in Vogo, the Bengaluru-based dockless scooter sharing platform. This comes after the company raised an undisclosed Series A funding from Ola, Hero MotoCorp’s Chairman, Pawan Munjal, Matrix Partners and Stellaris Venture Partners earlier this year. Following this round, however, Vogo will be looking to add over 1,000 pickup points across Bengaluru and Hyderabad in the coming year.

B2B marketplace Moglix raises $23 M led by Accel Partners

Moglix, the B2B ecommerce startup, closed its Series C funding on Tuesday, raising $23 million from the round. The participating investors included Accel Partners, Jungle Ventures and International Finance Corporation (IFC) among others. With the completion of this round, Moglix has raised a total of $41 million. As for future plans, the company aims to increase its logistics network and supply chain across the country.

Menterra Social Impact Fund makes $2 M investment: Who all benefitted?

Menterra Social Impact Fund, a venture capital fund, has made a $2 million investment in technology companies across health tech, agritech and edtech sectors. Among the companies who benefitted from the round were Omix Labs, Adiuvo Diagnostics, and Stones 2 Milestones. The latest investment also takes the total number of investments in Menterra’s portfolio to 10.

India second-most mobile spam affected country, says Truecaller

Telcos accounted for 91 percent of all spam calls on Indian users’ phones this year, reveals Truecaller Insights Report 2018. In 2018, 6.1 percent of overall calls received by Indians were spam calls, making it the second-most spam-affected country in the world behind only Brazil. Truecaller managed to block 17.7 billion spam calls across the world. In total, it helped its users identify 74.1 billion calls all over the world.

Bye, bye discounts

Attractive discounts and offers to customers from online marketplaces might become a thing of the past, as the government is planning to impose restrictions on ecommerce players offering deep discounts, media reports quoting sources said on Tuesday. The development comes a day after Commerce and Industry Minister Suresh Prabhu hinted that the ecommerce companies using their size and position in the retail market unfairly.

These are the 10 most active startup investors of 2018

With the year coming to a close, YourStory took a look at the active investors making the most number of investments in the Indian startup ecosystem in 2018. And there were quite a few surprises and predictable names in the list. While Sequoia Capital India remained the most active VC firm in the country, Chinese VC fund Shunwei Capital took a position at #10.

Top 5 Indian and global techies from our very own, Techie Tuesdays

It’s that time of the year again when we look back and reflect at the best and worst of everything. Doing exactly that, in this week’s feature of Techie Tuesdays, we turned the spotlight on the top five Indian and global techies. They are the visionaries, entrepreneurs, and disruptors we spoke to and featured over the course of the last 11 months.