When startup founders turn investors; Twitter to vet political ads before elections

Thursday February 21, 2019 , 3 min Read

Sachin Bansal's investment in Ola made news but there is more than just that here. From early 2009 to now, Indian startup founders have evolved into seasoned entrepreneurs, and are investing in startups themselves. They have gone from being “startup boys” to venerable names in the global startup ecosystem, and along the way, have created impact, shaping the narrative of the Indian startup ecosystem.

Ola, Bhavish Aggarwal, Sachin Bansal — Ola Co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal with Flipkart Co-founder Sachin Bansal

Paytm Money gets a new CTO

Online wealth management platform Paytm Money announced the appointment of Suresh Vasudevan as its Chief Technology Officer (CTO). In his new role, Suresh will be leading the overall engineering and technology functions at Paytm Money, and will be based out of Bengaluru. Prior to this, he worked at Amazon as the Head of Engineering for Alexa Skills Certification platform. He has also served as the Vice President of Engineering at Paytm Mall.

Whole-time Director, Paytm Money, Pravin Jadhav with newly-appointed CTO Suresh Vasudevan.

Naspers appoints Anirban Mukherjee as CEO of PayU India

Naspers-owned PayU announced the appointment of Anirban Mukherjee as Chief Executive Officer of PayU India. Anirban will be taking over from Amrish Rau, who is moving on to a bigger global role with Naspers’ fintech practice, as head of financial technology partnerships and investments. With two decades of experience in global payments, credit, and digital banking, Anirban will be responsible for all the operations and business lines of PayU India.

Twitter rolls out strict ad policies ahead of 2019 elections

The 2019 general elections are around the corner, and ahead of the polls online giants like Facebook and Google have been strengthening their laws related to political advertising. The latest one to join this bandwagon is Twitter. Announcing measures to ensure transparency, the micro-blogging site said it will be screening political campaigners before they are allowed to run ads on their services. Furthermore, Twitter will be detailing its users on political ad spends and target demographics.

India’s IT-BPM industry created 170,000 new jobs in 2018: NASSCOM

NASSCOM has revealed that India is the world’s third largest tech startup hub, with over 7,000 product and service startups in operation right now. There’s more. India’s IT-BPM industry is said to have grown by 9.2 percent in 2018-19, during which it created 170,000 new jobs across large and mid-sized enterprises. Most of the job creation happened in the field of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, data analytics, and cybersecurity.

MX Player enters video-streaming market with 5 original shows

Until recently, MX Player was just a video playback app, consistently ranking among India’s top 10 downloaded apps on Google Play Store. Things changed, however, when Times Internet acquired this Korean app for Rs 1,000 crore, and announced MX Player would pivot into the video-streaming space in India. Eight months since then, MX Player has now relaunched as an OTT platform and released five web shows under the label ‘MX Original Series’.

XpressBees raises Rs 35 Cr from InnoVen Capital

Alibaba-backed XpressBees has raised Rs 35 crore from venture debt capital firm InnoVen Capital. Founded by Amitava Saha, Co-founder of FirstCry, and Supam Maheshwari in 2012, the startup currently provides logistics services to companies including Paytm, Flipkart, Snapdeal and Reliance. Among its offerings are reverse logistics, real-time tracking and multiple payment collection options.