Tatas muscle into fitness

Good morning!

Tata Digital Limited, a 100 percent subsidiary of Tata Sons Private Limited, has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for investing up to $75 million in fitness startup Cure.fit. 

With this investment, Cure.fit Founder and CEO Mukesh Bansal will join Tata Digital as President. 

"Joining Tata Digital marks an exciting new step for me and my team and is a recognition of the value we have created with CureFit for fitness enthusiasts in India," Mukesh Bansal said.

This is not the first time the subsidiary has ventured into the consumer tech space. 

Last month, Tata Digital acquired a majority stake in online grocery delivery startup Bigbasket. The deal placed Tata in direct competition with major online delivery conglomerates, including Reliance Industries’ Jio Mart, ecommerce giant Amazon Inc, and Walmart-owned Flipkart.

The salt-to-steel conglomerate, Tata Sons, had set up Tata Digital in August 2019 to build digital consumer businesses across verticals, including travel, retail, and financial services.

Read all about how the Indian startup ecosystem is battling the second wave of COVID-19 here.

Here are some useful tools to help you find the nearest vaccine centres in real-time.

You can also share a tribute to COVID-19 warriors, saviours, and survivors here.

The Interview

In this episode of #HumanBeyondResources, Raghav Chandra, Co-founder and CPTO, Urban Company, discusses the various initiatives that the home services platform has introduced for the well-being of its employees and service partners, including sanctioning loans worth Rs 10 crore for the partners as their income sources dried up. 

Raghav also talks about why Urban Company remains aloof about its recent unicorn status, among several other things.

Editor’s Pick: Techie Tuesday

Gaurav Srivastava has come a long way in his entrepreneurial journey over the last 12 years. Starting as the co-founder of a bootstrapped GPS tracker manufacturing startup in 2009, he went on to design a low-code, intelligent delivery management platform with logistics SaaS company FarEye.

Today, Gaurav is the CTO of FarEye, which recently raised $100 million. The company is on track to achieve 100+ million transactions per day by processing petabytes of data, and claims 150+ customers in 30+ countries. Read more.

Startup Spotlight

This video tech startup hosts virtual events for Reliance, Amazon, Flipkart

Serial entrepreneur Vikash Samota founded his first startup back in 2010 after a three-year stint as an engineer at AT&T in the US. His company, Cyberlinks, did end-to-end development of mobile products. In fact, the genesis of MultiTV happened while he was running the services business at Cyberlinks. 

MultiTV built a full-stack vertically integrated video tech platform that could serve a variety of use cases across industries. Read more.

News & Updates

• Flipkart launched a contactless, QR-code-based payment facility for all its pay-on-delivery shipments to minimise personal contact amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Consumers can scan the QR code attached to their purchase and make the payment through any UPI app at the time of delivery.

• Reliance's JioMart now gets more than half its orders from India's Tier II and III cities. The platform, launched in May 2020, has seen an accelerated rollout in the pandemic to help people 'shop from home'.

• The World Bank approved a $500 million programme, which targets 555,000 MSMEs to improve their performance, and is expected to mobilise financing worth $15.5 billion as part of the government’s $3.4 billion MSME Competitiveness – A Post-COVID Resilience and Recovery Programme (MCRRP).

• PM Narendra Modi announced that the government will provide free COVID-19 vaccines to states for inoculation of all above the age of 18 from June 21, and asserted that the vaccine supply would be increased significantly in the country in the coming days.

Before you go, stay inspired with… 

“Fitness in India is still in the initial stages at sub one percent penetration. Over the next 10-20 years, this will increase to 15-20 percent like in the West.”

— Mukesh Bansal, Co-founder and CEO, Cure.fit

Now get the Daily Capsule in your inbox. Subscribe to our newsletter today!