Startup news and updates: daily roundup (June 11, 2022)

AICTE signs MoU with AWS to impart tech skills to students

All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), a statutory body under the Ministry of Education, is working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to impart cloud computing and machine learning (ML) skills to higher education students in India through the AWS DeepRacer Student League.

This new collaboration extends the ministry’s efforts to enable students with critical technology skills, and strengthen the focus to build a future-ready digitally-skilled workforce in India. Thousands of AICTE-affiliated colleges in the country will extend this initiative to benefit students.

Through the MoU, AWS will provide students access to AWS Educate, a programme that offers self-paced online cloud learning resources and labs, designed to help people learn, practice, and evaluate cloud skills.

ALSO READ

[Funding alert] CRED raises $140M in Series F round at $6.4B valuation

Bharat BillPay ecosystem onboards CRED

Bharat BillPay, the wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), has onboarded fintech startup CRED as a key Agent Institution (AI) for providing easy bill payment solutions to CRED members.

Agent institutions are the entities that offer bill payment, collection, and aggregation services to their customers via physical or digital channels.

With this collaboration, CRED members can make recurring payments across several segments, including electricity, telecom, DTH, gas, education fees, water, and municipal taxes, NETC FASTag recharge, loan repayments, insurance, cable, subscription fees, mobile prepaid recharges, and others, by logging into CRED app.

At present, Bharat BillPay offers recurring payment services to customers across several segments. The platform offers 20,000 plus billers across multiple banks and non-bank channels and has over 900 agent institutions live on the platform.

ALSO READ

MDR turnaround, merchant re-enrollment, stringent KYCs: The unanswered questions on UPI-credit card linkage

XPay.Life launches UPI services for rural India

XPay.Life, a digital payment platform that focuses on regional rural banks and district co-operative central banks (DCCBs), has launched its UPI services following three years of its operations.

The technology stack of XPay.Life enables financial access to those sections of the population, which reside in rural and semi-urban areas. It serves over four million consumers across 15+ states, covering one lakh villages.

The fintech startup, along with NABARD, NPCI, and state governments, is working towards strengthening digital banking systems in non-metro areas.

Rohit Kumar, Founder and CEO, XPay.Life, said, “With the launch of our UPI services, we are looking to make the whole of India and especially rural India financially aware and able.”

BillClap raises pre-seed round from IIM Lucknow

BillClap, a SaaS startup focused on the SMB segment that provides numerous business functionality solutions, has raised an undisclosed round of pre-seed funding round from IIM Lucknow's incubator.

BillClap will use this capital for scaling the acquisition of merchant customers, especially from Tier II and III cities. The startup has a presence in nine cities, and it aims to reach out to 10 more locations. It aims to reach 100 locations in the next one year.

Gaurav Gupta, Founder, BillClap, said, “The name of our product is BILLCLAP, and the first version of our MVP was made live on September 29, 2021, and had more than 24,000 registrations with more than one million products already added in the 23,000+ ‘Digital Dukaans’ created by merchants.”