Startup news and updates: daily roundup (August 29, 2022)

HomeLane appoints Aveek Nandi as Senior Vice President Product

HomeLane, announced another addition to their CXO suite, with the appointment of Aveek Nandi as Senior Vice President–Product and Head of Customer Experience. With more than 12 years of experience across product, P&L, and operations, Aveek was previously working with Vedantu, Yulu Mobility and Delhivery.

In his role at HomeLane as the SVP-Product, he will be working towards building a more competitive product and technology-led organisation. Additionally, as the Head of Customer Experience, Aveek has been entrusted with the goal to ensure that HomeLane consistently delivers a seven-star experience to its customers.

Prior to joining HomeLane, Aveek was associated with Vedantu as their AVP–Product and with Yulu as Head of Product, where he was leading the product and design charter for the brands. He has also led product design and strategy for ecommerce logistics at Delhivery. At Delhivery, he was part of the CEO's core team that focussed on building product solutions for key business challenges which included leading Delhivery's business for MSMEs. Prior to Delhivery, Aveek worked on product and process challenges across functions and geographies at Tesco.

Nissan appoints Keerthi Prakash as RNAIPL MD

Nissan has announced the appointment of Keerthi Prakash as Managing Director, Renault Nissan Automotive India Pvt Ltd (RNAIPL), to lead operations at the company’s Alliance plant in Chennai, India, from September 1, 2022.

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In his new role, Keerthi will report to Frank Torres, President Nissan India Operations and functionally to Roddy Macleod, Vice President of Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management for Africa, Middle East and India.

Keerthi, currently Deputy Managing Director, RNAIPL, joined the plant in 2008 and has over 20 years of automotive manufacturing experience. He replaces Biju Balendran, who has decided to pursue opportunities outside of Nissan after four successful years as plant Managing Director.

Essar signs $2.4bn sale pact with AM/NS for infra assets

Essar today announced signing definitive agreements with Arcelor Mittal Nippon Steel (AM/NS) for certain Ports and Power infrastructure assets that are primarily captive to Hazira steel plant operations.

The deal also envisages a 50-50 Joint Venture partnership, for building a 4 MTPA LNG terminal at Hazira, Gujarat, between Essar and ArcelorMittal.

Move-to-Earn Startup Fitmint to Launch Initial Dex Offering (IDO)

Bengaluru-headquartered move-to-earn startup Fitmint has announced that it will launch an ‘Initial DEX Offering (IDO)’ aka ‘token sale’ for its native crypto token named ‘FITT token’.

As a part of Fitmint’s upcoming three-day token sale activity, they will be putting out 300 million FITT tokens for public sale with the aim to create an open, decentralize, and community-driven game economy.

Fitmint is aiming to target over 15,000 people to participate in the sale, in a bid to discover a fair price of the token, and onboard the token buyers on the app. In the long run, Fitmint has plans to move toward being a Decentralized Autonomous Organisation (DAO) once the product and the ecosystem are mature enough.

BBC Studios inks content partnership with BookMyShow

BBC Studios announced a TVOD India exclusive content partnership with BookMyShow Stream, India’s home-grown TVOD streaming platform from the house of BookMyShow.

This inaugural partnership will see the launch of a BBC First dedicated branded space in the form of a widget on BookMyShow Stream, enhancing its bespoke and compelling portfolio with a dose of premium, bold, British drama.

BookMyShow Stream will feature other titles including Smother Series 1-2, Traces Series 1-2, The Chelsea Detective, Happy Valley Series 1-2 and Unforgotten Series 1-4 on its platform over the next two quarters.

Amazon India strengthens its infrastructure footprint in Pune

Amazon India today announced the expansion of its sortation and delivery network in Pune in preparation for the upcoming festive season.

With this expansion, Amazon India will now have six sort centres with more than 5 lakh square feet of sortation area, and close to 215 Amazon India operated and partner delivery stations in Maharashtra. This infrastructural expansion will support more than 1.3 lakh sellers in the state to reach a larger customer base, while offering a wider selection of products and faster deliveries this festive season.

The newly launched sort centre is spread across 1.25 lakh square feet facilitating connection of packages to delivery stations of the city, and other parts of Maharashtra enabling fast deliveries across the state.

ApniBus raises pre-seed funding led by Antler India

ApniBus, an intercity bus platform for the Bharat market, raised an undisclosed pre-seed funding round led by Antler India.

Other investors, including Goodwater Capital and angels like Niraj Singh (Founder and CEO of Spinny) and Asish Mohapatra (Founder and CEO of OfBusiness), also participated in the round.

Gurugram-based ApniBus is a full-stack solution for commuters to find, track, and book their intercity bus via the startup’s app, live in over 15 cities on 350 routes connecting over 1,000 destinations. 

The startup says it sees over 200,000 monthly transactions.

Sumit Gupta, Co-founder of ApniBus, said, “About one to three crore Indians travel via intercity buses daily. However, this market is still entirely offline, chaotic, inefficient, and has remained the same for decades. The Tier III and IV intercity travel market is massive whitespace and ripe for transformation.”

ApniBus was founded in 2021 by Sumit Gupta and Ravi Yadav.

Vahak raises capital from Work Universe

Bengaluru-based road transport logistics startup Vahak raised undisclosed funds from Work Universe in its ongoing Series A round.

Earlier in June, Vahak had raised $14 million in its Series A round from Nexus Venture Partners, Fundamentum, iSeed Ventures, Leo Capital, RTP Global, and Titan Capital.

Founded by Karan Shaha and Vikas Chandrawat in 2019, Vahak enables shippers and transport SMEs to connect with truckers through its AI-backed booking platform. 

Karan Shaha, CEO and Co-founder at Vahak, said, “Digitally-driven logistics services are the need of the hour to reduce India’s logistics cost. Through our community platform, we are improving the lives of truck drivers with better fleet management, easy return load bookings, and benefits like escrow payments and new value-added services going live soon.”