Startup news and updates: daily roundup (March 8, 2023)

Emeritus joins hands with Vahani to offer scholarships worth Rs 1 Cr to young women

Edtech company Emeritus is launching a scholarship programme for young women through Vahani Scholarship, a non-profit organisation that educates students from less-privileged socio-economic backgrounds.

Under this partnership, the firm will offer scholarships totaling to Rs 1 crore to the alumni of Vahani Scholarship to access the education programmes it offers in partnership with global universities in varied fields including data analytics, digital marketing and technology.

In 2021, Emeritus had launched an initiative to offer scholarships to individuals and provide one-on-one mentorship to Vahani Scholarship alumnae where the former's team members provided guidance and advice to the mentees.

Over 10K women entrepreneurs dispense Rs 900 Cr in financial services in 2022-23: Study

A study on the financial consumption by women at retail stores done by PayNearby, a branchless banking and digital network, said more than 10,000 women entrepreneurs dispensed financial services worth over Rs 900 crore in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in FY23.

Over three-fourths of the female customers that availed basic banking services at PayNearby's outlets preferred biometric authentication to withdraw cash while nearly half (48%) of the women said they preferred dealing in cash for payments.

These findings were shared as part of an annual survey, the third edition of PayNearby Women Financial Index, to depict financial consumption by women at retail stores. This was released by the company in association with the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub on Wednesday. The survey was conducted across more than 5,000 retail stores in the country.

Cult.fit launches Sisters' Souk to recognize brands led by women entrepreneurs in the health and fitness Space, on International Women’s Day 

Cult.fit, a health and fitness brand launched Sister’s Souk, an online flea market today on account of the International Women’s Day, to recognise the various initiatives by women in the health and fitness space.

This flea market is live on Cult.fit’s Instagram handle and will give a platform to the budding women entrepreneurs, and help them reach to the right target audience and Cult.fit’s wide user base. 

With this flea market, Cult.fit celebrates women who are breaking the barriers and takes a moment to feature women founded businesses who have not hit the roof yet and provides free visibility to the health and fitness brands in the D2C space.

The flea market features 9 brands from the fitness industry, namely, Sisters in Sweat, Proactive for her, Therapize, Aara Health, YBP Skin, Dr Su, That Sassy Thing, Strive and India Hemp & Co.

Salesforce Announces Einstein GPT, The World’s First Generative AI for CRM

Salesforce has launched Einstein GPT, a generative artificial intelligence customer relationship management (CRM) technology, which delivers AI-created content across every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction, at scale.

For example, Einstein GPT can generate personalized emails for salespeople to send to customers, generate specific responses for customer service professionals to quickly answer customer questions, generate targeted content for marketers to increase campaign response rates, and auto-generate code for developers.

With Einstein GPT, Salesforce will transform every customer experience with generative AI. Einstein GPT will use Salesforce’s proprietary AI models with generative AI technology from an ecosystem of partners, and real-time data from the Salesforce Data Cloud, which ingests, harmonizes, and unifies all of a company’s customer data.

Customers can then connect that data to OpenAI’s advanced AI models out of the box or choose their own external model, and use natural-language prompts directly within their Salesforce CRM to generate content.