Fintechs divided over RBI's data repository; Building an LLM for Marathi

Hello,

The hottest day on record?

On Wednesday, Delhi reportedly recorded the country's highest-ever temperature at 52.3 degrees Celsius.

However, authorities are yet to confirm whether the temperature sensor in Delhi's Mungeshpur automatic weather station—which showed the record-breaking reading—is working properly. 

Moving on, more capital pours into funds. 

Sorin Investments, an early-stage venture capital firm co-founded by former KKR India head Sanjay Nayar, has announced the final close of its maiden fund at Rs 1,350 crore.

Holani Venture Capital Fund, a Rs 300 crore SME-focused fund, raised Rs 184 crore within one month of its launch.

Meanwhile, financial services company Avendus has launched its third fund under the Avendus Future Leaders Fund (FLF Fund) platform and aims to raise a corpus of Rs 3,000 crore, including a green-shoe option of up to Rs 1,500 crore.  

Lastly, researchers have found a way to make chocolate with less sugar and calories by using the cocoa crop more efficiently.

Chocolate that’s good for the planet and the waist!

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• RBI's fintech repository triggers cheers and fears
• Building an LLM for Marathi
• Helping children overcome health battles

Here’s your trivia for today: When was the travelator, or a moving walkway, invented?

Fintech

RBI's fintech repository triggers cheers and fears

Fintech startups in India don’t know what to make of the data repository announced by the RBI. The central bank hopes the portal would serve as a compendium for policymakers to improve their understanding of the sector, as well as help formulate sophisticated policy frameworks.

However, it has left the fintech industry divided.

Key takeaways:

• “It’s well known that tech innovation will always outpace regulatory action, but with the repository, the RBI can catch it early and pre-empt innovations before they get tangled up in investor capital,” Anurag Jain, Founder and Executive Director of KredX, tells YourStory.
• Some founders highlight that the fintech data repository has the potential to enhance transparency and corporate governance, largely because it would encourage companies to furnish regular updates to the RBI for internal tracking.
• “It seems like the RBI may want us to report like a regulated entity, without granting us the status of a regulated entity. Either the RBI should be open to giving out RE licenses more readily, or create reporting structures for the portal that are very lenient,” says one fintech startup founder anonymously.

Funding Alert

Startup: Jakson Green

Amount: Rs 60 Cr

Round: Debt

Startup: DiFACTO

Amount: Rs 40 Cr

Round: Series A

Startup: EcoRatings

Amount: $1M

Round: Pre-seed

Startup

Building an LLM for Marathi

Bengaluru-based startup Smallstep.ai is building a large language model (LLM) for the Marathi language. Sagar Sarkale, CEO and Founder of Smallstep.ai, drew inspiration from misal dish to build two versions of LLMs, called Misal 7B and 1B.

Indic LLM:

• Misal is built on top of Meta’s Llama 2, an open-source Gen AI model further customised by Sarkale for Marathi. The model was developed to address the limitations of the Llama2 model, which was mostly trained on English data.
• Misal first addressed the challenge of non-English languages, like Marathi, by developing a specialised SentencePiece tokeniser, expanding the token vocabulary. Then, the model underwent training where it was exposed to a large volume of Marathi text data.
• “While we cannot outperform ChatGPT 3.5 in tasks such as sentiment analysis, paraphrasing, and translation, the Misal-7B model surpasses OlaKrutrim in all tasks except translation,” Sarkale says. 

100 Emerging Women Leaders

Helping children overcome health battles

Overcoming severe body image issues, Priya Prakash made it her mission to help other children going through the same health challenges. In 2016, she started HealthSetGo Education in Gurugram to offer a large-scale health programme for schools.

Personal fitness:

• The programme offers annual health checkups, accidental insurance of Rs 1 lakh for every student in the programme, and education on nutrition, mental health, and menstrual hygiene.
• HealthSetGo Education has an application platform where every doctor can record their observations on an app. These are then transferred onto an online health report that parents and schools can access.
• Over the last six years, HealthSetGo Education has worked with 300+ private schools and at the city level with governments, impacting 500,000+ students and parents. 

News & updates

• Union: A Samsung Electronics union in South Korea will begin escalating strike action next week by staging the first-ever walkout over demands for higher wages, union officials said on Wednesday.
• Turbulence: The Singapore Airlines flight that encountered severe turbulence on its way from London to Singapore dropped 54 meters (178 feet) in less than five seconds, preliminary findings released Wednesday showed.
• Crypto: Customers with funds locked up in crypto exchange Gemini’s defunct crypto lending programme are finally going to start getting their money back. The company said it will return $2.18 billion of its digital assets to users of the Earn programme, which it paused withdrawals for in November 2022.

When was the travelator, or a moving walkway, invented?

Answer: The first moving walkway debuted at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, US.

We would love to hear from you! To let us know what you liked and disliked about our newsletter, please mail [email protected]. 

If you don’t already get this newsletter in your inbox, sign up here. For past editions of the YourStory Buzz, you can check our Daily Capsule page here.