GlobalBees sees board members exit; No ifs or cigarette butts

Hello,

Vedantu, the Bengaluru-based edtech platform focused on K12 education, has reported its strongest quarter to date, turning profitable in Q4 of FY25. The company posted Rs 90 crore in collections in the January-March 2025 quarter, up 67% YoY, and generated over Rs 6 crore in free cash flow.

ICYMI: YourStory was the first to report Vedantu’s phoenix-like recovery.

Meanwhile, Bill Gates is giving away his fortune.

The 69-year-old billionaire Microsoft co-founder has pledged to give away almost his entire personal wealth in the next two decades and said the world’s poorest would receive some $200 billion via his foundation at a time when governments worldwide are slashing international aid, Reuters reports.

Elsewhere, Sir David Attenborough is celebrating his 99th birthday. 

To mark the occasion, the veteran broadcaster is speaking out against industrial overfishing in Ocean—a feature-length film. 

If the documentary moves you to become a deep-sea explorer, then worry not, as there’s a lot left to discover. A new study has found that in all the 67 years humans have been recording deep-sea dives, we have visually explored between 0.0006% and 0.001% of the deep seafloor. 

See the line where the sky meets the sea? It calls me. And no one knows how far it goes.

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• GlobalBees sees board members exit
• No ifs or cigarette butts
• Aarti Rana changing the lives of tribal women

Here’s your trivia for today: Where did the world's tallest bird, the giant moa, live until it went extinct around 1500?

D2C

GlobalBees sees board members exit

Three investor board members of GlobalBees, a FirstCry venture—Sudhir Kumar Sethi from Chiratae Ventures, Harsha Kumar from Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Kaveesh Chawla from Premji Invest—have stepped down from the company’s board, multiple people aware of the matter told YourStory. 

“Premji and Chiratae are shareholders of FirstCry, and they continue to be part of FirstCry. Their exit is to comply with UPSI rules,” said a person aware of the matter. 

Key takeaways:

• Premji Invest’s Chawla stepped down in September last year, while Chiratae’s Sethi left before the company announced Agarwal’s exit. In July 2021, Kumar and Sethi joined GlobalBees’ board after participating in its $150 million Series A funding round led by FirstCry.
• FirstCry last month said that GlobalBees CEO Nitin Agarwal quit the roll-up commerce company, citing “personal reasons.” In August last year, GlobalBees CBO Damandeep Soni also left the company and joined AstroTalk in March 2025.
• Just a month ago, FirstCry approved the infusion of Rs 146 crore into GlobalBees, expecting to close the investment in tranches over 12 months.

<Funding Alert>

Startup: PB Healthcare Services

Amount: $218M

Round: Seed

Startup: Footprints Preschool & Daycare

Amount: $7.5M

Round: Series A

Startup: 91Trucks

Amount: $5M

Round: Series A

Startup

No ifs or cigarette butts

According to the National Institute of Cancer Prevention and Research, the environmental burden of tobacco product waste is huge. The waste produced by the packaging of tobacco products in India amounts to over 1,70,000 tonnes per year; of this, waste produced by cigarette consumption is about 40,846 tonnes per year.  

Ketan Prajapati wants to tackle this problem with BuffIndia, the B2B waste management company he co-founded in 2018 with Nikhil Mangani to recycle cigarette waste.

Sustainable solutions:

• While BuffIndia has its footprint in 22 states and 85 cities across India, its primary waste processing site is at its headquarters in Ahmedabad. In March 2025, the company recycled about 32 lakh cigarette butts; it has upcycled 960 kg of microplastic to date.
• Its flagship product is a fire-proof recycling kiosk for cigarette disposal; this is installed on 1,350 premises, including over 450 major hotels and corporate clients, on an annual rental basis.
• “We started with investing Rs 1.75 crore in this company. We are raising about Rs 2 crore right now, as we speak. By 2030, we want to have a 15% share of the total market pertaining to cigarette waste management in India and have an annual revenue of Rs 2,500 crore,” Prajapati says.

Inspiration

Aarti Rana changing the lives of tribal women

There was a time about three decades ago when a Tharu woman in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri district would’ve spent her entire lifetime not getting a glimpse of the world outside her village.

Today, however, a Tharu woman in Lakhimpuri Kheri is a matriarch of a new world. Thanks to the vision of handloom weaver and social entrepreneur Aarti Rana, 10,000 Tharu women in 350 self-help groups helm a self-sustaining rural economy of handlooms and traditional crafts. 

Lead on:

• Rana started stitching ghaghra-cholis as a child with her mother, and in 2015, when the National Rural Livelihood Mission programme came to her village, she was among the five women out of 25 people who enrolled in it, despite pushback from her in-laws. 
• After the programme’s initial success, the district magistrate encouraged the women to form SHGs in their own villages and train others in handloom work. Rana took the lead. She began travelling across her panchayat, reaching out to women and persuading their families to let them participate.
• Rana’s efforts in promoting self-reliance among tribal women through traditional crafts earned her the Rani Laxmi Bai Bravery Award by the Government of Uttar Pradesh in 2016 and Nari Shakti Puraskar, India's highest civilian award for women, for 2020.

News & updates

• Exit: Tesla’s India country head has resigned after nine years at the company and ahead of the US EV maker's planned entry into the world’s third-largest car market, Bloomberg News reported. Tesla’s China teams will oversee the Elon Musk-led firm's India operations, with no immediate successor named.
• Gaming: Nintendo expects to sell 15 million units of its new Switch 2 console in the fiscal year ending March 2026. It is the first forecast for sales from the Japanese gaming giant since it announced the successor to its successful Switch device, which is due to go on sale in June.
• Sales: Chinese carmaker BYD aims to sell half of its vehicles outside the Chinese market by 2030, a massive increase that would make it a rival to the world's largest automakers. BYD executives have outlined the 2030 target to investors in small groups since late last year, emphasising its Europe expansion as pivotal to hitting the target.

Where did the world's tallest bird, the giant moa, live until it went extinct around 1500?

Answer: New Zealand

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