Financial access for blue-collar workers; Helping people reclaim their fitness

Hello,

With all the noise around generative AI chatbots, we often forget just how far we’ve come with robotics.

Google DeepMind on Tuesday released a new language model called Gemini Robotics On-Device that can run tasks on robots without an internet connection.

This is a significant development because the model allows robots to operate with full autonomy. Developers can fine-tune the model to suit various needs using natural language prompts, TechCrunch reports.

Google is also bringing a more advanced AI Mode search experience to users in India. The new mode provides enhanced reasoning capabilities, can interpret different types of input, and allows users to pose more complex queries. 

Lastly, the world’s largest digital camera released stunning shots of the universe on Monday, including colourful nebulae, stars, and galaxies.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located on a mountaintop in Chile, was built to take a deeper look at the night sky. According to researchers, if a ninth planet exists in our solar system, this telescope would find it in its first year.

Did you know that Dr Rubin, after whom the telescope is named, established the presence of dark matter in the universe? Yet, despite her pioneering work, she never won a Nobel Prize.

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Financial access for blue-collar workers
• Helping people reclaim their fitness
• Meet the women welders at Praj GenX

Here’s your trivia for today: Although it’s referred to as a “sea”, which body of water is the largest lake in the world?

Startup

Financial access for blue-collar workers

Entitled Solutions, founded by Anshul Khurana, Arpan Jain, and Krishna Yadav in 2020, is an inclusion platform that aims to make health and financial services accessible to urban low-income workers. 

By connecting employers, financiers, and healthcare service providers, the company has built an ecosystem where the low-income or blue-collar workers are not an afterthought, but the focal point.

Financial inclusivity:

• Entitled Solutions provides its customers with salary advances, personal loans, health insurance, and even two-wheeler loans. It has partnered with 80 different kinds of enterprises, which largely employ blue-collar workers, including companies like Quess, Swiggy, SIS, and Domino’s.
• The company is currently reporting a monthly transaction value of around Rs 1 crore and claims it has a 4-5X increase in product usage. The overall business growth has been 2-2.5X over the last five years.
• The startup primarily generates revenue through commissions on every successful closure of financial or healthcare products facilitated through its platform. It also generates revenue through various corporate social responsibility programmes offered to enterprises.

Funding Alert

Startup: GoKwik

Amount: $13M

Round: Undisclosed

Startup: Fabheads

Amount: $10M

Round: Series A

Startup: Evera Cabs

Amount: $4M

Round: Convertible debentures and debt

Startup

Helping people reclaim their fitness

Fitness and health are key concerns for many people, especially given the largely sedentary lifestyles and work environments in major cities.  

Asad Hussain felt that most Indian fitness companies aren’t doing anything to tackle India’s unhealthy work culture. That led him to found Odds Fitness in 2019 to change the status quo. The startup approaches fitness with a special focus on medical science and long-term health benefits. 

Personalised health plans:

• After registering, a customer undergoes a series of tests. The reports are analysed by a doctor who then plans a “personalised health roadmap”. Users are also privy to weekly updates on their progress, customised to their requirements. 
• The startup, which has 300 customers and a 97% retention rate over a period of six months, wants to acquire a total of 1,000 clients by June 2026. 
• Odds Fitness is bootstrapped, six years after its inception. With an investment of close to $1 million, the startup has been profitable from its first year of operations. It plans to triple its undisclosed annual revenue by the end of this year.  

Women Empowerment

Meet the women welders at Praj GenX

In a significant move toward gender inclusion in heavy manufacturing, Praj Industries’ GenX facility in Mangaluru has trained and deployed 50 young women as welders.

In a team named after Rani Chennamma, the 19th-century queen of Kittur, a princely state in Karnataka, these women are now welding critical equipment like pressure vessels, distillation columns, and storage systems for the hydrocarbon sector.

Bihar ke Innovators

Building Bharat’s food delivery backbone

Foodam, a fusion of “Food” and “Dham” (symbolising trust), was launched in 2021 to deliver quality groceries, fresh meat, and produce to households in Tier III and IV towns reliably.

Beauty services for small-town India

Co-founded by Rishi Ranjan Kumar and Sarika Shukla, Ladyfair is headquartered in Patna and built around two core missions: providing affordable, salon-grade beauty services at home and creating dignified livelihoods for rural women.

News & updates

• AI research: Andy Konwinski, computer scientist and co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity, announced that his company, Laude, is forming a new AI research institute backed with $100 million of his own money. 
• Google search: The UK’s competition regulator may force Google to rank businesses more fairly in search results and offer alternative services to consumers, marking the first use of expanded powers to oversee the world’s biggest tech companies.
• Investment: Amazon plans to invest about $54 billion in the UK over the next three years, expanding its warehouse network and AI infrastructure to bulk up its ecommerce and cloud operations.

Although it’s referred to as a “sea”, which body of water is the largest lake in the world?

Answer: Caspian Sea

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