Hurun India Launches 2024 Under 35s List, Showcasing Seven Trailblazing Women Entrepreneurs

Hurun India has unveiled its much-anticipated 2024 Under35s List, celebrating the accomplishments of India's brightest young entrepreneurs. Among them, seven dynamic women have made an exceptional mark in their respective industries.

Leading the charge are Parita Parekh (32), founder of Toddle, and Isha Ambani (32) of Reliance Retail, the youngest women on the list. Both are setting new benchmarks for success with innovative approaches to business. Aneri Patel (33) of Ganesh Housing Corporation, Aneesha Tewari (33) of USV, and Anjali Merchant (34) of Encore Healthcare follow closely, each continuing their family legacies with forward-thinking leadership.

The list also includes Saloni Anand (34), co-founder of Traya Health, a self-made entrepreneur revolutionizing India’s hair care industry. Completing the list is Ghazal Alagh (35), co-founder of Mamaearth, who has steered her startup to become a publicly listed company.

This year's list from Hurun India underscores the significant influence of young women in shaping the future of entrepreneurship in the country.

Click here to access the full list.

PayPal’s expansion into China set to boost global business for Chinese brokers

PayPal has unveiled its new platform, PayPal Complete Payments, aimed at supporting Chinese businesses in their global expansion. The launch is expected to significantly impact the financial brokerage industry, offering enhanced tools for Chinese brokers to streamline cross-border transactions and expand their reach in global markets.

During a conference attended by over 700 Chinese merchants and business partners, PayPal introduced the all-in-one platform, which integrates customized solutions for cross-border payments. The platform simplifies payment and receivables processes, offering merchants of all sizes faster access to funds and enhanced reporting features.

For Chinese brokers, the platform promises to drive growth by improving payment experiences and expanding access to PayPal’s global user base, which spans 200 countries and more than 100 currencies. With over 400 million active PayPal users, brokers can now more easily connect with international clients, boosting their global footprint.

The platform also features advanced risk management tools, including AI-powered fraud detection, a vital asset for brokers handling high-value cross-border transactions.?As China’s payment industry continues its rapid expansion, PayPal’s partnerships with leading Chinese financial institutions and technology platforms will further empower brokers. These collaborations aim to localize solutions, enabling brokers to better navigate the complexities of cross-border payments and grow their businesses on the global stage.

“Bridging Chinese businesses with consumers around the world”

Suzan Kereere, President, Global Markets, PayPal, said: “We are excited to bring PayPal’s Complete Payments solution to China, empowering businesses with secure, seamless cross-border transactions and helping them tap into global markets. This launch marks a significant milestone in PayPal’s mission to revolutionize commerce globally, bridging Chinese businesses with consumers around the world in a more efficient and transparent way.”

Hannah Qiu, Senior Vice President, China CEO, PayPal, said: “As of date, PayPal has facilitated the global expansion of many Chinese businesses. With PayPal’s unique two-sided network and technological advantages, we will continue to enhance and optimize the system and product capabilities of PayPal China, empowering Chinese merchants to expand business globally through more diversified cross-border payment solutions.”

Michelle Gill, Executive Vice President, General Manager, SMB and Financial Services, PayPal, said: “Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) play a significant role in global trade. Their growth is one of the crucial factors in enhancing economic resilience and market vitality. PayPal is committed to helping SMEs integrate into the global economy through technological innovation. By offering convenient and seamless payment experiences and continuously upgraded solutions, we not only help significantly boost conversions but also help SMEs build trust with their customers and provide diversified payment options.”

Tamara Niesen, Chief Marketing Officer at WooCommerce’s, commented:?“As one of the first e-commerce platforms to bring PayPal Complete Payments to China’s merchants, we are thrilled to support their expansion into global markets. This partnership delivers a tailored user experience for WooCommerce merchants, enabling cross-border businesses to confidently scale with PayPal’s advanced solutions.”

Global EV market to rise to $2,108 billion by 2033: Report

NEW DELHI: The global electric vehicle (EV) market is set to grow significantly in corning. years, with projections indicating it could reach $ 2,108 billion by 2033, according to a Axis Securities report.

The market currently valued at $255 billion grew at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 per cent from 2024 to 2033. The report further suggests that India's EV market could achieve annual volumes of 10 million units by 2033, up by 1.7 million units in FY24, primarily due to a combination of supportive government policies, the launch of new products, declining bill of materials (BOM) costs, and advancements in technology.

Meanwhile, Centre has allocated Rs 10,900 crore in subsidies over the next two years to support the sale of 24.79 lakh e-2Ws, 3.16 lakh e-3Ws, and 14,028 e-buses.

Additionally, each electric two-wheeler will receive a subsidy of Rs 10,000, while electric three-wheelers will receive Rs 50,000 until March 2025. Furthermore, Rs 500 crore has been set aside for e-trucks, with incentives tied to scrappage certificates from approved scrapping centres, and another Rs 500 crore for the deployment of e- ambulances, including hybrids. The government has also allocated Rs 2,000 crore to establish electric vehicle public charging stations nationwide which includes installation of 22,100 fast chargers for electric four-wheelers, 1,800 chargers for electric buses, and 48,400 chargers for electric two-wheelers and three-wheelers. Moreover, to make EV affordable government has implemented favorable tax rates for EVs. Electric cars are subject to a mere 5 per cent tax, in contrast to the 28 per cent tax on hybrid vehicles and the substantial 49 per cerit tax on internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.

SaaS firm Whatfix raises $125 million in Series E funding from Warburg Pincus, SoftBank

Whatfix, a business-to-business digital adoption platform, has raised $125 million in its Series E funding round, led by private equity firm Warburg Pincus with participation from existing investor SoftBank Vision Fund 2.

This round of funding comes at a time when venture capital activity in India has regained momentum, particularly in the AI and SaaS sectors, following a slowdown in funding last year. Venture Capital investors and Private Equity firms have recently begun signing larger cheques for startups, signaling a revival in investment activity.

“We have started hiring in Southeast Asia and Middle East or Dubai market where we are expanding. So we are entering these newer geographies as well with the new funding. We are also strengthening our product categories which includes generative AI products as well,” said Khadim Batti, cofounder and CEO of Whatfix to Moneycontrol.

Sources told Moneycontrol that the deal was valued at $790 million pre-money and around $870 million post-money. The company has launched newer products for enterprises within the generative AI space.

“We are rolling out an intermediate product in the next quarter that understands the knowledge of the application, the support and the data we have and generates the content automatically. Whatfix used to create the workflows or walk-throughs, now that can be created with this new product,” Batti said.

“We don’t have a set target, however, if there are firms that enhance our product line or enhance productivity tools or something which can accelerate our Gen AI tools then we will look at it,” Batti said.

In June of 2021, Whatfix raised $90 million in a funding round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. Existing backers Eight Roads Ventures, Sequoia Capital India, Dragoneer Investment Group, F-Prime Capital and Cisco Investments also invested in the Series D round.

Founded by Khadim Batti and Vara Kumar Namburu in 2013, Whatfix makes software adoption easier for companies.

Its products involve onboarding, performance support, change management and training. Its customers include Arrow Electronics, Schneider Electric, and Avnet, along with partners like Microsoft, Salesforce, Infosys, and Accenture.

As of FY23, Whatfix reported a revenue of Rs 285 crores, which was up 65%. The firm’s losses widened by 31% to Rs 328 crores on the back of rise in overall expenses, showed RoC filings.

The firm will be breaking-even in terms of Ebitda in the next 7-8 quarters, Batti said.

“We have been growing well, as well as optimsing our products. We have grown 45% as of FY24 and we will also look at breaking even in the next 7-8 quarters. We want to continue to invest in growth, partial revenue growth is helping us to offlset the losses and we will break even in the next few quarters,” Batti said.

Whatfix is also building its own generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) vision model for its customers.

“By integrating GenAI throughout its product suite, offering digital adoption, product analytics, and application simulation, Whatfix accelerates this user-first approach, building an experience layer across the enterprise software stack,” the firm said.

The funding comes at a time when investors are signing large cheques for startups, especially in the fintech, AI and SaaS space. Three startups, M2P Fintech, Nurix AI, and Atlys, have secured substantial investments, totalling millions of dollars.

Keep the code behind AI open, say two entrepreneurs

No one doubts that artificial intelligence (AI) will change the world. But a doctrinal dispute continues to rage over the design of AI models, namely whether the software should be “closed-source” or “open-source”—in other words, whether code is proprietary, or public and open to modification by anyone.

Some argue that open-source AI is a dead end or, even worse, a threat to national security. Critics in the West have long maintained that open-source models strengthen countries like China by giving away secrets, allowing them to identify and exploit vulnerabilities. We believe the opposite is true: that open-source will power innovation in AI and continue to be the most secure way to develop software.

This is not the first time America’s tech industry and its standard-setters and regulators have had to think about open-source software and open standards with respect to national security. Similar discussions took place around operating systems, the internet and cryptography. In each case, the overwhelming consensus was that the right way forward was openness.

There are several reasons why. One is that regulation hurts innovation. America leads the world in science and technology. On an even playing field it will win. With one hand tied behind its back it might well lose. That’s exactly what it would do by restricting open-source AI development. A potential talent pool that once spanned the globe would be reduced to one spanning the four walls of the institution or company that developed the model. Meanwhile, the rest of the world, including America’s adversaries, would continue to reap the benefits of open-source and the innovation it enables.

A second reason is the widely accepted view that open-source makes systems safer. More users—from government, industry and academia, as well as hobbyists—means more people analysing code, stress-testing it in production and fixing any problems they identify.

A good example in the sphere of national security is Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux). It was originally developed by the America’s National Security Agency as a collection of security patches for the open-source Linux operating system, and has been part of the official Linux distribution for more than 20 years. This learn-from-others approach is vastly more robust than one based on proprietary operating systems that can only be fixed by their vendors, on whatever timelines they can manage.

There is much discussion in Western national-security circles about preventing other states from gaining access to state-of-the-art AI technology. But restricting open-source will not accomplish this goal. In the case of China, that is because the horse has bolted. China is already at the cutting edge of AI: it may well have more AI researchers than America, and it is already producing very competitive models. According to one popular system for ranking large language models, China has three of the world’s top seven open-source models.Some Chinese companies are also finding ways to get around export controls on graphics processor units (GPUs), specialised circuits that excel at algebra. Even American companies are not easily persuaded to overlook billions in revenue. A previous attempt at prohibiting the export of high-end Intel chips resulted in China developing the world’s fastest supercomputer using a novel, internally developed computing architecture.

The inability of American companies to keep proprietary, infrastructure-critical IP secure has a long history. Huawei, for instance, has publicly admitted to copying proprietary code from Cisco. As recently as March, the FBI apprehended a Chinese former Google engineer for allegedly stealing AI trade secrets from the company—which is renowned for its security.

A question to ask is whether we want to live in a world where we understand the fundamental nature of other countries’ AI capabilities—because they’re based in part on open-source technology—or a world where we’re trying to figure out how they work. There is no third option where China, for example, doesn’t have advanced AI capabilities.

The final reason to favour open-source is that it drives innovation. The argument that we should move away from open-source models because they cannot compete with proprietary models on performance or cost is plain wrong. Foundation models are on their way to becoming a key component of application infrastructure. And since at least the mid-1990s the majority of impactful new infrastructure technologies have been open-source.

There’s no clear reason why AI models will be different. Today’s AI is rooted in open-source and open research, and the stunning advances in generative AI over the past two years—with the rise of OpenAI, Mistral, Anthropic and others—can be largely attributed to the openness of the preceding decade. Today, many of the most advanced uses of AI are the product of developers running and fine-tuning open-source models. Many of the most advanced users of AI are in communities that have grown organically around open-source. The die has been cast.

There is, of course, room for different business and development models to thrive, and no one should take national security lightly. But restricting open-source would hamstring an approach that has held its own when it comes to security while driving three decades of innovation.

NSE defers T+0 settlement cycle implementation

The National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) has announced that it will delay the implementation of its T+0 rolling settlement cycle in the capital market segment until a later date. The exchange will communicate the revised timeline for the introduction of T+0 in a separate notice.

T+0, introduced in March, provides an alternative to the standard T+1 settlement cycle. Under T+0, trades are settled on the same day, offering quicker capital release and enhanced risk management.

To ensure system stability and continuity, the NSE will conduct mock trading sessions for both capital market and futures and options (F&O) segments from its disaster recovery site on 28 September 2024. Live trading from the disaster recovery site will take place between 30 September and 1 October 2024.

The exchange has advised members to note that contingency tests will be conducted during the mock trading session on 28 September 2024 from 12 PM to 1 PM.

FPIs buy Rs 57k crore stocks in September, flows hit 9- month high

NEW DELHI: Foreign investors have poured Rs 57,359 crore into Indian equities in Sept, making it the highest inflow in nine months, mainly driven by a rate cut by the US Federal Reserve.With this infusion, foreign portfolio investors’ (FPIs) investment in equities has surpassed the Rs 1 lakh crore mark in 2024, data with the depositories showed. FPI inflows are likely to remain robust, driven by global interest rate easing and India’s strong fundamentals.However, the RBI’s decisions, particularly regarding inflation management and liquidity, will be key in sustaining this momentum, Robin Arya, smallcase manager and founder & CEO of research analyst firm GoalFi, said.

According to the data, FPIs made a net investment of Rs 57,359 crore in equities until Sept 27, with one trading session still left this month. This was the highest net inflow since Dec 2023, when FPIs had invested Rs 66,135 crore in equities. Since June, FPIs have consistently bought equities after withdrawing Rs 34,252 crore in April-May. Overall, FPIs have been net buyers in 2024, except for Jan, April, and May.

Several factors have contributed to the recent surge in FPI inflow into Indian equity markets, such as the start of the interest rate cut cycle initiated by the US Fed, increased India weightage in global indices, better growth prospects, and a series of large IPOs, Himanshu Srivastava, associate director manager research, Morningstar Investment Research India, said.