Byju's - to rename WhiteHat Jr, fires 300 at Toppr🎓, Banks rethink fintech collabs🗃️, US Fed asks to ban TikTok⚖️
Byju’s may rebrand WhiteHat Jr, Banks rethink fintech partnerships, US regulator asks to ban TikTok, Funding Deals and more.
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Byju’s may rebrand WhiteHat Jr, fires another 300 at Toppr🎓
Edtech major Byju's is in active discussions to rebrand its code-teaching unit WhiteHat Jr, which it acquired in a $300 million deal in 2020.
WhiteHat Jr, which teaches coding to children, has run into trouble in the past for allegedly misleading advertisements and promises on the outcomes of their courses.
As per current discussions, Byju’s may add its name to WhiteHat Jr as a suffix, but is also considering renaming it completely and using Byju’s name. A final call is yet to be taken.
Meanwhile, Byju’s has fired 300 people from its subsidiary Toppr, a day after we reported that WhiteHat Jr had fired around 300 staff.
Several edtech startups, including Unacademy, Vedantu and others have laid off employees in the past few months to increase their runway and conserve cash.
Banks rethink fintech partnerships after RBI’s new rule🗃️
Indian banks are rethinking partnerships with credit-card based fintech firms following recent directives by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) with respect to the co-branded card segment.
RBL Bank has been going slow on its partnerships with KreditBee and Uni Cards, after the regulator started questioning the business model of some of these firms.
The RBI wanted to know: who do these cards belong to, the bank or the fintech? Since then, RBL indicated to its fintech partners that they may have to take a relook at these partnerships, depending on the policy announcements by the regulator.
Other key bank partners for the segment include IDFC First Bank and State Bank of Mauritius (SBM) in India.
Hot Shorts⚡
Arzooo, a retail technology platform has raised $70 million in a new funding round led by SBI Investment, Japan, and Trifecta Leaders Fund.
SaaS startup for exporters Sourcewiz has secured Rs 20 crore in its Pre-Series A funding round led by Matrix Partners India.
Business-to-consumer (B2C) credit management platform CheQ has raised $10 million in its seed round, led by Venture Highway and 3one4 Capital.
Bengaluru-based 'Move-to-Earn' (rewarding users for engaging in physical exercises) startup Fitmint has announced raising seed funding of $1.6 million from multiple VCs and institutional investors.
➡️ Check out our LinkedIn space for more on the funding deals.
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US regulator asks Google and Apple to ban TikTok⚖️
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) head, Brendan Carr, has fired off a letter to tech giants Apple and Google, asking them to remove the short video app TikTok from their app stores because of its suspicious data handling practices.
"It is clear that TikTok poses an unacceptable national security risk due to its extensive data harvesting combined with Beijing's apparently unchecked access to that sensitive data," Carr wrote in the letter.
Just a week ago, BuzzFeed News reported that ByteDance employees repeatedly accessed US TikTok users' data, sparking concern in the Biden administration.
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