FM hails unicorns🦄 | PhonePe ⬆ 2Bn mark | Apple to sell parts🔧

FM Nirmala Sitharaman hails India’s 36 unicorns, PhonePe clocked more than 2 bn digital payments, Apple to sell spare parts to consumers, Funding Deals & more.

Rise & Shine ☀

Nov 18, 2021

Hi 👋🏻,

Start your day, the smart way!

Top tech news of the day delivered straight to your inbox.

1 Mail | 2 Minutes | 3 Stories | Funding Deals

Every day, keep an eye on the Promotions tab for new mail.

FM Nirmala Sitharaman hails India’s 36 unicorns in the last 12 months👏🏻

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday commended the startup ecosystem in India and hailed the 36 companies that turned unicorns in the past 12 months.

🦄 A unicorn company, or unicorn startup, is a private company with a valuation of over $1 billion.

Sitharaman said startups in India have rapidly found funding, which is not so common in any other country. “New age industries will be the catalyst and will make a big change,” she remarked while addressing the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) Global Economic Policy Summit 2021.

According to the FM, the new age industries will help bring in the demand for conventional products.

The Union Minister called India one of the fastest-growing economies despite the COVID-19 pandemic and said that reviving growth is on top of the government’s agenda.

PhonePe says it clocked more than two billion digital payments in October📱

PhonePe, part of the Walmart-owned Flipkart Group, clocked more than two billion transactions across payment channels in October, according to a statement. These include payments made using the Unified Payments Interface and the Bharat Bill Payment System.

In February, PhonePe had recorded one billion monthly transactions. The company claims to have 145 million monthly active users (MAUs), $600 billion annualised total payments value, and digital transactions from over 19,000 pin codes covering 99% of the country.

PhonePe’s rapid growth—one billion transactions added in just eight months—is indicative of the wider adoption of digital payments in India, accelerated by the pandemic.

The value of transactions using UPI crossed $100 billion in a month for the first time in October. As many as 4.2 billion UPI transactions amounting to Rs 7.71 lakh crore (about $103 billion) were clocked in the month, marking all-time highs on both counts for the five-year-old payments channel.

E-commerce enablement company GoKwik has raised ₹112 crores (or roughly $15 million) as a part of its Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India.
Velocity, which runs a revenue-based financing platform for e-commerce and D2C businesses, has raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, a US-based venture capital firm.
Silicon Valley-based Better Capital, which is run solo by Vaibhav Domkundwar, has launched its maiden fund with a corpus of $15 million to make pre-seed and seed investments in Indian startups.
FinTech startup smallcase has invested $5 million in Tickertape - a web and mobile-based investment information and research platform.
Fintech start-up SalaryBox has raised $4 million in a new seed round from new and existing investors including Y-Combinator, Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures, Soma Capital and 2AM Ventures.

Apple to sell spare parts to consumers to repair iPhones, Macs🛠

Apple Inc on Wednesday said it will for the first time start selling spare parts and tools to the general public to perform their own repairs on some iPhones and Mac computers.

The self-service repair program comes after years of pressure from consumer groups has resulted in Apple providing greater access to repair manuals and genuine parts.

Under the self-service program, Apple customers will be able to buy those parts directly to perform their own repairs after reading a manual. Apple said the online store will start with about 200 parts and tools aimed at fixing the most common issues with displays, batteries and cameras on iPhone 12 and 13 models.

The program will eventually extend to Mac computers that use Apple's M1 chip and later to less common repairs.

Apple said the program will begin early next year in the United States and expand to more countries later in the year.