Mensa acquires High Star👖, WhatsApp Pay goes for Bharat🗺, CoinSwitch to diversify💰

Mensa Brands adds home-grown denim brand, WhatsApp Pay turns to Bharat to win ePay race, Coinswitch Kuber looks beyond crypto, Funding Deals & more.

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Dec 28, 2021

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Mensa Brands adds home-grown denim brand High Star to its cart👖

E-commerce roll-up brand Mensa acquired High Star, a home-grown denim brand that caters to digital-first consumers.

Ananth Narayanan, Founder and CEO, Mensa Brands

Mensa Brands has set a target of achieving a 10x gross turnover for the brand within the next 4 to 5 years. “Our team has outlined a strategic roadmap for expanding the brand’s footprints in the domestic and international markets across channels to reach consumers and continue to improve customer experience,” Ananth Narayanan, Founder and CEO of Mensa Brands said.

Mensa’s team will bring their expertise to expand the brand’s presence pan India and take it global. Within the first year of onboarding, Mensa will support High Star in areas such as digital marketing, technology, working capital management and channel expansion, a statement said.

WhatsApp Pay turns to Bharat to win ePay race🗺

WhatsApp Pay is betting on rural consumers to get ahead in the digital payments game, a senior executive told us. The messaging platform, which has only recently joined the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ecosystem, is looking to capture the next 300 million UPI users by focusing on first-time consumers from rural India. UPI currently has more than 100 million active users.

abhijit bose — Abhijit Bose, Head of India, WhatsApp

“We know that there's going to be a portion of the digital-savvy urban users that will eventually, hopefully, choose the WhatsApp experience. But there's a lot of upside for us to invest in rural, new-to-digital [customers],” said Abhijit Bose, head of India at WhatsApp.

Last month, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which runs UPI, allowed WhatsApp to double the number of users on its payments service to 40 million, which is still about one-tenth of its more than 400 million users in India.

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CoinSwitch Kuber aims to become a one-stop investment shop💰

Coinswitch Kuber, which in October became the second Indian cryptocurrency platform to turn unicorn, now plans to go beyond just crypto.

The company will diversify into a wealth tech startup that deals in Indian and US stocks, mutual funds, fixed deposits and bonds to offer more investment options to its more than 15 million users, its founder and chief executive Ashish Singhal said.

Ashish Singhal, founder and CEO, CoinSwitch

Is this an attempt by CoinSwitch to reduce risk in the face of regulatory uncertainty? Singhal said it wasn’t, and that Coinswitch would remain a crypto-first company.

"Our users put their risk capital into crypto, but they also have a separate packet of investment income. We want to help our users across asset classes… Our fortunes are tied to crypto. If crypto dies, we die,” he said.

India’s crypto bill was listed for both the budget and winter sessions of Parliament this year but was not tabled either time.

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