PhonePe's Pincode goes live📍, Iron Pillar closes $129 Mn fund💰, How Microsoft started?

PhonePe’s e-commerce app, Iron Pillar closes $129 Mn fund, Manufacturers ramp up local production, Funding Deals and more.

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Apr 5, 2023

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Today, we are covering:

PhonePe’s local commerce app Pincode goes live on the ONDC network
Iron Pillar closes $129-million fund to back cloud, SaaS firms
Wearables, hearables manufacturers ramp up local production
Funding and Acquisition Deals
Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975. Here’s how they got started.

PhonePe’s hyperlocal commerce app Pincode goes live on ONDC📍

Walmart-owned fintech major PhonePe has announced the launch of Pincode, an app built on top of the government-backed ONDC platform.

The app will have a pilot in Bengaluru with categories such as grocery, food, pharma, electronics, and home decor, a statement from the company said.

The Pincode app hopes to promote local shopkeepers and sellers and digitally connect each city’s consumers with all the neighborhood stores that they usually buy from offline.

The fintech previously made attempts to enter the space with Switch, loosely based on the super app concept, and Stores, which was aimed at facilitating the hyper-local discovery of merchants.

Iron Pillar closes $129-million fund to back cloud, SaaS firms💰

Venture capital investor Iron Pillar, which has backed the likes of FreshToHome, Uniphore, Servify and Curefoods, has closed a $129 million fund focused on making investments in global cloud software companies from India.

Iron Pillar’s managing partner Anand Prasanna told that the fund will look at investing in growth-stage startups with an emphasis on software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud infrastructure segment including investment themes such as cyber security and governance, DevOps tools, future of work and education, and automation.

Wearables, hearables manufacturers ramp up local production🎧

Local value addition in wearables and hearables manufacturing is set to increase with India’s major smartwatch and headphones manufacturers making printed circuit boards (PCBs).

Dixon Technologies, which manufactures hearables for Imagine Marketing (Boat), the largest wearables brand in India, will introduce SMT (surface-mount technology) for circuit boards for hearables in April with a capacity of 1.2 million pieces a month, said Sunil Vachani, chairman, Dixon Technologies.

Optiemus, which manufactures mainly for Noise, the second-largest wearable brand in India is open to supplying them to other electronics manufacturers.

The wearables segment has seen rapid growth, clocking 46.9% year-on-year growth in 2022 as shipments reached 100 million, as per IDC India.

Spendflo—which provides a SaaS buying and management platform has raised $11 million in a Series A fundraising round led by Prosus Ventures and Accel.
Healthtech startup Dozee has raised $6 million as part of its Series A2 funding from existing investors such as Prime Venture Partners, 3one4 Capital, YourNest VC, and new investors which include State Bank of India, J&A Partners Family office.
Solar EPC company Prozeal Infra has secured its first round of funding worth $4 million led by Chandrakant Gogri’s family office arm – Alchemie Ventures.
Zyod, a global B2B platform for apparel sourcing and manufacturing, has raised $3.5 million in its seed round led by Lightspeed.
Dozer, an open-source data infrastructure platform that helps software engineers create application programming interfaces (API), has raised $3 million in a seed round of funding.
AI content creation and collaboration platform Narrato has raised $1 million in its pre-seed round led by AirTree Ventures.
Insurtech firm InsuranceDekho has acquihired Verak, a Mumbai-based SME insurance distribution firm.
Global customer loyalty and customer engagement SaaS platform Capillary Technologies has acquired Texas-headquartered Brierley+Partners.