Reliance enters beauty ecomm💅🏻, PhonePe raises $100 M💸, JioMart shuts Express🛵

Reliance Retail launched an online beauty platform, PhonePe raises $100 mn, JioMart shuts quick delivery service, Funding Deals and more.

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Feb 15, 2023

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Reliance enters beauty ecommerce, to compete with Nykaa, Tata Cliq Palette💅🏻

Reliance Retail on Tuesday launched an online beauty platform, Tira, heating up the competition within the rapidly growing beauty ecommerce space, led by Nykaa, new entrant Tata Cliq Palette, and others, including Sephora, SS Beauty by Shopper’s Stop and Myntra.

The platform, with dedicated makeup, skin and haircare, fragrances, bathing, men’s beauty and luxury sections, and Valentine’s section, is open initially to all Reliance employees and will soon be enabled for consumers.

With Tira, Reliance plans to scale up with a vast collection of mass, premium and luxury labels and its own private labels.

PhonePe raises $100 million funding at $12 billion valuation💸

Digital payments major PhonePe has raised another $100 million in primary funding after raising $350 million last month.

Ribbit Capital, TVS Capital Funds and Flipkart’s early backer Tiger Global are three investors which have put in funds at a pre-money valuation of $12 billion.

With this second tranche, the fintech startup has raised $450 million in the first two months of this year.

PhonePe had raised $350 million in funding from global private equity firm General Atlantic at a pre-money valuation of $12 billion, making it the most valuable privately held Indian fintech firm.

Hot Shorts⚡

Fintech startup Stable Money has raised $4.5 million in its Series A round led by Lightspeed and Matrix Partners.
Prozo, a full-stack supply chain startup, has raised Rs 45 crore in Pre-Series B via a combination of equity and debt financing, led by Sixth Sense Ventures, with participation from JAFCO Asia and other marquee investors.
Integrated incubator Venture Catalysts announced that it has led a seed round of $1.8 million in Lorien Finance, a cross-border fintech platform.
Biotechnology startup CrisprBits has raised $250,000 in a pre-seed round led by US-based VJ Group.

Funding Deals 💰

JioMart shuts quick delivery service Express within a year🛵

Reliance Retail's JioMart has quietly paused the operations of JioMart Express, the quick commerce grocery delivery service launched in March 2022.

Users can no longer download the JioMart Express app from the Google Play Store, and its website is also inactive.

Further, users are being directed to JioMart on WhatsApp where deliveries take a few hours or even a day as against the 90-minute delivery service of JioMart Express.

“They (JioMart) do not want to be in this kind of heavy-burn business. Amid the hype last year, they also experimented with express deliveries, but it’s not going to be continued,” one of the sources told.