Financial Biweekly
In today's edition: Tira's launch, Gold prices, CureFoods funding, Triumph Motorcycles new partner and booming EVs in India.
Launch of Tira
Reliance Retail Ltd, launched Tira, a beauty retail online platform trying to grab a share of the growing personal care market in India. Tira is an omni-channel beauty retail online platform that has virtual try-on features, and tutorials. With 4,300 square feet of Tira store in Jio World Drive and more stores on the way in approximately 100 cities in India, incumbents such as Nykaa, Sephora, and Shoppers Stop have to tighten their belts.
What’s happening in the tech?
Apparently, Amazon.com and a unit of De Beers Group are collaborating to grow artificial diamonds, which is going to revolutionize computer networks in the coming future, at least that’s what it seems.
The catch here is diamonds would be a part of the component that lets the data travel farther without breaking down.Meta has released an AI that can pick up individual objects from within an image, along with a dataset of image annotations which is the largest to date.
Apple is soon going to open a store in India in Mumbai’s Jio World Drive Mall.
Funding, Startups, and Businesses in Starlight
LightMetrics an AI-based video telematics startup has raised $8.5 million from Sequoia Capital. If you are wondering what is video telematics, video telematics combines video data, computer vision technology, and vehicle data to deliver insights that telematics alone cannot. Basically, it is used to monitor key events such as speeding, aggressive braking, harsh acceleration, and idle time.
Electric Mobility solutions provider Magenta has raised $22 million from Morgan Stanley and BP Venture capital arm. They are building their own vehicles and are also trying to create an EV charging ecosystem.
Cloud kitchen startup Curefoods has raised Rs 300 crore in a funding round led by Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal's venture capital firm Three State Ventures. Curefoods is planning to open offline stores in multiple cities in India but it is still behind its rival Rebel Foods. Let’s see how they will use this money to get the customers hooked.
Good news for bike riders
British Triumph Motorcycles have completed the transfer of sales and marketing operations to Bajaj Auto Ltd. Two companies would also be launching a jointly developed mid-sized range of bikes this year. Let’s see how the cost of bikes from Triumph will be affected in India.
Let’s talk about investments
Gold prices have rallied up to touch a lifetime high of ₹61,080 per 10 grams amid the uncertainty in the equity market and headwinds from global trends. As per the data from Mint, all types of equity (Large, Mid, Small) have outperformed Gold in FY23. Equity has the ability to beat inflation and beat all other methods of investments if the investments are done for a long period. Nifty Smallcap 250 was the best performer in FY 21 and FY 22 followed by Midcap and Nifty 50.
It’s very important to reassess the asset allocation to minimize the losses which can occur due to current market conditions.
Talking of buying shares, Sebi has issued a new advertisement code for investment advisers which restricts them to issue any statements that may mislead retail investors.
Now that’s interesting
Some bosses in the US are preferring old people for work due to their work ethics. According to the article published in ‘The Wall Street Journal’, young workers spend most of their time scrolling through social media and less time with customers. Coming late is also a big problem for young workers.
Researchers from Sri Ramakrishna Engineering College in Tamil Nadu, have developed an eco-friendly polymer using the 3-D printing method. Almost 50% of plastic waste comes from one time use plastics, and if this polymer works, it can be a game changer.
The number of English content consumers on Netflix, and Prime Video like platforms have surged by 124% in India since 2020. Guess the idea that English content is only viewed by elite audiences in the metro is no longer true.
On the one hand, where offices are allowing people to work from home, co-working startups are booming like never before. Gurugram-based co-working aggregator platform Stylework has raised $2 million. Seems like some people just don’t like to go to their own office, the reason can be anything, people, culture. You can get an open desk in a lavish office in Bengaluru full of techies for almost 10k. Companies like OfficeBanao are also getting business due to this trend as well.
E-scooters have soared EV sales to a record high of 1 million units in FY23. Companies like Ather Energy, Ola, Hero Electric, TVS, and Bounce are some of the best-selling companies. I mean you can drive almost 120 km after 5 hours of charging. Only a few years back this was a farfetched idea. Things are picking up the pace very fastly in this space. The discovery of lithium in Kashmir is also good news for Indian EV manufacturers.
That’s all for today’s edition.
Subscribe to my newsletter if you want to stay updated in the field of Government policies, Finance, and Startups.
Untill next time, Sayonara!
Financial Biweekly
Good work....Basket of all relevant news updates 👍
Very insightful.
keep going.