Vantage Point by EMVC - Jul 5 2024
Updates to keep up with the latest in fintech from our vantage point.
Welcome back,
This week Sentient Labs raised $85mm. Amazon invested in its India payments arm. Swiggy launched its own UPI service. There is also an insightful weekend read.
From the team at Emphasis Ventures.
If you’re a fintech startup or thinking about starting up, we’d like to meet you. At Emphasis Ventures, we’ve worked with founders of Slice, M2P, Khatabook, Bureau and many others from their early days.
Blockchain - AI platform Sentient Labs raised $85mm led by Founders fund, Pantera Capital and others. Sentient will develop a decentralized open source AI platform and will use existing technology from the Polygon blockchain.
Amazon has invested $72mm in its India payments business. This comes on the back of RBI’s recent approval to grant Amazon Pay a payment aggregator license. The company has 67.5mm prepaid wallet accounts in India that do 600mm+ monthly payment transactions.
Online food delivery platform Swiggy launched its own UPI service earlier this week. Swiggy also has a digital wallet and a co-branded credit card for user payments. Notably, this comes at a time when competitor Zomato has recently surrendered its payment aggregator and wallet licenses and has also withdrawn its application for obtaining a non-bank lender license from the Reserve Bank of India.
Weekend read: Indian startups show signs of recovery with $7Bn funding in H1 2024. "...The Indian startup ecosystem is going through a recovery phase: there have been larger funding rounds, an increase in the number of deals, a surge in secondary deals and ESOP buybacks, and a decline in layoffs.... there is a significant increase in the number of startup deals and funding in H1 2024 from $5.92 billion in H1 2023..."
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