One Thing Today in Tech

Technology investments by the world’s biggest companies will continue to grow despite the current global uncertainties, Rajesh Gopinathan, chief executive of Tata Consultancy Services, one of the world’s biggest IT services providers, writes in the company’s annual report for the fiscal year that ended on March 31.

"The war in Ukraine, the geopolitical tensions in Europe, and the resultant impact on global economic growth are real threats. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has shown us that enterprise spending on technology is far more resilient than most people think, as it is central to businesses’ ability to innovate and differentiate in good times, and to survive and adapt in tough times," Gopinathan writes.

“At our current pace of growth, it is only a matter of time before we double our revenues and hit the $50 billion mark,” he writes.

Infosys, India’s second-largest IT services company, has extended CEO Salil Parekh’s tenure by about another five years, starting July 1, the company told the stock exchanges in a statement. Parekh, who came to Infosys from Capgemini in January 2018, is widely credited for returning Infosys to industry-leading growth, expanding and deepening its capabilities in cloud services and AI. The appointment is subject to shareholder approval.

MFine, a healthcare tech platform provider in Bengaluru, has fired between 500 and 600 people, based on reports from Economic Times and Inc42, which first reported the layoff. Startups in India face tough times ahead as the funding frenzy of 2021 comes to an end amid concerns of a recession in the US and a global economic slowdown. India’s startups are largely funded by foreign money.

Unacademy, Cars24, and Meesho are some of the other well-known startups that have laid off large portions of their workforce in recent times.

VenturEast, a venture capital firm, has fully exited Seclore, a data-centric security platform provider, as part of the startup’s latest funding round, the firm said in a press release. Seclore has raised $27 million in series C funding, led by Oquirrh Ventures and Origami Capital. VenturEast invested in the company at its seed and Series A stages. It now exits with a 17.5x return on its seed round.

Seclore has now raised $46 million to date. Its customers include government and defence agencies and more than 500 global enterprises, including American Express, Applied Materials, ADM, Saudi Telecom, and ICICI group, according to the press release.

Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds:

https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds

SoftBank's Vision Funds lost more than $27 billion in the last fiscal year, by far their worst performance on record, CNN reports. CEO Masayoshi Son said he will now play defence and be more selective about investments. Google teased its Pixel watch at its I/O conference, planned for a launch around September. Sachin Bansal adds Vidit Aatrey to Navi’s board. And Ather has raised more money.

Notes:

SoftBank's Vision Funds lost more than $27 billion in the last fiscal year, by far their worst performance on record, CNN reports after the Japanese company reported earnings on May 12.

The world's biggest tech investor said Thursday that the funds had recorded a loss of 3.5 trillion yen ($27.5 billion) in the year ended March. That was a significant reversal from the unit's performance from last year, when it had logged a healthy profit, according to CNN.

At an earnings presentation in Tokyo, CEO Masayoshi Son acknowledged the losses and pledged to start taking a more conservative approach.

"We, SoftBank, should be taking defence," he said, with the word Defense emblazoned on one of the slides of a presentation as well.

Going forward, SoftBank will be more selective about which deals to take on, roll out stricter criteria for new investments, and focus on improving returns from its portfolio companies, he added.

Google announced its long-awaited Pixel Watch on Wednesday, furthering the tech giant's expansion into hardware, CNET reports. The company teased its first smartwatch during its Google I/O conference but plans to reveal more details closer to the device's fall launch. Fall in the US starts towards the end of September.

The watch has a domed circular design, runs on Google's Wear OS smartwatch software and includes some Fitbit health-tracking features. Google didn't announce a price but said it will be sold as a premium product, according to CNET.

Ather Energy, one of India’s leading electric two-wheeler companies, has raised $128 million in its Series E funding round, with investors including National Investment and Infrastructure Fund Limited’s Strategic Opportunities Fund, Hero MotoCorp, and others. Ather Energy plans to use the funding to expand manufacturing facilities, invest in research and development, charging infrastructure and expand its retail network.

The company registered its highest ever monthly sales, in April 2022, delivering 3,779 units to customers. Booking orders for Ather Energy’s flagship product, the Ather 450X is growing at 25 percent quarter-on-quarter. Ather Energy is present in 32 cities with 38 showrooms and aims to expand to 150 in 100 cities by 2023.

Navi Technologies Limited, Flipkart founder Sachin Bansal’s financial services company, has appointed Vidit Aatrey, co-founder and CEO of Meesho as an independent director on its board of directors, effective April 9, 2022.

Aatrey joins three other independent directors, Abhijit Bose, Shripad Nadkarni and Usha Narayanan. Navi’s board now comprises seven members, including Bansal, co-founder Ankit Agrawal and Anand Sinha, a former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India, the company said in a press release.

Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds:

Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart unit are joining the country’s new Open Network for Digital Commerce, Economic Times reports. The network is being compared with India’s Unified Payments Interface, to support the idea that it could do for online commerce what UPI did for payments. And Uber, which is looking to cut costs in the US, is significantly and rapidly expanding its tech team in India.

Notes:

Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart unit are joining the country’s new Open Network for Digital Commerce, Economic Times reports, citing sources familiar with the developments. This new network, ONDC, is being presented as a first-of-its-kind platform worldwide that will make it easy for millions of small sellers in the country to go online and for consumers to find them irrespective of which app or site they use to shop.

Paytm has already joined the network, and Flipkart’s payments unit PhonePe is doing so as well, according to ET.

Uber Technologies, which is cutting costs in the US, has announced a fresh round of recruitment for its India tech centres, with a plan to hire 500 more engineers by December. Uber recruited 250 engineers in 2021 to expand its tech team to 1,000 in two centres in India—Hyderabad and Bengaluru, the company said in a press release yesterday.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told staff recently that he will be cutting costs on multiple fronts, and that hiring should be seen as a ‘privilege,’ CNBC reported on May 9.

IBM’s Red Hat, an open-source software leader, and Kyndryl, its IT infrastructure services subsidiary, have announced a strategic partnership to help customers embrace open, differentiated automation technologies and managed services to modernise core business applications and IT infrastructure, the company said in a press release.

Red Hat and Kyndryl will offer integrated services and solutions based on the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate critical workloads from the enterprise data centre to the edge and on public clouds.

GoKwik, which helps brands reduce ecommerce churn, has raised $35 million in a Series B round led by Think Investments. The round also saw participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital India, Matrix Partners India and RTP Global, the company said in a press release. The company will use the money to work on tech solutions for large marketplaces, and omnichannel players, and add more D2C customers. GoKwik expects to hire more than 200 people across India this year.

ReshaMandi, which is building a ‘digital ecosystem’ for the natural fibre supply chain in India, has made a foray into the skincare segment by investing an undisclosed amount in a Bengaluru-based skincare brand, Healios Wound Solutions, the company said in a press release. The investment will help Healios expand its silk protein-based skincare range and market it to a wider audience looking for natural, sustainable and environment-friendly skincare products.

Sericin has antioxidant, anti-ageing, moisture retention, and depigmentation properties, which makes it an ideal ingredient in any skincare line, according to ReshaMandi’s press release. Going forward, Healios’s SeriSkin range will be positioned as a silk protein-based premium product made of naturally-extracted sericin, the company said.

Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds:

https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds

Apple is ending the iPod Touch, the last of the company’s series of music devices — including the iPod nano and the Shuffle — that changed how people listen to music forever. Google’s annual developer conference starts today. Delhivery gets strong interest from anchor investors ahead of IPO subscription. And Razorpay offers staff an ESOP buyback while bringing on new investors.

Notes:

Apple is ending the iPod Touch, the last of the company’s series of music devices — including the iPod Nano and the Shuffle — that changed how people listen to music forever. The company announced yesterday in a press release that iPod Touch will remain on sale while stocks last.

Apple last updated the iPod in 2019.

Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, starts today and will run through tomorrow, with a wide variety of presentations on the latest at the search giant — including AI, updates to the Android operating system, and hardware as well.

This year, there are ongoing rumours about Google’s first wearable, the Pixel Watch, as well as a midrange counterpart to last year’s Pixel 6 smartphones. It’s possible we could also see a new pair of true wireless earbuds announced, according to The Verge.

Delhivery plans to open its initial public offering today, with a price band of between Rs. 462 and Rs. 487 per equity share of the face value of Rs. 1 each, the logistics startup said in a press release. The company raised Rs. 2,347 crore from allotments to 64 anchor investors yesterday, Economic Times reports.

Some of the foreign investors who participated in the anchor share allotment were Tiger Global, Steadview, Baillie Gifford, Amansa, GIC and Invesco HK, according to ET.

The IPO subscription closes on May 13. Bids can be made for a minimum of 30 equity shares and in multiples of 30 thereafter.

SoftBank may report a record loss for its quarter ended March 31, Bloomberg reports, citing Kirk Boodry, an analyst at Redex Research, who publishes on the investment research network SmartKarma. The Bloomberg report is behind a paywall, but it was also carried by Economic Times.

The world’s largest tech fund — and one of the biggest investors in India’s startup ecosystem — is estimated to have lost about $18.6 billion on its public portfolio alone during the March quarter.

The actual bottom line for the fiscal fourth quarter will hinge on how SoftBank marks the value of its vast number of privately-held holdings, including ByteDance, which operates the popular short video platform TikTok, and India’s Oyo Hotels, according to Bloomberg.

Razorpay, a payments and banking platform provider for businesses, has announced its fourth and largest ESOP sale under its Employee Stock Ownership Plan for its 650 existing and former employees as part of a $75 million transaction.

This is led by Lightspeed Venture Partners along with participation from Moore Strategic Ventures, who will subsequently join the company’s cap table, Razorpay said in a press release on May 10.

Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds:

https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds

Apple’s director of machine learning, Ian Goodfellow, is leaving the company due to its return to work policy, according to a tweet by Zoe Schiffer, a tech reporter with The Verge. Ride-hailing network provider Uber’s CEO has promised cutbacks on spending, CNBC reports. And the global tech-led sell-off after US monetary tightening has hit cryptocurrencies as well, with Bitcoin losing more than half its value from its November peak.

Notes:

Apple’s director of machine learning, Ian Goodfellow, is leaving the company due to its return-to-work policy, according to a tweet on May 8 by Zoe Schiffer, a tech reporter with The Verge. In a note to staff, Goodfellow said “I believe strongly that more flexibility would have been the best policy for my team,” according to Schiffer’s tweet, which has been picked up widely.

Uber, is the latest tech company to announce cutbacks, with money becoming less cheap, and investors looking elsewhere. The ride-hailing network provider will cut back on spending and focus on becoming a leaner business to address a “seismic shift” in investor sentiment, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees in an email, CNBC reported on Monday.

Uber will slash spending on marketing and incentives and treat hiring as a “privilege,” Khosrowshahi said, according to CNBC. The world’s biggest tech companies have lost over a trillion dollars in value, as dumped stocks after central banks around the world raised the rates at which commercial banks could borrow from them.

Bitcoin fell below the $30,000 mark today as both traditional financial markets and cryptocurrencies suffered from a sell-off caused by the US Federal Reserve's monetary tightening as well as fears of a recession, CoinDesk reports.

The latest decline left bitcoin at a 10-month low and its lowest price this year, less than half the value that the cryptocurrency had in November last.

HCL Technologies is acquiring Confinale AG, a Switzerland-based digital banking and wealth management consulting specialist, India’s third-biggest IT services company said in a press release. The acquisition will help HCL expand its reach in the global wealth management market with an emphasis on consulting, implementation and management of banking software from Avaloq, another Swiss company, whose software is used by some 140 banks around the world.

Clearview AI, an American facial recognition surveillance company, has agreed to permanently ban most private companies from using its service under a court settlement, The Verge reports. The agreement, filed in a court in the US state of Illinois yesterday, would settle a 2020 American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit that alleged the company had built its business on facial recognition data taken without user consent.

Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds:

https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds

Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI) and Mindtree will merge to form a larger IT services company that could be more capable of challenging bigger rivals for digital transformation contracts and global talent. LTI chief executive Sanjay Jalona is leaving and Mindtree’s boss Debashis Chatterjee is to lead the combined business.

Notes:

The combined entity is to be called LTIMindtree, the L&T group companies told the stock exchanges on Friday after markets in Mumbai.

LTI CEO and MD Sanjay Jalona, a former Infosys executive who took LTI public six years ago, and is widely seen as responsible for its bigger play today, has resigned. Debashis Chatterjee, a former senior executive at Cognizant Technology Solutions, who joined Mindtree as CEO and MD in August 2019, after L&T group acquired the Bengaluru company, has been named to lead the combined entity.

LTIMindtree would become India’s sixth-biggest IT services company by revenue, with combined sales of more than $3.5 billion for the year that ended March 31, 2022. The combine would be the fifth-biggest IT company by market cap, at $18.3 billion, surpassing Tech Mahindra’s $16.2 billion, as things stood on Friday. Tech Mahindra remains larger, by revenue, with annual sales of over $6 billion.

Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds:

https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds

Apple, Google, and Microsoft plan to expand support for a common passwordless sign-in standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium; IBM shareholders have urged the company to report on concealment clauses that prevent employees from discussing workplace wrongdoing. And Wipro and HFCL team up to make 5G routers.

Apple, Google and Microsoft yesterday announced plans to expand support for a common passwordless sign-in standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium, according to a post on the alliance’s website.

Based on its standards — which tie authentication to a physical device, such as a user’s smartphone — users will sign in through the same action that they take multiple times each day to unlock their devices, such as a simple verification of their fingerprint or face, or a device PIN.

This new approach protects against phishing, and sign-in will be more secure compared with passwords and legacy multi-factor technologies such as one-time passcodes sent over SMS, according to the post.

IBM shareholders at the IT giant's annual meeting last month endorsed a proposal to have the company produce a public report on the potential risks arising from its use of concealment clauses that constrain disclosure of workplace misconduct, The Register reports, citing a statement yesterday from Clean Yield Asset Management, a US-based investment firm focused on corporate social responsibility.

In a statement on its website, Clean Yield Asset Management said that 64.7 percent of IBM shareholders supported a proposal submitted by the investment firm calling on the company to report on its use of concealment clauses at IBM’s 2022 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.

The support for this proposal comes at a time when leading companies such as Google and Salesforce are scaling back the use of these problematic clauses and lawmakers at the state and federal levels are taking steps to end their use.

Specifically, Clean Yield’s proposal calls on the Board to report on the potential risks to IBM associated with its use of concealment clauses in the context of harassment, discrimination, and other unlawful acts. Concealment clauses are any employment or post-employment agreement, such as arbitration, nondisclosure or non-disparagement agreements that IBM asks employees to sign which would limit their ability to discuss unlawful acts in the workplace, including harassment and discrimination.

Wipro, India’s fourth-biggest IT services provider, and HFCL, a leading telecom equipment manufacturer and technology provider, have entered into a partnership to engineer a variety of 5G transport products that include Cell Site Router, Distributed Unit Aggregation Router, and Centralised Unit Aggregation Router, the companies said in a press release.

With expertise in product engineering, transport network technologies and 5G, Wipro will co-develop equipment with HFCL. Wipro will use Tarang Labs, its product compliance and certification labs in Bangalore, for hardware integration, validation and pre-certification.

Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds:

https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds

Amazon yesterday said that cumulative exports by Indian exporters on the Amazon Global Selling programme are on track to surpass the $5 billion milestone. The company has doubled its exports pledge to facilitate $20 billion in cumulative exports from India by 2025. Intel acquires GPU tech company Siru Innovation. More global competition for Netflix in India.

Notes:

Amazon yesterday said that cumulative exports by Indian exporters on the Amazon Global Selling programme are on track to surpass the $5 billion milestone. The programme took about three years to get to the first billion dollars, and the last two billion dollars have come in just 17 months, the e-commerce giant, which has not had a smooth going with Indian rules when it comes to local sales, said in a press release.

Amazon has doubled its exports pledge to facilitate $20 billion in cumulative exports from India by 2025.

Intel has acquired Siru Innovations, a graphics technology firm founded by ex-Qualcomm mobile GPU engineers, The Register reports.

Siru Innovations is a Finnish firm focused on developing software and silicon building blocks, known as IP, for GPUs made by other companies. The Siru team will join Intel's fledgling Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, according to The Register.

Paramount Global, formerly ViacomCBS, has announced that the streaming service will become available in India in 2023, as CEO Bob Bakish pushes towards 100 million subscribers, TechCrunch reports. That means more competition for Netflix in India.

This June, Paramount, which has about 62 million subscribers overall, will launch in the UK and South Korea. In India, Paramount+ will launch in partnership with Viacom 18. The service has already launched in 25 markets across Latin America, Canada, the Nordics and Australia, according to TechCrunch.

Infosys and manufacturers’ Alliance, an industry lobby in the US, have released the findings of a survey on efforts towards carbon neutrality in the sector, the Indian IT services giant said in a press release yesterday.

According to their findings

Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds:

https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds

A group of Apple employees, calling itself Apple Together, has opposed the company’s ‘hybrid working pilot’ return-to-office policy as a measure that actually kills flexibility, even diversity, and perpetuates a culture of working in silos. Google has sacked another AI researcher for questioning its science, NYT reports. And investors pour hundreds of millions more into Indian startups.

Notes:

A group of Apple employees calling itself Apple Together has opposed the company’s ‘hybrid working pilot’ return-to-office policy, first announced last year and being implemented from April, as a measure that actually kills flexibility and even diversity and perpetuates a culture of working in silos.

In an open letter published last week, the group said the policy is really motivated by fear. “You have characterised the decision for the Hybrid Working Pilot as being about combining the 'need to commune in-person' and the value of flexible work," the letter says. "But in reality, it does not recognise flexible work and is only driven by fear. Fear of the future of work, fear of worker autonomy, fear of losing control.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced the policy mid-last-year, requiring staff to return to offices on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and work from home or remotely available on the other two days.

“Office-bound work is a technology from the last century, from the era before ubiquitous video-call-capable internet and everyone being on the same internal chat application. But the future is about connecting when it makes sense, with people who have relevant input, no matter where they are based,” the group said.

Google has fired another top AI researcher from its Google Brain unit, less than two years after it dismissed two researchers who criticised the biases built into artificial intelligence systems, New York Times reports.

The company has fired Satrajit Chatterjee, who questioned a paper it published on the abilities of a specialised type of AI used in making computer chips.

Chatterjee led a team of scientists in challenging the acclaimed research paper, which appeared last year in the scientific journal Nature that said computers were able to design certain parts of a computer chip faster and better than humans, according to the New York Times.

Chatterjee was fired in March, shortly after Google told his team that it would not publish a paper that rebutted some of the claims made in Nature. Google confirmed his dismissal to the New York Times and defended its decision to not publish his team’s paper, according to the report.

Zepto, a quick delivery service for groceries started by two Stanford dropouts, has raised $200 million in its Series D funding, valuing the company at around $900 million.

Traceable AI, an API security and observability company, has raised $60 million in Series B funding, valuing the venture at more than $450 million.

Toplyne, a SaaS platform provider that helps companies to monetise their product-led growth, has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital India, and existing investors including Together Fund.

Kaleidofin, a fintech company, has announced a second close to its $15 million Series B equity round led by Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.

Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds:

https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds

ISMC, a semiconductor consortium, will invest Rs. 22,900 crore ($3 billion) in India's southern state of Karnataka to set up a chip-making plant, the state government said in a statement on Sunday. The plant is to come up on a 150-acre plot on the outskirts of the royal city of Mysuru, about three hours by car south of Bengaluru.

ISMC is a joint venture between Abu Dhabi-based Next Orbit Ventures and Israel's Tower Semiconductor, which may soon be acquired by US chip giant Intel.

This plant, India’s first semiconductor fabrication unit — a 65nm analogue semiconductor foundry — is expected to generate more than 1,500 direct jobs and 10,000 indirect jobs, the Karnataka government said in its statement.

Tower Semiconductor, is the principal technology partner, with the project initially funded by Next Orbit Ventures Fund. The consortium is one of the three applicants for the $10 billion incentive package for semiconductor manufacturing that India is offering under a national semiconductor mission.

Amazon is cutting paid time off for front-line US workers who test positive for Covid-19, starting today, CNBC reports.

All US-based Amazon workers who test positive for Covid-19 will now get up to five days of excused, unpaid leave, the company told workers in a notice sent Saturday. A spokesperson told CNBC, that workers are still able to use their sick time off if needed.

Wipro will continue to look for large acquisitions in underpenetrated areas of opportunity that can be scaled even further, Economic Times reports, citing CFO Jatin Dalal.

The company has taken aggressive steps to regain revenue growth leadership under CEO Thierry Delaporte, who has spent billions of dollars buying businesses including Capco, CAS Group and Rising. Last week, the $10 billion IT services giant, India’s fourth-biggest, reported earnings matching street expectations.

Accenture has named Nick Mulcahy, the CEO of Zag, which the tech services giant acquired, as the New Zealand country managing director, elevating him from his role as head of technologies, Consultancy reports. His predecessor Ben Morgan will assume the newly-created position of New Zealand regional growth lead.

Mulcahy joined Accenture as a managing director in 2020 upon its acquisition of Wellington-headquartered Zag, a SAP and cloud consultancy, for a reported $45 million.

Rise Capital, a VC firm founded by former Tiger Global executive Nazar Yasin, has entered India, hiring Anuj Mehta as its India head, Economic Times reports. The VC firm is looking to take the seed to Series B bets on Indian startups with cheque sizes ranging from $100,000 to $10 million from its third fund, Yasin, who quit Tiger Global in 2013, told ET.

Rise Capital, which has backed companies such as Facily, Kitopi, Kueski and Gaia, has already closed two deals in India recently. It has invested in TradeX, an investment app company, and SaveIn, a neobank, as part of their larger seed stage rounds, according to ET.

Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds:

https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds