One Thing Today in Tech

It was about 10 years ago that Shekhar Kirani took a flight from Bangalore to Chennai, and spent the better part of the day talking to a couple of young entrepreneurs before taking an evening flight back. He had been introduced to them by a colleague and the partner at Accel was looking to find out if the VC firm should invest in them. The two entrepreneurs—Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy—came from simple backgrounds and hadn’t attended any of India’s Institutes of Technology or top business schools. They had experience working at Zoho, a small software products company at the time, which helped but many would have rejected them, Kirani says. There was something about the duo and their fledgling venture, called Freshdesk at the time, that convinced Kirani Accel should go ahead and bet on them. And Freshdesk, which would eventually become Freshworks, got its first million dollars in VC money with Kirani joined the company’s board. He certainly couldn’t have imagined then, that the little Chennai outfit would go on to deliver Accel’s first US IPO from its Indian portfolio—and an India-founder-led software products company at that. Forbes India caught up with Kirani, a day after he returned from attending Freshworks’s billion-dollar IPO on the Nasdaq. We spoke about everything from what was going through his mind on the floor of the exchange to how Mathrubootham had matured as an entrepreneur, and what it takes to succeed as a VC investor

Instagram's head Adam Mosseri said the Facebook unit will "pause" development of a version of the photo and video sharing app targeted at children, dubbed 'Instagram Kids'. However, Instagram will continue to develop and integrate parental supervision features into the existing app, Mosseri said in a blog post, while also arguing YouTube and TikTok had children's apps. In our tech conversation, Krishna Kumar—founder and CEO of Cropin—unpacks his company's multiple agri-tech cloud software products

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launches the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission today at 11 am via video conferencing. The main components of this platform include a health ID for every citizen that will also work as their health account to which personal health records can be linked and viewed via a mobile app. Healthcare Professionals Registry and a Healthcare Facilities Registries will act as a repository of all healthcare providers across both modern and traditional systems of medicine. And in our tech conversation today, we catch up with Akhil Aryan, the co-founder and CEO of ION Energy

Apple users of the lightning connector will likely be the most affected if a proposed rule to make the Type-C USB connector a common charger standard is adopted as a law in Europe. The European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, Thursday said it is putting forward legislation to establish a common charging solution for all the relevant devices. That, and in our tech conversation today, the founders of Extrapolate Advisors unpack their data-as-a-service platform, called DataSutram

Freshworks became perhaps the first Indian-founder-led cloud software venture to publicly list in the US, on September 22, after a successful initial public offering on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Shares of the company, which listed under the symbol FRSH, were 32 percent higher at $47.55 at the close of normal trading on the exchange. The shares rose to over $49 in after-hours trading. In tech conversation, we catch up with the founders of a new networking platform for professionals, entrepreneurs and angel investors, CoffeeMug.ai

Freshworks will become perhaps the first Indian founder-led cloud software venture to become a publicly listed company in the US, on Wednesday. The company will sell its shares at $36 each—on strong demand — after initially setting a range of $28 to $32 and then raising it $32 to $34. At $36 a share, Freshworks will raise about $1 billion and have a market value of $10 billion. In our tech chat, Kanan Rai speaks about her experience as a non-techie woman building businesses within Google

Pfizer and BioNTech have said that the first test results of their Covid-19 vaccine tested on children, age group of 5 to 11 years, showed the vaccine to be effective. The Covid-19 vaccine was well tolerated, with side effects generally comparable to those observed in participants in the age group of 16 years to 25 years, the companies said in a press release. In our tech conversation today, Narayan Prasad Nagendra, COO of SatSearch, explains the new space tech opportunities for Indian companies

Google has adopted anti-competitive, unfair, and restrictive trade practices in the mobile operating system and related markets in India, the investigative arm of the Competition Commission of India (CCI) has said following an investigation that started in April 2019. That, and SpaceX's first civilian crew returns, and in today’s tech conversation, we speak to Vasanth Kamath, founder and CEO of smallcase, on the company’s evolution into a powerful tech platform

Byju’s, an EdTech company and India’s most valuable startup, is acquiring Tynker—a coding platform for children in the US—to accelerate its expansion in America. Tynker’s creative coding platform has been used by over 60 million kids and 100,000 schools in 150 countries. a16z may invest in CoinSwitch. In our tech conversation, Ultraviolette Automotive’s founders give us an update on their electric performance bike F77

On Wednesday, India’s government announced a relief package and a series of structural reforms for the cash-strapped telecom sector. Union Minister for IT and Communications, Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the cabinet has approved 100 percent Foreign Direct Investment in the telecom sector through automatic route—from 49 percent earlier. In our tech conversation, we talk to Amagi’s co-founder and CEO Baskar Subramanian