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.
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