Indian budget hotel chain Oyo may have lost a lot of business amid the pandemic, but it is inching closer to finding a new investor: Microsoft. Microsoft is in advanced stages of talks to invest in Oyo, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The size of the investment and the valuation are unclear. Oyo…
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Just half a year after leading SODA’s Series B, SoftBank Ventures Asia is raising its bet on the Tokyo-based sneaker resell platform. The early-stage venture capital arm of SoftBank Group announced today it has returned to lead SODA’s Series C, which currently totals $56.4 million. Other investors include South Korean sneaker reselling platform KREAM (another…
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Rui Ma Contributor More posts by this contributor Factories Aren’t Dying To Take Your Order And Other Hardware Startup Follies Working With A Chinese Factory, Hardware Entrepreneur Edition China’s e-commerce and industrial ecosystem is as different from the Western world as its culture. The country took decades to earn its reputation as the Factory of…
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Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. Despite the geopolitical headwinds for foreign tech firms to enter China, many companies, especially those that find a dependable partner, are still forging ahead. For this…
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Shares in Zomato, a Gurgaon-based food delivery company and first of India’s consumer tech startups to go public, closed up 64.7% in its debut day of trading in Mumbai, delivering a key insight into the appetite investors have for the world’s second largest internet market’s burgeoning startup ecosystem. Zomato’s shares traded all day above the…
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GudangAda founder and chief executive officer Stevensang GudangAda, a Jakarta-based marketplace that brings wholesalers closer to retail stores and other buyers, announced it has closed a Series B of more than $100 million. The company says the round was oversubscribed, passing its initial target of $75 million. The funding was led by Asia Partners and…
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The universe of Indian firms attempting to replicate Thrasio’s success in the world’s second largest internet market just got bigger. Three-month-old GlobalBees said on Monday it has raised $150 million in a Series A financing round led by FirstCry. Lightspeed Venture Partners also invested in the new financing round, which is $75 million in equity…
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Lee Li Contributor Lee Li is a project manager and B2B copywriter with a decade of experience in the Chinese fintech startup space as a PM for TaoBao, MeitTuan and DouYin (now TikTok). The fintech sector has been hugely successful (and hugely profitable) for much of the last decade, and even more so during the…
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Indian startup Inshorts, which operates an eponymous news aggregator service, has raised $60 million in a new financing round as its two-year-old bet — launch of a new social media app called Public — continues to impress, the startup confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. Vy Capital led the new round in Inshorts, which has raised…
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Arcc, a coworking space in Singapore available for bookings on Deskimo Part of Y Combinator’s current batch, Deskimo wants to make finding coworking spaces easier. Its on-demand booking app is currently available in Singapore and Hong Kong, with plans to enter more markets after Demo Day. Its founders are former Rocket Internet executives who say…
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