360 One WAM, India’s largest wealth manager focused on ultra-high-net-worth individuals, has agreed to acquire popular Indian mutual fund investment app ET Money for about $44 million.
360 One disclosed (PDF) the deal in a stock exchange filing Wednesday evening.
ET Money boasts over 900,000 transacting clients and tracks assets under management of approximately $8.3 billion.
The platform has been a popular choice for retail investors, with monthly mutual fund net flows of around $89.9 million.
ET Money is the second startup from local media powerhouse Times Internet’s portfolio to be sold in recent weeks.
EnerVenue, a startup that has developed an alternative to lithium-ion batteries for long-duration renewable energy storage, is raising $515 million in fresh equity, per an SEC filing seen by TechCrunch.
The company is in the process of building a gigawatt-scale factory in Kentucky to produce its nickel-hydrogen batteries, an endeavor that’s estimated to cost $264 million.
So far, EnerVenue has raised $308 million of the $515 million target, the filing says.
Nickel-hydrogen batteries aren’t as energy dense as lithium-ion, meaning they won’t be competing for space in electric vehicles quite yet.
The next challenge will be completing the factory, scaling production and sending its novel batteries out into the world.
According to the Form S-1, the new AI governance committee includes managers from Rubrik’s engineering, product, legal and information security teams.
Here’s why having AI governance could become the new normal.
“Aside from its strategic role to devise and oversee an AI governance program, from an operational perspective, AI governance committees are a key tool in addressing and minimizing risks,” he said.
The EU AI Act has teeth, and “the penalties for non-compliance with the AI Act are significant,” British-American law firm Norton Rose Fulbright noted.
Establishing AI governance committees likely will be at least one way to try to help on the trust front.
Rubrik, a data cybersecurity company that raised more than a half-billion dollars while private, filed to go public after the bell on Monday.
As a private-market company, Rubrik last raised a lettered round in 2019 when it closed $261 million at a $3.6 billion post-money valuation, according to Crunchbase data.
However, subscription revenue grew 40% over the same period, rising from $385.3 million to $537.9 million.
The growth in its subscription revenue, and not its legacy revenues, is the engine that could propel Rubrik to a successful IPO.
A Silicon Valley storyRubrik’s potential IPO could prove a coup for Lightspeed Venture Partners, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capital shop.
The Apple Watch gets some face time in the filing, as well.
The suit rightly notes that the Apple Watch is “only compatible with the iPhone” – a longstanding complaint among Android users interested in picking up what is far and away the market share leader.
Apple is not, however, alone in ensuring that certain functionality only operates as stated with first-party hardware, however.
The Apple Watch has historically been even more dominant in its respective category than the iPhone in the global market.
Should the DOJ’s suit force the company to open Apple Watch functionality, it would not only limit watch-based iPhone sales, it would also potentially open the device up to Android users, which, in turn, could have a positive impact on sales.
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Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Monday show, in which we take a look back at the weekend and what’s ahead in the week.
Over the weekend, we dropped an interview with Roger Lee that is well worth your time, and here’s our take on Reddit’s IPO financials.
Here’s what we got into today:
Profitable car rental service Turo is still ready for an IPO, but its growth cratered in 2023Turo, the venture-backed, peer-to-peer car rental service reported its fourth-quarter and full-year financial performance this week in an updated IPO filing.
The company has put the capital to good use, posting quick revenue growth since 2019, positive operating income since 2021 and net profit since 2022.
In 2021 Turo’s growth rebounded from 2020’s pandemic-driven woes impressively, rising 213% that year to $469 million.
However, triple-digit growth was short-lived at the car rental company, which saw its revenue growth slow to 59% in 2022 when it recorded $746.6 million worth of total revenue.
TechCrunch calculates that its Q3 2022 to Q3 2023 growth rate was 13.6%, while its Q4 to Q4 growth over the same time frame was a slightly sharper 14.3%.
A German subsidiary involved in Sam Altman’s controvercial crypto blockchain digital identity business, Worldcoin, was reported Friday to have filed a legal challenge against a suspension order from Spain’s data protection authority.
Here’s Worldcoin’s statement in full:Worldcoin is fully compliant with all laws and regulations governing biometric data collection and data transfer, including Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”).
Nor to confirm whether Worldcoin and its operators in Spain have complied with the local order to stop scanning and processing data of people from the market.
If that happens, disputes over decisions are either resolved via majority votes or, if DPAs remain split, the European Data Protection Board gets a casting vote.
The article also notes that “several” EU authorities are currently investigating whether Worldcoin complies with the GDPR.
Hot on the heels of the successful completion of its grid-connected geothermal power plant in Nevada, Fervo Energy is raising $221 million per SEC documents, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
Previous geothermal plants have only scratched the surface by accessing hot springs or shallower rock formations.
Fervo uses directional drilling techniques pioneered by the oil and gas industry to extend its wells far beyond their surface footprints.
Once those wells are drilled, Fervo then strings them with fiber optic cables connected to a range of sensors.
Previous investors include BHP Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Congruent Ventures, DCVC, and Prelude Ventures.
Google’s proposed “Findings of Fact” filing documents the history of search competition, including Google’s own beginnings, its innovations, the competitive landscape, Google’s search ads business, distribution agreements, and more.
When shareholders sold stock to various VC firms, those funds were not used to improve the search engine, the filing argues.
But it contradicts this point, too, noting that a third of DuckDuckGo’s 50 employees in 2018 were working on improving the search engine, for example.
The search engine receives only about 2.5% of general search queries in the U.S., despite estimates that 10% of people in the U.S. claim to be users.
This, DuckDuckGo’s leadership had explained, is due to the fact that people often use its search engine for some, but not all of their search queries.
