A quick roundup of the developments in the Indian and international digital, tech and business ecosystem. 

Funding and acquisitions

  • Health startup Niramai has raised $6 million in a Series A round led by Dream Incubator, with participation from BEENEXT and others, per a company statement.
  • Reliance has acquired the equity shares of EasyGov via its subsidiary Reliance Industrial Investments & Holdings for a cash consideration of Rs 18 crore, and will further invest up to Rs 50 crore, per a stock exchange filing [pdf]. EasyGov is a software and data company, and develops software for the delivery of government schemes and services. 
  • Walmart Labs has acqui-hired Bangalore-based deeptech startup Dataturks, which had 35 paying clients in health and legal sectors in the US, reports Inc42.
  • Swiggy has invested Rs 31.2 crore in Fingerlix as part if its Series C round, in which Accel Partners and Zephyr Peacock have also participated, reports the Economic Times.

Developments in digital businesses

  • B2B agriculture startup CropIn has registered 3x growth in annual accruing revenue over the last 15 months; it claims to have digitized 5 million acres of land.
  • Neeraj Agarwal, executive at health and fitness startup CureFit has quit the company to launch xto10x as co-founder and COO, per the Economic Times. xto10x has been started by Binny Bansal and McKinsey consultant Saikiran Krishnamurthy.
  • Zomato has seen a 45% increase in table reservations over the last two months from New Year’s Eve to Valentine’s Day, per a company statement.
  • Payments mobile app TrueBalance has partnered with PayU to offer UPI payments on the app, per a company statement.
  • ZEE5 has entered a carrier billing deal with Apigate along with bundling, wallets and application to person messaging for subscribers, per a company statement. Apigate has 3.5 billion customers worldwide across 110 mobile network providers in Asia, Middle East, Latin America, Europe, and Africa.
  • Education startup UdaCity has 36,000 paying students in India, with over 1.15 million students taking free courses, head of Udacity Sebastian Thrun told the Economic Times. The startup runs collaborations with Infosys, Wipro, Flipkart, and others. Thrun also said Bangalore has been the most active city globally since launch.

Policy

  • Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg will meet with a British official to discuss internet regulation and fake news, reports CNBC. The two would discuss the UK government’s plan to regulate tech companies over how they deal with harmful content.