Tag: india

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Xiaom Q4 sees strong growth in overseas shipment and internet services

Xiaomi, the Chinese company known for its cheap handsets and a vision to drive revenues by selling internet services, has come in ahead of analysts’ estimates in its fourth-quarter profit although revenues missed expectations.

The Hong Kong-listed company more than tripled its net profit to 1.85 billion yuan ($276 million), exceeding the 1.7 billion yuan average estimate, Reuters reported citing Refinitiv data. However, revenue from the quarter missed the 47.4 billion yuan expectation, rising 26.5 percent to 44.4 billion yuan ($6.62 billion).

Xiaomi singled out overseas markets in its latest earnings report as the segment grew 118.1 percent to make up 40 percent of its total revenue in the fourth quarter, compared with just 28 percent for the year-earlier period. Xiaomi has been particularly well-received in India, where it holds a leading position in smartphone shipments according to market researcher Canalys, and it’s seeing rapid growth in western Europe.

Unlike conventional smartphone makers that are fixated on selling hardware, Xiaomi runs what it calls a “triathlon” business model comprising of hardware, software and retail. To put it in layman’s terms, the company is selling hardware through its network of online and offline stores, upon which users will consume the app services and in-app ads that come with its smartphones, smartwatches, smart air purifiers and hundreds of other connected devices.

Xiaomi’s five-year plan is a $1.5 billion bet on smart homes

Xiaomi has repeatedly billed itself as an “internet” firm, though so far smartphones are still its main economic driver, accounting for 65.1 percent of overall revenue in Q4. Despite a sluggish year for smartphone brands around the world, Xiaomi handsets grew nearly 30 percent to 118.7 million units in sales last year. The company predicted back in October that it was on course to hit the 100 million sales mark that month.

25.1 percent of Xiaomi’s Q4 revenue went to smart devices (excluding phones) and lifestyle items, representing an 87 percent year-over-year growth. The latter category, which ranges from umbrellas and suitcases to clothes and shoes, is pivotal to Xiaomi’s goal to attract more female users, an effort that has seen the company team up with selfie app maker Meitu. 

Internet services remain as Xiaomi’s smallest segment, bringing in only 9.1 percent of total revenue and growing at 61 percent year-over-year. But the highly lucrative business is bound to carry more load in the future as Xiaomi has promised to keep profit margins for smartphones and hardware under 5 percent.

Gross profit margin from Xiaomi’s internet services increased to 64.4 percent in 2018, up from 60.2 percent in 2017 driven by a higher-margin advertising business. The number is well above the 6.2 percent profit margin for Xiaomi smartphones, and the firm can potentially generate more internet-based income if it’s able to step up monetization of the 242.1 million monthly users on its ecosystems apps.

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Xiaomi outs Redmi Go, a $65 entry-level smartphone for India

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has announced a new entry level smartphone at an event in Delhi.

The entry-level smartphone is targeted at the Indian market and looks intended to woo feature phone owners to upgrade from a more basic mobile.

It runs Google’s flavor of Android optimized for low-powered smartphones (Android Go) which supports lightweight versions of apps.

Under the hood the dual-SIM handset has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 chipset, 1GB RAM and 8GB of storage (though there’s a slot for expanding storage capacity up to 128GB).

Also on board: 4G cellular connectivity and a 3000mAh battery.

Up front there’s a 5 inch HD display with a 16:9 aspect ration, and 5MP selfie camera. An 8MP camera brings up the rear, with support for 1080p video recording.

At the time of writing the Redmi Go is being priced at 4,499 rupee (~$65). Albeit a mark-down graphic on the company’s website suggests the initial price may be a temporary discount on a full RRP of 5,999 rupees (~85). We’ve asked Xiaomi for confirmation.

Xiaomi’s website lists it as available to buy at 12PM March 22.

While Xiaomi is squeezing its entry level smartphone price-tag here, the Redmi Go’s cost to consumers in India still represents a sizeable bump on local feature phone prices.

For example the Nokia 150 Dual SIM candybar can cost as little as 1,500 rupees (~20). Though there’s clearly a big difference between a candybar keypad mobile and a full-screen smartphone. Yet 3x more expensive represents an immovable barrier for many consumers in the market.

The Redmi Go also looks intended to respond to local carrier Reliance Jio’s 4G feature phones, which are positioned — price and feature wise — as a transitionary device, sitting between a dumber feature phone and full-fat smartphone.

The JioPhone 2 launched last year with a price tag of 2,999 rupees (~40). So the Redmi Go looks intended to close the price gap — and thus try to make a transitionary handset with a smaller screen less attractive than a full screen Android-powered smartphone experience.

That said, the JioPhone handsets run a fork of Firefox OS, called KaiOS, which can also run lightweight versions of apps like Facebook, Twitter and Google.

So, again, many India consumers may not see the need (or be able) to shell out ~1,500 rupees more for a lightweight mobile computing experience when they can get something similar for cheaper elsewhere. And indeed plenty of the early responses to Xiaomi’s tweet announcing the Redmi Go brand it “overpriced”.

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Ola raises $300M as part of a new electric vehicle partnership with Hyundai and Kia

Ride-hailing platform Ola announced today that it has raised $300 million from Hyundai and Kia as part of a strategic partnership focused on electric vehicle development.

This brings the company’s total raised to $3.8 billion according to Crunchbase. Ola’s last funding was announced just three weeks ago, when the company said it had raised $56 million in early funding by investors including Tiger Global and Matrix India (two of its earliest backers) to spend on its recently spun-out electric vehicle business called Ola Electric Mobility.

In a press release, Ola said the partnership will build “India-specific” electric vehicles and infrastructure customized for Ola’s fleet and operating and management software. It also includes new financing programs, such as loans and installment payments, for driver who want to purchase the EVs.

Ola Electric Mobility’s challenges including building EV infrastructure (and gathering related data, including maps) for India’s sprawling and diverse landscape. One incentive is the government’s stated goal of making 30 percent of the country’s vehicles electric by 2030, though it hasn’t formalized that policy yet.

Ola’s announcement said that “data accumulated during service operation will allow the companies to make constant vehicle improvements to better meet local needs and specifications.” For Hyundai, the partnership represents an opportunity to move beyond being an auto-maker to taking control of all parts in the “mobility value chain,” including production, fleet operation and services.

Ola’s goal is to increase its drivers from 1.3 million to two million and offer one million EVs by 2022. Its other EV programs include a pledge to add 10,000 rickshaws for use in cities.

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Shiok Meats takes the cultured meat revolution to the seafood aisle with plans for cultured shrimp

Rising consumer interest in alternative proteins and meat replacements has brought hundreds of millions of dollars to companies trying to grow or replace beef or chicken, but few companies have turned their attention to developing seafood alternatives.

Now Shiok Meats is looking to change that. The company has raised pre-seed financing from investors like AIM Partners, Boom Capital, and Bryan Bettencourt and is now part of the recent Y Combinator cohort presenting next week.

Co-founders Sandiya Shriram and Ka Yi Ling are both stem cell scientists working at Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research who decided to leave their cushy government posts for life in the fast lane of entrepreneurship. 

The two have set themselves a goal of creating a shrimp substitute that would be similar to what’s typically found in the freezer section of most grocery stores — and a minced shrimp-replacement for use in dumplings.

There’s a huge market for seafood across the globe, but especially in Asia and Southeast Asia where crustaceans are a huge part of the diet. Chinese consumers alone account for the consumption of some 3.6 million tons of crustaceans, according to a 2015 study from the Food and Agriculture Department of the United Nations .

Shrimp cultivation as it stands is also a pretty dirty business. The industry is constantly being criticized for poor working conditions, unsanitary farms, and ancillary environmental damage. A blockbuster report from the Associated Press revealed instances of modern slavery in the Thai seafood industry.

“We chose to start with shrimp because it’s an easier animal to deal with compared to crabs and lobsters,” says Shriram. But the company will be expanding its offerings over time to those higher-end crustaceans.

Right now, the focus is squarely on shrimp. The company’s early tests have proved successful and the company estimates that it can make a kilogram of shrimp meat for somewhere around $5,000.

While that may sound expensive, it’s still much less than many of the lab-grown meat companies are pending to produce their replacement beef.

“We’re still relatively low compared to the other clean meat companies, which are still at hundreds of thousands of dollars,” says Ling.

The company is looking to bring its first product to market in the next three-to-five years and will initially target the Asia-Pacific consumer.

That means initially selling into their home market of Singapore and expanding into Hong Kong, India and eventually, Australia.

 

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Pi Day wasn’t pleasant for a lot of tech execs

Pi Day is apparently New Job day for tech execs and VCs these days.

Leaving: Lee Fixel

It’s not every day that one of the top VC investors heads out from their shop. TechCrunch’s @cookie aka Connie Loizos has the story:

Lee Fixel, the low-flying head of Tiger Global’s private equity business, is leaving at the end of June, the firm announced today in a letter sent to clients and seen by Reuters . Scott Shleifer and Chase Coleman will continue as co-managers of the portfolios Fixel has overseen, with Shleifer taking over as its head, according to the letter.

Fixel, 39, is reportedly planning to invest his own money and “may start an investment firm in the future,” Tiger Global wrote in the letter.

Tiger Global has become a major force in late-stage investing. As I wrote last fall, it is also part of a small coterie of investment firms which have pushed their portfolio companies to IPO with reasonable speed (the other firm I noted at the time was Benchmark).

One challenge for Tiger has been the rise of the SoftBank Vision Fund, which has driven up valuations for startups and has almost certainly complicated the return profile of many of Tiger’s investments. The two also share a penchant for investing internationally, where Tiger had almost a monopoly position before the Vision Fund burst on the scene.

Another wrinkle worth tracking is the increasing opposition of Indian founders to both Tiger (and specifically Fixel) and SoftBank. As I wrote in the newsletter just a few weeks ago:

There is a clear lack of trust between India’s startup and venture communities, which ultimately threatens the sustainability and growth outlook of the country’s tech sector.

But a solution to the problem is not so cut and dry. Mega growth funds like SoftBank and Tiger Global have given limited control to their Indian portfolio companies and have forced their hands on numerous occasions. Yet Ola’s avoidance of SoftBank has led to lower valuations and more difficult and lengthier fundraising processes.

Leaving: Chris Cox & Chris Daniels

Facebook’s chief product officer is leaving along with Chris Daniels, the VP of WhatsApp. TechCrunch’s Josh Constine summarized the situation:

The changes solidify that Facebook is entering a new era as it chases the trend of feed sharing giving way to private communication. Cox and Daniels may feel they’ve done their part advancing Facebook’s product, and that the company needs renewed energy as it shifts from a relentless growth focus to keeping its users loyal while learning to monetize a new from of social networking.

There has been much ink spilled here about what this all means strategically, but I do think that there are no good times for prominent 13-year and 8-year veterans to leave their positions. Zuckerberg seems ready to begin a whole new era for Facebook, and perhaps neither wanted to make the multi-year commitment that his new vision entails.

That, or Cox unplugged the servers yesterday.

Leaving (America): Jay Jorgensen

A very rare move from the United States to Korea for a senior exec, from TechCrunch’s Catherine Shu:

Coupang, the unicorn that is defining e-commerce in Korea, announced today that it has hired Jay Jorgensen, Walmart’s former global chief ethics and compliance officer, to serve as its general counsel and chief compliance officer. Jorgensen will relocate to Seoul for the position.

Founded in 2010, with a total of $3.4 billion raised from investors, including SoftBank, and a valuation of $9 billion, Coupang currently operates only in Korea, where it is the largest e-commerce player, but has offices in Seoul, Beijing, Los Angeles, Mountain View, Seattle and Shanghai.

Coupang has been the outlier success of the Korean startup ecosystem for the past few years. The company’s founder, Bom Kim, who holds a bachelor’s and an MBA from Harvard, has worked to apply American management models to Coupang, attempting to eschew the insular culture typical of Korea’s technology companies. Clearly, that vision is drawing international talent.

Staying: Zachary Kirkhorn

Tesla is getting some financial help from itself, from TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec:

The automaker officially tapped as its next chief financial officer Zachary Kirkhorn, a longtime employee who has been part of the automaker’s finance team for nine years, according to securities filings posted Thursday. The automaker also appointed Vaibhav Taneja, who led the integration of Tesla and SolarCity’s accounting teams, as its chief accounting officer. Taneja, who will report to Kirkhorn, will oversee corporate financial reporting, global accounting functions and personnel.

No telling whether Kirkhorn knows how to blow a whistle though….

No Longer Admitted: Bill McGlashan

Sometimes when you venture to make an investment, it doesn’t always pan out, from Maggie Fitzgerald at CNBC:

TPG’s Bill McGlashan was fired from the private equity firm on Thursday amid the massive college cheating scandal.

McGlashan, 55, has been terminated for cause from his positions with TPG and Rise effective immediately.

“After reviewing the allegations of personal misconduct in the criminal complaint, we believe the behavior described to be inexcusable and antithetical to the values of our entire organization,” said a TPG spokesperson.

McGlashan founded TPG Growth, which has had a litany of successes investing in later-stage startups such as Airbnb.

Leaving (but not by choice): Bird employees

Once high-flying and now somewhat not as high-flying scooter startup Bird announced that it was laying off around 40 employees. From TechCrunch’s Megan Rose Dickey:

“As we establish local service centers and deeper roots in cities where we provide service, we have shifting geographic workforce needs,” a Bird spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We are expanding our employee bases in locations that match our growing operations around the world, while developing an efficient operating structure at our Santa Monica headquarters. The recent events are a reflection of shifting geographical needs and our annual talent review process.”

I hope they flip them the Bird on the way out.

India fintech and the growing proxy war between global tech giants

Photo by anand purohit via Getty Images

Written by Arman Tabatabai

South African media conglomerate and investment giant Naspers is reportedly planning to invest $1 billion in India this year.

According to reports earlier this week, Naspers is looking towards India’s budding fintech market in particular to unload the fresh pile of dough it’s sitting on after recently lowering its stake in Tencent and cashing out on Walmart’s $16 billion acquisition of portfolio company Flipkart last year.

The fintech heavy thesis directionally makes sense in the context of Naspers’ broader strategy. Naspers has openly discussed its attraction to India’s financial services market and the company already has an established footprint in the region as the owner of payments platform PayU.

That said, the amount Naspers is reportedly looking to gift in just one year is astounding. Indian fintech startups saw around $2.6 billion of investment in 2018 according to Pitchbook. Naspers’ investment alone would represent a 40% spike in India’s total fintech venture capital.

Though one billion dollars in one year may seem ambitious, Naspers has proven it’s not afraid to pour billions into India and emerging verticals, having just led a $1 billion round in Indian food delivery startup Swiggy only a few months ago.

More importantly, Naspers’ push shows that the company is seriously doubling down in the escalating competition to become the dominant force in India’s booming fintech ecosystem. As we discussed in our recent conversation with Billionaire Raj author James Crabtree, India’s financial system is ripe for disruption. With secular tailwinds like growing mobile penetration and financial literacy, innovative financial models in India have begun leap-frogging traditional institutions, with Google and Boston Consulting Group even forecasting that the market for digital payments in India would reach $500 billion in size by 2020.

And many have taken notice — the number of fintech investments in India has grown at a 200%-plus compound annual growth rate over the last five years, according to data from Pitchbook, as leading investors and global tech powerhouses all battle to become the layer of financial infrastructure on which the future Indian economy sits.

A recent deep dive in the WSJ highlighted how crowded the ongoing fight for Indian payments dominance has become in the context of Paytm, an Indian startup that received a $1.4 billion investment from venture behemoth SoftBank:

The Indian market is one worth fighting for, with hundreds of millions of Indians getting online and starting to transact for the first time, thanks to plummeting prices for mobile data and smartphones.

Digital payments in India are soaring” and “set to explode,” Credit Suisse said in a February research note. They should rise nearly five times to $1 trillion by 2023, the report said…

…Meanwhile, it isn’t just Google and WhatsApp challenging Paytm . Indian e-commerce titan Flipkart, in which Walmart Inc. bought a controlling stake for $16 billion earlier this year, has a popular payments service called PhonePe. Amazon.com Inc. has its own payments service and two of India’s biggest telecom players, Bharti Airtel Ltd. and Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd., offer digital wallets, as well.”

Next to peers like Alibaba, SoftBank, or Google, Naspers can often seem like the biggest tech company no one has ever heard of. But if its latest swan dive into India can help Naspers strike gold — as it did with its early investment in Tencent — it might just become the company powering the next economies of the world.

Thanks

To every member of Extra Crunch: thank you. You allow us to get off the ad-laden media churn conveyor belt and spend quality time on amazing ideas, people, and companies. If I can ever be of assistance, hit reply, or send an email to danny@techcrunch.com.

This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York

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After FAA doubles down on 737 decision, Canada grounds the planes amid reports of complaints from U.S. pilots

After the Federal Aviation Administration issued a statement late yesterday doubling down on its decision to keep the Boeing 737 Max planes at the heart of two accident investigations flying, Canada has become the latest nation to ground the plane.

“There are — and I hasten to say not conclusive — but there are similarities,” said Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau, in a statement broadcast on Canadian television. Garneau noted that the similarities “exceed a certain threshold in our minds with respect to the possible cause of what happened in Ethiopia. This is not conclusive, but it is something that points possibly in that direction, and at this point we feel that threshold has been crossed.”

Canadian concerns actually echo incident reports that were made by pilots in the U.S. regarding the control system of Boeing’s latest version of its 737 flagship aircraft.

At least two pilots who had flown the 737 Max 8 planes in the U.S. commented in incident reports about the noses of their planes dipping when the autopilot system on the aircraft had been engaged, according to a report in The New York Times citing a federal government database of incident reports.

Those reported problems are similar to the ones that occurred before the October Lion Air crash of Flight 610 in Indonesia.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is standing behind its decision to keep the Boeing 737 Max 8 planes airborne.

In a statement issued late yesterday, the FAA said it is reviewing all available data and has found “no systemic performance issues.”

Boeing is moving to address potential issues in new 737s as Europe bans its plane

The plane has been involved in two accidents within the last 6 months.

On Sunday, an Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed just after take off killing all 157 people on board. Last year, in October, the Boeing 737 Max 8 was involved in a crash in which an Indonesian Lion Air jet also crashed, killing 189 passengers and crew.

Roughly 350 737 Max 8 planes remain in service around the globe, mainly in the U.S.

Meanwhile, fleets using Boeing’s latest 737 in countries across the globe have grounded the aircraft. The plane has been suspended from service in AeroMexico, Argentina, Australia, Brazil’s Gol airline, China, Egypt, all European countries, three Persian Gulf states, India, Iceland, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Singapore, South Korea, and Turkey.

Here’s the full statement from the FAA.

The FAA continues to review extensively all available data and aggregate safety performance from operators and pilots of the Boeing 737 MAX. Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft.  Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action.  In the course of our urgent review of data on the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash, if any issues affecting the continued airworthiness of the aircraft are identified, the FAA will take immediate and appropriate action.

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YouTube Music and YouTube Premium come to India

YouTube Music is coming to the next critical battlefield for streaming music services: India. The company announced this week it’s launching its ad-supported version of YouTube Music for free in the country, as well as YouTube Music Premium, its subscription that offers background listening, offline downloads and an ad-free experience for ₹99 a month.

In addition, YouTube Premium, which extends offline play, background listening and the removal of ads across YouTube, is also launching in India. This will include access to YouTube Original programming like Cobra Kai, BTS: Burn The Stage, and others, and ships with the Music Premium subscription for ₹129 rupees per month.

This is not Google’s first entry into the streaming music market in India. The company already operates Google Play Music – and now, those subscribers will gain access to YouTube Music as part of their subscription, the company says.

India is a key market for streaming services because of its sizable population of 1.3 billion people, many of whom are still coming online for the first time. (Only some 483 million are active internet users today).

Already, Apple and Amazon operate their music services in the region, and Spotify has made an India launch a strategic focus this year.

However, Spotify’s entry into India has been complicated by a licensing dispute with Warner Music (WMG’s Warner/Chappell publishing arm, specifically). That conflict led to Spotify entering the market without some of today’s biggest artists like Cardi B. and Ed Sheeran. The case has been ugly: Warner sued Spotify asking for an emergency injunction; Spotify then accused Warner of “abusive behavior;” and Warner called Spotify a “liar.” Despite its legal troubles, Spotify hit 1 million users in India within a week of launching. That bodes well for its potential when it gets through the legal battles.

Unlike Spotify, however, YouTube Music is fully licensed as it enters the region – a potential competitive advantage. It also has a deal with Samsung where Galaxy S10 owners can gain 4 months of YouTube Premium/YouTube Music Premium for free. (Spotify has a deeper Samsung partnership, involving preinstalls and Bixby integrations.)

For YouTube, a win in India is much needed, as its streaming music service hasn’t picked up traction to date.

To some extent, that’s because YouTube users know they can get to music videos for free, but it also has to do with Google’s baffling strategy in operating two separate brands around music. Apple doesn’t make this mistake. It leverages the power of its platform to promote its only music service, Apple Music. That may have gotten it into trouble, though – today, Spotify filed a complaint with the European Commission over the “Apple tax” levied on its rivals and its restrictive rules.

Google has said it plans to merge the two services at some point, but for now the split likely leads to confusion.

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Wattpad gains strategic investment from Times Bridge to further expand in India

Wattpad is further expanding into Asia with a new partnership and undisclosed strategic investment from Times Bridge, the global investment arm of the Times Group in India. The deal aims to help the storytelling community establish a larger presence in the country where it already counts over 2.6 million monthly users who have shared more than 4 million stories to date, it says.

Similar to its recent partnership with entertainment partner Huayi Brothers Korea, the deal with Times Bridge is also focused on turning more Wattpad stories into books, TV shows, movies, and other digital projects in the region.

This is an area where Wattpad has found some success. In the U.S., one of the stories on its platform became the Netflix teen hit “The Kissing Booth,” and other stories have become projects at Hulu, AwesomenessTV, eOne, Sony, SYFY, iflix, Universal Cable Productions (NBCU), and elsewhere. The company also just launched its own books division to better capitalize on bringing its online stories to print.

India has been a more recent focus for Wattpad, following its  $51 million raise from Tencent. Soon after, the company appointed its first Head of Asia for Wattpad Studios, Dexter Ong. And it also recently hired its first GM of India, Devashish Sharma, who has been working with local partners to turn its stories into movies, TV, digital and print in the region.

“Millions of Indian readers and writers have already found a home Wattpad,” said Sharma, in a statement. “Times Bridge and The Times Group have an unmatched media and entertainment portfolio, and connections with some of India’s most-respected authors and cultural figures. We’re excited to work together to create new opportunities for Indian storytellers,” he added.

Today, Wattpad’s app supports a number of local languages including Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Assamese, Marathi, and Oriya.

To find the stories that become popular, Wattpad relies on a combination of human curation and technology – the latter with its Story DNA machine learning system that helps to identify the standouts by deconstructing things like sentence structure, word use, grammar and other factors that contribute to popularity.

“We’re thrilled to work with Times Bridge expand our footprint in the region and create more opportunities for India’s rich literary community to tell their stories, reaching new audiences in India and around the world,” said Wattpad co-founder and CEO Allen Lau, in a statement.

Wattpad didn’t disclose Times Group’s investment. The firm has previously partnered with other tech companies in India, and has investments in Uber, Airbnb, Coursera, Houzz, MUBI, Smule, and others.

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Google has quietly added DuckDuckGo as a search engine option for Chrome users in ~60 markets

In an update to the chromium engine, which underpins Google’s popular Chrome browser, the search giant has quietly updated the lists of default search engines it offers per market — expanding the choice of search product users can pick from in markets around the world.

Most notably it’s expanded search engine lists to include pro-privacy rivals in more than 60 markets globally.

The changes, which appear to have been pushed out with the Chromium 73 stable release yesterday, come at a time when Google is facing rising privacy and antitrust scrutiny and accusations of market distorting behavior at home and abroad.

Many governments are now actively questioning how competition policy needs to be updated to rein in platform power and help smaller technology innovators get out from under the tech giant shadow.

But in a note about the changes to chromium’s default search engine lists on an Github instance, Google software engineer Orin Jaworski merely writes that the list of search engine references per country is being “completely replaced based on new usage statistics” from “recently collected data”.

The per country search engine choices appear to loosely line up with top four marketshare.

The greatest beneficiary of the update appears to be pro-privacy Google rival, DuckDuckGo, which is now being offered as an option in more than 60 markets, per the Github instance.

Previously DDG was not offered as an option at all.

Another pro-privacy search rivals, French search engine Qwant, has also been added as a new option — though only in its home market, France.

Whereas DDG has been added in Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brunei, Bolivia, Brazil, Belize, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Germany, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Faroe Islands, Finland, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, India, Iceland, Italy, Jamaica, Kuwait, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Moldova, Macedonia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, Portugal, Paraguay, Romania, Serbia, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, El Salvador, Trinidad and Tobago, South Africa, Switzerland, UK, Uruguay, US and Venezuela.

“We’re glad that Google has recognized the importance of offering consumers a private search option,” DuckDuckGo founder Gabe Weinberg told us when approached for comment about the change.

DDG has been growing steadily for years, and has also recently taken outside investment to scale its efforts to capitalize on growing international appetite for pro-privacy products.

Interestingly, the chromium Github instance is dated December 2018 — which appears to be around about the time when Google (finally) passed the Duck.com domain to DuckDuckGo, after holding onto the domain and pointing it to Google.com for years.

We asked Google for comment on the timing of its changes to search engine options in chromium. At the time of writing the search giant had not responded.

We’ve also reached out to Qwant for comment on being added as an option in its home market.

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AgroStar gets $27M Series C to give more Indian farmers increase crop production with data analytics

Indian agriculture tech startup AgroStar announced today that it has raised a $27 million Series C for its platform, which helps farmers increase crop production, manage orders and buy supplies online. The round was led by Bertelsmann India Investments, with participation from returning investors Accel, Chiratae Ventures and Aavishkaar Bharat Fund.

AgroStar bills its app as a “one-stop solution” that contains everything India’s 135 million farmers need, including agronomy tools, such as a crop disease diagnosis tool that combines image recognition technology, educational content and an e-commerce store that sells farming products. Its new funding, which brings AgroStar’s total raised so far to $42 million, will be used to scale the platform in order to take advantage of India’s increasing smartphone penetration in rural areas and hire more agriculture experts.

CEO and co-founder Shardul Sheth told TechCrunch that the app has been downloaded over a million times and engaged with more than million farmers. Its target is to reach 10 million downloads over the next two years and expand its e-commerce operations to more states in India.

In a statement, Bertelsmann India Investments managing director Pankaj Makkar said the investment firm will work with AgroStar to “build the right strategy for its supply chain and will bring the best practices from our investments in similar spaces in China.”