1K Kirana shuts down, after raising #36Mn from Info Edge and Alpha Wave

- 1K Kirana, a kirana tech startup backed by Info Edge, is on the brink of bankruptcy and is exploring a distress sale to stay afloat. - The startup, which once had over 1,000 employees, has drastically reduced its workforce to just 30, and its website and apps are non-functional. - Despite raising over $32 million in funding, 1K Kirana's aggressive expansion and high operational costs have led to financial instability and mass layoffs. - The company is in talks with ShopKirana for a potential acquisition, but the deal's details remain unclear. - The kirana tech sector, once booming during the pandemic, is now facing consolidation and competition from larger B2B ecommerce players, making survival challenging for smaller startups like 1K Kirana. Source: Inc42

Just heard that 1K, an omnichannel grocery startup in gurgaon series B funded by info edge and alpha wave have laid off close to 60% employees and severance package is also not announced yet.

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/startup/info-edge-ventures-backed-1k-kirana-lays-off-40-workforce-to-restructure-business-10359421.html

Info Edge Writes Off Entire Investment In Sequoia-Backed Bijnis https://inc42.com/buzz/breaking-info-edge-writes-off-entire-investment-in-sequoia-tiger-backed-bijnis/

Can anyone confirm. Reliance Retail laying of 80% workforce from JioMart.

I have interviews lined up. Please share some insights

Once the posterboy of vc funded fast growing startups, Khatabook has grown quite. Anyone has an idea what's happening? I have heard from somewhere they have become profitable on the back of lending to shopkeepers.

Dunzo Taskmo Frontrow

After securing $66.4 million across seven funding rounds. koo Shuts down 🙂👏

I work at this company since 2+ years, day before yesterday company received an email from one of the two payment gateways that they use for catering Indian and International users for both payments as well as payouts. Now since the gateway that was catering the international users banned the company's account, all of the international transactions went to 0 quickly which was more than 90% of the total revenue, additionally they fined the company for $425,000 Now the problem for the company is: 1. The transactions completely stopped 2. A large sum of money in the account as balance is on hold by the payment gateway accounting to approximately, 1/5th of fine. 3. The fine which the payment gateway is charging, doesn't have any underlying reason as why the fine amount is so big. 4 There's absolutely no reply from the payment gateway on the email hence no way to contact directly. Now, the thing is company knew this day was possible but they had took preventive measures as well and weren't expecting this to happen anytime soon and atleast with a prior notice unlike which landed like a bomb with a brief (text only) email. So there are features called radar and chargeback protection in the payment gateway which take some percentage of your transaction to ensure if there are some fraudulent/illegal transactions they will flag those transactions and prevent the customers (our company in this case) from getting disputes from the card owner/payee, having which of no use to the company. As per the terms, a threshold percentage of your transactions need to be disputed in order to be flagged as suspicious for the payment gateway which was way less in the company's case. Although company too could have prevented this from just banning users whose payments were getting disputed by the card holders claiming they didn't authorise the purchase or either the user didn't deliver for what the payment was done by the payee. In either of the case banning that user was the ideal action.