ETtech Evening Briefing on Mar. 1, 2021: Crouching Tiger, and ride-hailing's slow recovery

Good evening,

Tiger Global, the New York-based investment firm, is set for another bumper year in India after investing $677 million in Indian companies—about 20% of its total investments worldwide—in 2020. The company has invested $189 million in six Indian companies already in 2021, and it’s barely March.

Meanwhile, ride-hailing is making a slow but steady comeback, and Facebook has paid $650 million to settle a privacy dispute with some users in the US.

Tiger Global continues to bet on India

Even as a raging pandemic dented businesses across sectors, Tiger Global pumped $677 million into Indian companies in 2020 alone, according to data from Tracxn.

The aggression could partly be attributed to the change of guard at the New York-based fund’s top deck. In 2019 Lee Fixel, the former CEO of the firm (who, incidentally, is known as the Maharaja of Indian e-commerce for his steadfast backing of Flipkart), stepped down, making way for Scott Shleifer. Known to be media-shy and extremely secretive, Shleifer has steered the fund to invest more in India, and in new sectors such as edtech, food delivery, fintech and SaaS, among others.

Almost one-fifth of the fund’s total investments in 2020 were in India, the data shows.

It is now in talks to invest more in companies such as Groww, an online investment platform, and Pristyn Care, a healthcare startup focused on surgeries.

Tiger’s numbers: According to data from Venture Intelligence, the fund has already pumped in $189 million into six companies in 2021, including Innovaccer, Infra.Market, Ally, Cred and Zomato. To date, the fund has invested $3.4 billion across 83 companies in India and is poised to invest another half-a-billion dollars this year, experts close to the fund believe.

Ride-hailing’s slow recovery

India’s ride-hailing industry, which includes cabs, auto-rickshaws and bike taxis, clocked 71 million trips worth $164 million in January, according to market tracker RedSeer Consulting.

Why it matters: This marks a 63% recovery in the value and volume of rides from pre-Covid-19 levels. The sector saw 113 million rides worth $259 million in gross booking value (GBV) in January 2020, before the country went into lockdown.


What’s driving this? The bounce-back was largely aided by auto and bike taxi rides, which recovered to 83% and 62% of their pre-Covid levels respectively in January, compared to just 54% for cabs.

Cities lead the way: The study also found that the top seven cities were leading the recovery. Kolkata’s numbers have bounced back to more than 80% of pre-Covid levels, while Delhi’s and Mumbai’s have recovered by over 50%.


We reported earlier that ride-hailing companies were increasingly focusing on corporate partnerships as employees start returning to offices, even as overall demand remained well below pre-pandemic levels.

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ETtech Done Deals

■ Paradigm Shift Capital, a soon-to-be-launched US-based fund, plans to deploy $15-20 million over the next 12-15 months in early-stage startups in India and the United States. The Delaware-based fund—which will be launched by Govind Mundhra, former chief financial officer of WeWork India, along with Surabhi Washishth and Dhruv Washishth—will deploy 70% of its capital in India and the rest in the US.

■ Edtech startup ImaginXP has raised $1.5 million in a pre-Series A funding round led by Venture Catalysts along with participation of angel investors Shashank Deshpande, Krish Kupatjil, Samyakth Capital and others. The funding is aimed at accelerating both offline and online degree programmes.

■ Argoid, an AI-driven streaming media personalisation platform, has raised $1.7 million in a seed funding round that was led by YourNext Capital, an early-stage fund focused on deep-tech and enterprise segments. Turbostart and Team Launchpad.vc—an affiliate of Rock Mountain Capital and Catch NYC—also participated in the fundraising.

Facebook pays $650 million to settle privacy dispute


A US judge has given final approval to Facebook Inc.'s $650 million payment to settle a privacy dispute between the company and 1.6 million users in the state of Illinois.

Biometric data: During the trial, Facebook was found to be violating Illinois law by storing biometric data—digital scans of people's faces, in support of its face-tagging feature—without users' consent, the report said.

The backstory: In 2015, Chicago attorney Jay Edelson sued Facebook, accusing the tech giant of illegally collecting biometric data to identify faces, in violation of a 2008 Illinois privacy law. In January 2020, Facebook agreed to pay $550 million after it failed to get the lawsuit—filed as a class action in 2018—dismissed. In July 2020, the judge in the case, James Donato, ruled that the amount was insufficient.

Govt gets more time to examine WhatsApp's privacy policy

The government on Monday told the Delhi High Court that WhatsApp's new privacy policy, which is scheduled to come into effect from May 15, was being examined at the highest level and they were seeking clarifications from the company on the issue. The court adjourned the matter until April 19.

The backstory: WhatsApp unveiled a new privacy policy update in January, which would allow it to share users’ metadata and business chats with parent company Facebook starting February 8. But after a huge controversy, WhatsApp deferred the implementation of the new policy to May 15 even as many users switched to rival platforms such as Signal and Telegram.

The government had earlier told the Delhi High Court that WhatsApp’s attempt to introduce a new privacy policy for Indian users, while refraining from doing so in Europe, was a "major cause for concern".