With reports of key Indian startups like Oyo and MamaEarth redrawing their IPO plans amid the current ‘tech turbulence’ the startup space in India looks uncertain. The money-raised from IPOs through the stock market is a key element in ensuring the growth and expansion of startups while also providing funds to bridge the fiscal gaps. Such uncertainty not only undermines the morale of investors and founders alike, but also casts a long shadow on the potential of the startup culture in India.
Oyo, a SoftBank Group-backed hotel chain, initially aimed for a stock market debut in late 2021 however plans were rejected by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) raising multiple red flags. A report from Bloomberg claimed that it has now decided to reduce the number of shares it will offer on the market by two-thirds in a renewed effort to still get the sale done. Since the Covid-19 pandemic hit in March this further intensified the problem for the money-borrowing CEO, Ritesh Agrawal who has come under increased scrutiny.
Mamaearth, a skincare startup, has also put its IPO plans on hold with the company’s co-founder Ghazal Alagh acknowledging the uncertainty over the current market conditions in a recent LinkedIn post and said that no specific valuation numbers have been quoted or subscribed to by the firm.
Meanwhile, in an effort to ensure that the deposits at the now collapsed Silicon Valley Bank remain insured, the FDIC appointed First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company of North Carolina to purchase SVB’s loans and deposits. This follows the bank’s collapse earlier this month after Twitter issued a notice of copyright infringement and took action to have the leaked code removed from GitHub.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation stated that all SVB NA depositors will be automatically transferred to First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company and that their deposits will remain insured by the FDIC up to the limit. First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company has around $109 billion in assets and total deposits of $89.4 billion.
The role of Chief Data Officers (CDO)s is also gaining traction with a new IBM Institute for Business Value survey finding that the CDO is rapidly becoming an important member of the C-suite. Such a rise in their importance is attributed to their responsibility of ensuring data security, increasing data ROI and making sure that data architecture is cloud-ready.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman also engaged in a public spat with Altman rebutting Musk’s criticism of OpenAI, a for-profit company backed by Microsoft and run by Altman. Musk’s criticism was directed at OpenAI granting exclusive access to its codebase to Microsoft. Musk founded OpenAI with Altman only to quit the firm shortly afterward with a report from Semafor claiming that this was due to Musk trying to take control of the startup without success.
