Also in the letter:
■ Mobikwik Q3 results
■ Swiggy closing in on 1B orders: CFO
■ China investigates Google
OpenAI, Kakao to jointly develop AI products for South Korea
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Kakao CEO Chung Shin
OpenAI is done putting all its eggs in the Microsoft basket, it would appear. Its CEO, Sam Altman, has spent the best part of his Asia tour—Japan and South Korea thus far—building key strategic alliances with internet giants in those markets to drive enterprise growth.
K-GPT: OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it would jointly develop AI products for South Korea with Kakao, one of Korea’s largest technology companies.
- Kakao operates South Korea’s leading messaging app, KakaoTalk, with a 97% market share and has expanded into ecommerce, payments, and gaming.
- Kakao directly competes with local rival Naver, but analysts say it has fallen behind Naver in the AI race.
In Japan:
- On Monday, OpenAI and SoftBank announced a joint venture called SB OpenAI Japan to market a new advanced enterprise AI offering, Cristal Intelligence, exclusively to major Japanese companies.
- A day later, SoftBank announced an annual investment of $3 billion to deploy OpenAI’s solutions across its group, including its semiconductor firm Arm and digital payment service provider PayPay.
Also Read: ETtech Explainer: How OpenAI is moving the needle with new ‘deep research’ tool
Closer home: Altman, as ET reported, is expected to arrive in New Delhi on Wednesday, where he will meet senior government officials, technology entrepreneurs and investors such as Peak XV Partners and Accel.
Also Read: China’s AI wave turns into tsunami
Bhavish Aggarwal to invest Rs 2,000 crore in AI startup Krutrim, unveils open-source models
Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal has announced a Rs 2,000 crore investment in his AI startup Krutrim and has committed to increasing it to Rs 10,000 crore by next year. The funding, sources told us, would be a mix of equity and debt financing.
Hit upgrade: Aggarwal also unveiled a slew of open-sourced models, including an upgraded version of Krutrim called Krutrim 2, a large language model (LLM).
Other released models:
- Chitrarth 1: A vision-language model built on top of Krutrim 1.
- Dhwani 1: A speech-language model capable of tasks such as speech translation.
- Vyakhyarth 1: An Indic embedding model for search and retrieval-augmented generation applications.
- Krutrim Translate 1: A text-to-text translation model.
Tell me more: Aggarwal announced a partnership with chipmaking giant Nvidia to deploy superchips, aiming to build India’s largest supercomputer.
Recent developments: This announcement follows Aggarwal’s recent update over Krutrim deploying advanced AI models from DeepSeek on its domestic servers to boost data privacy and cut AI training costs.
Also Read: ETtech Explainer: What is DeepSeek, China’s competitor to OpenAI?
Mobikwik slips into losses despite operating revenue going up
Mobikwik cofounders Bipin Preet Singh, Upasana Taku
Fintech company MobiKwik reported a net loss of Rs 55 crore for Q3 December 2024, down from a Rs 5.1 crore net profit a year earlier, due to higher processing and employee costs.
Reason: Mobikwik stated that the slowdown in the country’s unsecured credit business moderated its earnings during Q3.
- Its revenue from financial services dropped 53% to Rs 73 crore.
- Its buy-now-pay-later and consumer loan disbursals declined to Rs 700 crore, down from Rs 2,400 crore last year.
Financials:
- Operating revenue grew to Rs 270 crore, up 18% from a year ago.
- Overall expenses stood at Rs 314 crore during the quarter, a nearly 45% increase from a year ago.
The startup, backed by Peak XV Partners, listed on the bourses last month. On Tuesday, its market capitalisation was around Rs 3,131.54 crore.
Swiggy annual run rate at nearly 1 billion orders: CFO Rahul Bothra
L-R, Swiggy CFO Rahul Bothra, Eruditus founder Ashwin Damera
Food and grocery delivery company Swiggy is clocking an annualised run rate of 1 billion orders across its consumer offerings, its CFO Rahul Bothra said.
What it means: The food and grocery delivery company, set to release its December-quarter earnings on Wednesday, is currently on pace for an annualised order run rate of 1 billion. Its July-September numbers showed an annualised run rate of 920 million orders.
Breaking it down: Swiggy’s consumer verticals include food delivery, quick commerce, and out-of-home consumption. In that order, the first two segments comprise the most significant chunk of the company’s business.
IPO journey: “For us, it (going public) was an eventuality…the decision was taken on the basis of timing, for which various (things) had to align. The foremost one was the maturity of the business model,” he said.
Quick commerce boom: He noted that the quick commerce industry had reached $8 billion in annualised gross order value (GOV).
China probes Google moments after Donald Trump’s tariff enter effect
Minutes after US president Donald Trump’s additional 10% tariffs on Chinese imports took effect on Tuesday, Beijing retaliated with some of its own. Among those measures was an investigation into US tech giant Google.
Driving the news: China’s antitrust regulator, State Administration for Market Regulation, will investigate Google for alleged antitrust violations. However, it did not specify the details of the proposed investigation. Beijing also imposed new tariffs on United States imports, including:
- 15% levies on coal and liquefied natural gas.
- 10% tariffs on oil and agricultural equipment.
Yes, but: Google’s involvement in China dates back to 2006 when it launched a Chinese-language search engine. In 2010, the company shut down its Chinese search engine following a cyberattack and censorship issues. The company still maintains a sales and engineering presence in China, as well as services such as Google Cloud and related hardware.
Background: Over the weekend, United States President Donald Trump ordered a blanket 10% tariff on Chinese imports, effective from Tuesday midnight, citing Beijing’s failure to curb illegal drug flows. The order includes retaliation clauses that could raise tariffs if China responds in kind.
Also Read: Salesforce cuts 1,000 jobs amid ongoing tech layoffs: Report
