🏠 How NoBroker is leveraging AI

Start Your Day with YS Buzz: Your 8 AM Snapshot of Today's Top Startup News! 09 May 2024 [View in Browser]( Hello, OYO is on a hunt for funds. According to [TechCrunch]( the hotel-chain company is engaging with investors, including Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund Khazanah, to raise a new funding round that could cut its valuation to $3 billion or lower. The report, citing sources, said the round would see some secondary transactions that will value OYO at as low as $2.5 billion—a steep drop from its peak valuation of $10 billion in 2019. Meanwhile, Zomato has launched a crowd-supported weather infrastructure, [Weather Union]( over 650 on-ground weather stations—to offer real-time, location-based information on key weather parameters. Elsewhere, Simpl, which specialises in buy-now-pay-later products, has [laid off]( over 100 employees as it aims for profitability. The fintech startup is reportedly dealing with elevated cash burn and a slowdown in new user acquisitions. In other news, it looks like [McDonald’s]( is having a tough challenge in the country. Its Indian franchisee owner, Westlife Foodworld, reported a 96% slide in Q4 profit as inflation-weary consumers cut back spending on fast food even as franchisees tried to lure them with discounted prices. [ICYMI:]( Global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels this century. Lastly, thanks to AI, this specialist has identified [40 counterfeit paintings]( selling on eBay, and among them are a “Monet” and a “Renoir”, priced exorbitantly high! In today’s newsletter, we will talk about - Decoding NoBroker’s AI model - LLM for financial services - Preserving Gujjar crafts in Kashmir Here’s your trivia for today: What caused the first computer bug? --------------------------------------------------------------- Startup Decoding NoBroker’s AI model the past seven years, proptech unicorn NoBroker has been dabbling with AI. NoBroker’s latest B2B offering, Convozen, is a small language model (SLM) that offers service agents tools to enhance performance and customer satisfaction. Improving performance: - Convozen streamlines business operations by leveraging AI to evaluate consumer interactions across channels, ensuring adherence to SOPs and providing automated quality assessment. It uses ML to transcribe and extract insights. - Its Pitch Pop feature summarises previous conversations and customer moods. On the other hand, the Agent Assist feature offers real-time support and guidance to service agents. - Convozen has a mechanism for companies to rate the customer-agent interactions, which NoBroker calls ‘sentiment analysis’, by marking them either positive or negative. This process involves monitoring conversations continuously. [Read More]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Funding Alert 1) Atlan: $105M|Series C 2) Myelin Foundry: $4M|Equity 3) Eternz: $1.15M|Pre-Seed --------------------------------------------------------------- Fintech LLM for financial services Fintech player Pine Labs-owned API platform Setu has developed India's first domain-specific Large Language Model (LLM) for the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sectors. Called Sesame, the LLM has been developed in collaboration with Sarvam AI, an indigenous AI research firm specialising in creating innovative and tailored AI solutions for various industries. AI solution: - The model aims to enable BFSI users to make smarter and faster credit decisions and provide hyper-personalised financial services across their entire lifecycle. - It uses a data-rich ecosystem backed by India's thriving digital infrastructure to provide improved credit underwriting, fraud detection, loan monitoring, upsell/cross-sell, and personal finance advisory. - “We showed that we can significantly increase the accuracy of identifying insights from financial statements. This is a template which we believe can be repeated across sectors," said Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder, Sarvam AI. [Read More]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Inspiration Preserving Gujjar crafts in Kashmir Khanum, a 25-year-old philosophy and social science graduate, has turned her paternal home into a centre for reviving the Gujjar community’s rich art and heritage. The Noor Centre upholds the vanishing handwork—colourful embroidery, stitching, knitting, and designing practices—unique to the Gujjars’ once pastoral lifestyle, identity, and ancestry. Celebrating identity: - Khanum’s Noor Centre has become a knowledge and skilling hub for young women from the ethnic community to reclaim their identity and sow the seeds for financial independence. - Last year, with the help of the NGO Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Federation of India Limited, she presented her work at cultural events in Ladakh and Ranchi. - "At Noor, I have learnt ways to incorporate our traditional styles into my designs, thereby making them mainstream,” says 25-year-old professional designer Kulsuma Yusuf. [Read More]( --------------------------------------------------------------- From the CapTable CEO exit highlights Ola’s mounting ride-hailing struggles Last week, SoftBank-backed Ola Cabs announced that CEO Hemant Bakshi would leave the company after only eight months at the helm of the ride-hailing unicorn. Just four months ago, though, Bakshi was the very picture of confidence, full of bluster and belief that Ola’s e-bike taxis would disrupt the two-wheeler ride-hailing space. Indeed, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that scaling the e-bike taxi service was Bakshi’s primary mandate.Today, Bakshi is an increasingly distant speck in Ola’s rearview mirror and, far from disrupting the ride-hailing space with its fleet of electric scooters, Ola finds itself being disrupted. Newer, nimbler players with zero-commission models are upending the industry. Despite Aggarwal maintaining that Ola is the country’s biggest ride-hailing company, multiple industry executives say that Rapido beat Ola in terms of total number of rides across categories this February. Not only are Ola’s e-bike taxi plans yet to truly take off, the company quietly relaunched regular bike taxis in Bengaluru recently in its quest to catch up to Rapido. Key takeaways: - Last week, ride-hailing company Ola announced its CEO Hemant Bakshi would be leaving the company after just 8 months at the helm. - His exit comes at a time when rival Rapido claims to have leapfrogged its older rival in terms of rides per day, largely on the back of its thriving bike-taxi business. - Meanwhile, Ola’s e-bike taxi business, which it touted as a massive disruptor, is yet to truly scale. - A reliance on gig workers, the immature EV market, and regulatory headwinds, among others, have hampered its spread. [Continue Reading]( --------------------------------------------------------------- News & updates - [Recovery:]( Almost all customers of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX will get their money back—plus interest. As per a reorganisation plan, FTX estimates it owes creditors around $11.2 billion. The company said it has between $14.5 billion and $16.3 billion to distribute to creditors. - [Warnings:]( The RBI has warned some non-bank lenders against disbursing cash loans in excess of the permissible limit of Rs 20,000, a move likely to stop large cash payouts to those borrowing against gold. The advisory comes within weeks of regulatory action against IIFL Finance for violating cash disbursal and other norms. - [Losses:]( Uber posted a surprise first-quarter net loss of $654 million, driven by legal charges and provisions and those related to fair valuation of certain company investments, sending the shares of the ride-share and food delivery company down nearly 9% on Wednesday. Did you know? What caused the first computer bug? Answer: An insect, more precisely, a moth! We would love to hear from you! To let us know what you liked and disliked about our newsletter, please mail nslfeedback@yourstory.com. If you don’t already get this newsletter in your inbox, [sign up here](. For past editions of the YourStory Buzz, you can check our [Daily Capsule page here](. [Feedback]( [Unsubscribe]( [Newsletters](