funding – TheNewsHub

Eruditus bags $150 million funding at $3.1 billion valuation

suimt — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 13:58:07 +0000

MUMBAI: Edtech startup Eruditus has raised a fresh $150 million in funding led by TPG even as the collapse of India’s biggest edtech startup Byju’s continues to deter investors from making heavy investments in the segment. The company’s existing investors SoftBank (through Vision Fund 2), Accel, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Leeds Illuminate and CPP Investments also backed the funding round which values Eruditus at about $3.1 billion, almost unchanged from its previous valuation of $3.2 billion at which the company had raised $650 million from investors in 2021.
Had the Byju’s meltdown not happened, it would have been easier for Eruditus to close the funding round sooner, said co-founder and CEO Ashwin Damera. “This has been a longer, tougher fundraise than before. We came across many funds which showed interest but eventually came back and said we do not want to do anything in education in India,” Damera told TOI.
The startup, Damera said, turned profitable on EBITDA basis in FY24 and the firm’s ability to execute well may have worked in its favour in a difficult funding environment for the edtech space. Eruditus operates in the higher education space which has takers as people increasingly look to upskill themselves in an evolving landscape where technology is changing the way organisations and people work. The startup partners with universities to offer degree programmes and professional certificates to its users. “In FY25, we should achieve net profitability as well,” said Damera.
Portions of the fresh funds will be used to bolster the firm’s AI capabilities and make smaller acquisitions in the range of $20-$50 million. The startup is not in a rush to file for an IPO unlike many of its industry peers, Damera said, adding that it is rather focused on shifting its domicile from Singapore to India, the process for which will start sometime early next year.

Samsung Backs Scholarly AI Bot Serving Students and Academics

Ashish Singh — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 09:14:38 +0000

Liner, an AI search engine for students and researchers, has raised $29 million (roughly Rs. 243 crore) from investors including Intervest, Atinum Investment and Samsung Venture as it builds out its business in specialised information retrieval.

The Seoul-headquartered AI startup’s biggest and fastest-growing market is in the US, where it has 10 millions users across universities like UC Berkeley, Texas A&M, and the University of Southern California. The vast majority of its paying users are in higher education, and about two-thirds are in the US, founder and Chief Executive Officer Luke Jinu Kim said in an interview.

Liner’s tool, launched last year, aims to be a more reliable Artificial Intelligence (AI) service than general-use ones like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Perplexity’s bots. It narrows its search to credible sources like academic papers and government databases, and the company has access to a library of scientific journals and publications.

“It’s a new type of search engine. There’s no junk, only valuable information,” 33-year-old Kim said. The tool works across academic disciplines, from medicine to engineering, humanities and history.

It uses generative AI, the same tech that helped build bots like ChatGPT and Alphabet Inc.’s Google Gemini, customiing large language models to weigh the validity of information. Students can ask complex queries like “what are the key literary devices in Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy and what is their significance,” or “How do you calculate the heat loss through a wall with a material’s thermal conductivity, thickness and temperature difference.”

The startup has its roots more than a decade ago when Kim and Chanmin Woo were undergrads and created a browser extension to highlight only pertinent results from web searches. When ChatGPT was released in late 2022, they took the opportunity to create a more disciplined chatbot that wouldn’t suffer from hallucinations, Kim said.

Investors in the Series B round include LB Investment, as well as existing backers Capstone Partners and SL Investment, the startup said. It has raised a total of $33 million (roughly Rs. 277 crore) so far, and is adding to its roughly 40-person global team with more positions in San Francisco.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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AMD Sees Next AI Chip in Mass Production Later This Year

SpiceJet's grounded planes to fly again within 2 years; earmark Rs 400 crore

suimt — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 06:32:11 +0000

SpiceJet informs DGCA all its grounded planes to fly again within 2 years; earmark Rs 400 crore for that.

NEW DELHI: Thanks to its recent Rs 3,000-crore funding, SpiceJet has informed the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) it plans to have all its grounded planes back in the air within 18-24 months.
Ajay Singh’s airline has earmarked Rs 400 crore for spares, maintenance and engineering for this task. In the interim, it will also wet-lease some planes (hire planes with operating crew) to give a boost to capacity, this is what SpiceJet engineering informed the DGCA last Friday when the airline was called for their post-funding plans regarding operational fleet size.
The more comes at a time when the regulator is finalising the winter schedule of flights that will be effective from this month’s end. “The airline informed seven grounded aircraft will be flying again by the calendar year-end,” said sources.
Before it recently secured funding, more than half of SpiceJet’s fleet had been grounded. As on June 30, 2024, 36 of its 64 planes were grounded. And of the 28 airworthy planes, barely a few were flying. Clearly, the airline wants to change that quickly. After securing the funding, SpiceJet CMD Ajay Singh told TOI the airline aims to have a fleet of 100 aircraft by the end of 2026.
On Tuesday, the airline announced it will have 10 more planes flying by Nov-end by leasing seven and ungrounding three. Agreements for these seven leased aircraft have been signed and they should be inducted by Nov 15. “Two of these leased aircraft have already arrived in India and are scheduled for immediate induction. SpiceJet will also operationalise its grounded planes in phases, with the first three set to re-enter service before the end of November,” the airline said in a statement.
“This fleet expansion follows SpiceJet’s successful qualified institutional placement (QIP) (for) Rs 3,000 crore…. In addition to the QIP, the airline is set to receive an additional Rs 736 crore from a previous funding round, further bolstering its financial stability and growth trajectory,” the airline said.
SpiceJet CMD Ajay Singh said: “This addition is crucial as we continue to meet the growing demand for air travel while strengthening our operational capabilities. With the capital raised, SpiceJet is well-positioned to offer improved services and an expanded route network. We are committed to delivering seamless, reliable, and affordable travel, and we are excited about the future for both the airline and our passengers.”