Y.Combinator News

staffing solutions provider Instawork has acquired the technology platform built by Bengaluru-based online placement forum Able Jobs for an undisclosed amount. Ravish Agrawal, one of the cofounders, will serve as an advisor to Instawork, while Siddharth Srivastava, the other cofounder will join Instawork as a product leader. Through the deal, Elevation Capital, Titan Capital and other venture investors on the captable of Able Jobs will exit the company and the small team of around four employees still with the company will be taken in by Instawork, the spokesperson added.

Vapi, a San Francisco-based startup that helps businesses deploy artificial intelligence-powered voice agents, said on Thursday it raised $20 million from investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners and Y Combinator, in an early-stage funding round. The fundraise valued Vapi at $130 million, according to a source familiar with the matter. Other investors in the round included Abstract Ventures, AI Grant, Saga Ventures and Michael Ovitz, who co-founded the influential Creative Artists Agency.

payments major Stripe has moved to an ‘invite only’ mode in India, meaning merchants will not be able to join the payment aggregator by themselves. They will need to request for an invite from Stripe’s India team and wait for approval. In a post published on its website, Stripe said it will only be able to support more Indian merchants by the second half of 2025. The company did not provide any explanation for the same.

Investors keep the faith in Indian social startups, eye GenAI models Among the FinTech sector, the 'Alternative Lending' segment accounted for almost 89% of the total funding in the first three months of 2024. The 'Alternative Lending' firms clocked $491 million during this period, Tracxn mentioned. Credit Saison emerged as the top-funded company in the 'Alternative Lending' segment, receiving $144 million in a Series D round in Q1 2024.

Origin Protocol token holders have voted to merge the protocol’s lesser known token Origin DeFi Governance “OGV” with its native decentralized finance (DeFi) Ethereum token OGN.

Binance Holdings Ltd. acrimoniously split with its Indian affiliate WazirX in 2022, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange looked near-invincible in the local market while WazirX was flailing. A government crackdown on offshore platforms has abruptly reversed the competitive dynamics. Since Indian authorities in late December began restricting access to Binance and other foreign crypto exchanges operating there without local registrations, traders have flocked to domestic rivals like WazirX. Many of them are moving deposits across from Binance, according to the local venues. It’s a welcome reprieve for WazirX and competitors like CoinDCX and CoinSwitch Kuber, which were pummeled by a 2022 taxation regime that drove traders to offshore exchanges. They appear poised for further gains after Apple Inc.’s App Store this week took down the apps of Binance and seven other foreign exchanges after a request from India’s government. Deposit inflows at WazirX jumped about 250% in the four days following India’s Dec. 28 compliance show-cause notice to nine offshore platforms, compared with the four days leading up to it, according to the company. CoinDCX reopened for deposits right after the event and they immediately began pouring in, CEO Sumit Gupta said.

Binance Holdings Ltd. acrimoniously split with its Indian affiliate WazirX in 2022, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange looked near-invincible in the local market while WazirX was flailing. A government crackdown on offshore platforms has abruptly reversed the competitive dynamics. Since Indian authorities in late December began restricting access to Binance and other foreign crypto exchanges operating there without local registrations, traders have flocked to domestic rivals like WazirX. Many of them are moving deposits across from Binance, according to the local venues. It’s a welcome reprieve for WazirX and competitors like CoinDCX and CoinSwitch Kuber, which were pummeled by a 2022 taxation regime that drove traders to offshore exchanges. They appear poised for further gains after Apple Inc.’s App Store this week took down the apps of Binance and seven other foreign exchanges after a request from India’s government. Deposit inflows at WazirX jumped about 250% in the four days following India’s Dec. 28 compliance show-cause notice to nine offshore platforms, compared with the four days leading up to it, according to the company. CoinDCX reopened for deposits right after the event and they immediately began pouring in, CEO Sumit Gupta said.

Sam Altman being fired as the CEO of OpenAI. The board of the Silicon Valley-based maker of AI chatbot ChatGPT suddenly ousted Altman — one of the most influential tech entrepreneurs of our times — stating “he was not consistently transparent in his communications, hindering the board's ability to fulfill its responsibilities”.

Deep learning startup funding: Giga ML, which offers enterprises customisable large language models (LLMs), has secured $3.6 million in seed funding led by the venture capital Nexus Ventures Partners. The round also saw the contribution of startup accelerator Y Combinator and Liquid 2 Venture, 8vdx, and angel investors such as Garry Tan, the President and CEO of Y Combinator. The startup was founded by IIT-Kharagpur graduates Varun Vummadi and Esha Manideep Dinne in 2023.

cryptocurrencies climbed up to 9 per cent in the last 24 hours, with Bitcoin topping the $41,000 mark and Avalanche and Ethereum seeing big swings. Bitcoin, the largest crypto by market value, was trading 0.69 per cent higher at $41,124.58, taking its seven-day gains to 0.8 per cent. Ethereum surged 2.9 per cent in the last 24 hours to $2,769. The second-largest cryptocurrency by market value has risen 3.9 per cent in the last one week. Tether, the third-largest, was almost flat at $1 and so was USD Coin, which was flat at $0.99. BNB added 1.19 per cent, XRP gained 2.01 per cent but Terra fell 2.12 per cent.

Mudrex, Bengaluru-based crypto investing platform, has raised $6.5 million in a pre-series A round from Arkam Ventures, Tribe Capital and Bolt by QED Investors. Launched in 2018, Y Combinator-backed Mudrex has clocked a 450 per cent user growth in the last four months from over 100 countries. Four months earlier, the start-up raised $2.5 million from seed funding led by Nexus Venture Partners, Village Global with participation from Kunal Shah, Anand Chandrashekharan, and Anjali Bansal.