CDP Institute

Thailand food delivery app Robinhood is now expanding its services into four key areas including supermarket, delivery, transportation and travel, in line with its plans to become a super-app. This includes Robinhood Mart, a supermarket and store shopping service, Robinhood Express, a goods delivery service, Robinhood Ride, a transportation platform, and Robinhood Travel, an online travel agent.

Singaporean multinational ride-hailing and food delivery company, Grab, has plans to execute cost-cutting measures to weather through undetermined economic situation, according to a new memo sent to employees. On a similar note, Grab Indonesia this month decided to discontinue its cloud services.

Aviva is a Mexico-based fintech startup focused on bringing working capital to unserved communities. Its approach uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to match customers’ spoken word to the fields of a real-time credit application. Now buoyed by $2.2 million in pre-seed funding, the company is rolling out a network of physical and digital onboarding kiosks in Chalco de Díaz, Ixtapaluca and Texcoco, towns about an hour’s drive from Mexico City.

Kouna, a SaaS platform for brands to optimize prices, promotions, orders, and inventory through artificial intelligence, announced raising US$6 million in a seed round, led by Mexican VC Cometa. Kouna focuses on the optimization of promotions, an aspect where mass consumer brands and retailers would allegedly not have good guidance, a problem that Kouna promises to solve thanks to machine learning.

Leading global wireless technology firm Qualcomm has launched its African Innovation Platform, a suite of mentorship, education, and training programmes created to support the development of Africa’s emerging technology ecosystem.

Sun King, a provider of off-grid solar energy products in Africa and Asia, has secured a $70 million equity investment led by LeapFrog Investments. It’s an extension of the $260 million Series D round the solar company announced this April, which was led by BeyondNetZero, the climate investing venture of General Atlantic and M&G Investments’ Catalyst and Arch Emerging Markets Partners.

A lawsuit against Facebook’s parent company Meta has been filed in Kenya’s High Court over its alleged role in fueling violence and hate in eastern and southern Africa.

In a major boost to Asia’s third largest economy’s towering ambitions to dominate the smart devices market, India’s home-grown brands now comprise 55 per cent of the country’s accessories’ space, data by market intelligence-major IDC India showed. The accessories’ space includes hearables, wearables, and power accessories. The IDC India attributed the dominance of Indian wearable brands to new launches, discounts across channels, and aggressive marketing by brands.

Google announced a slew of new features at its ‘Google for India 2022,’ plus increased use of artificial intelligence across different platforms. These include a collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru to enable Indian internet users to read webpages in their native language and a plan to build a unified model capable of handling more than 100 native languages of India.

An Australian-developed technology to convert ammonia into green hydrogen is being trialed in the United Kingdom, with hopes the Fortescue Future Industries-backed method will help turbocharge the uptake of hydrogen as a clean energy source, especially for fuel cells. The new “cracker” technology will convert ammonia into green hydrogen for electricity generation and could have future uses for vehicles such as fuel-cell electric buses and replacement diesel generators. The technology has big implications for developing green hydrogen at an industrial scale, given the fuel can be transported via ammonia.

Credit Clear (CCR), which provides tech solutions to the debt collections industry has just mapped out a three-year plan to triple its market share in Australia. The company anticipates revenue to grow to $100 million per annum over this period, underpinning an “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization” (EBITDA) growth to $25-30 million per annum. CCR currently has a 1.4% market penetration in the Australian debt collection industry worth $2.5 billion.

Mexican startup Welbe Care, which offers companies a health platform for their employees through a membership, raised US$5 million in a seed round. Welbe is a B2B platform that provides companies with a complete record of workers’ health data and enables them to comply with OHS regulations. With the platform, human resources areas can put employees in contact with general practitioners and specialists in Mexico.