1.InCred Finance raises $60 mn, turns unicorn

InCred Finance, the lending arm of financial services firm InCred Group, has raised ₹500 crore ($60 million) in its Series D round of funding joining the coveted ‘unicorn’ club, which has not seen any major additions in the country in 2023 besides quick commerce firm Zepto.The latest round values InCred Finance at about ₹8,800 crore ($1.05 billion).

The fund raise comes sixteen months after the firm completed its merger with US private equity giant KKR in July last year in an all-stock deal.

2.Dish needs wash: What does Tata Play tell us about DTH, cable TV's future? Vanita Kohli-Khandekar in Business Standard. Some excerpts:

A year ago, Tata Play, the satellite television broadcaster once kno­wn as Tata Sky, became the first company in India to take the “co­n­fidential” pre-filing route for an initial pu­b­lic offering (IPO). Under the confide­n­t­ial route, the company did not need to reveal the details of the prelim­­­inary documents and could change its mind about going public after hearing back from the Securities and Exchange Board of India.

The following month, Tata Play got the green signal from the stock market regulator to proceed with its IPO. However, the issue is yet to happen. The current market buzz is that it could take a lot more time.

Meanwhile, unconfirmed reports suggest the Tata group could buy out the 20 per cent equity in Tata Play held by Temasek, the Singapore-based investment firm, at a valuation of just under $1 billion (Rs 8,350 crore at the prevailing exchange rate). That is a comedown for what was till 2019 one of India’s largest and most profitable media companies. In fact, soon after the “confidential” pre-filing for the IPO, word on the street was that Tata would seek an enterprise valuation of Rs 16,000 crore to Rs 18,000 crore in the issue.

DTH, which is short for direct-to-home broadcast through satellites, and cable to­gether constitute the pay TV market. From more than 160 million homes four years ago, pay TV is down to about 100 million.

At the top end, viewers are going to streaming platforms through broadband internet, which telecom firms Jio and Airtel are better placed to offer. At the bottom end, they are deserting pay TV for free DTH, which Prasar Bharati offers through DD Freedish.

It is not that people are not watching TV, it is just that more and more of them are watching it through means other than a DTH or cable connection. Roughly 15-25 million of the 60 million homes that have dropped off pay TV have shifted to broad­band either through cable or telecom.

If you hook up your smart TV to a broad­band connection, you can watch both strea­ming platforms as well as regular television on it. These become hybrid homes. 

This is reflected in the declining subscribers and revenues of Dish TV, Tata Play, and Airtel Digital TV. In 2022-23, Tata Play made a loss of Rs 105 crore on revenues of Rs 4,530 crore. Dish TV’s revenues fell to Rs 1,110 crore in FY23, less than half its FY19 level, while its losses almost doubled to more than Rs 2,230 crore. Read on.

3.The $100 billion market to make everyone thinner just got more crowded.

 Eli Lilly won US approval to use the active ingredient (tirzepatide) in its diabetes drug as a treatment for obesity. Zepbound, as the new weight-loss treatment is called, will cost $1,059.87 for a month’s supply. That’s cheaper than Wegovy, a similar drug made by Novo Nordisk, which is $1,349 for a month’s supply.

The mania over weight-loss drugs is drawing responses from all kinds of industries, including airlines, dialysis centers and big box chains like Walmart. Lilly wasn’t allowed to market its diabetes drug, Mounjaro, for obesity prior to Wednesday’s approval. The promise of these drugs has boosted Lilly and Novo to record heights—Lilly is now the most valuable health-care company in the world. 

But with the frenzy comes the still-open question about any possible long-term health risks that may be associated with weight-loss drugs. 

Clinical trials have shown the appetite-suppressing drug can help patients lose 21% of their body weight when combined with a healthy lifestyle

4.AI startup Humane is expected to reveal its long-rumoured AI Pin today, a wearable device powered by ChatGPT to function as a hybrid between a personal assistant and smartphone, according to The Verge.

Humane’s first gadget, the AI Pin, has been announced as one of Time Magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2023.

It appears the AI Pin will attach magnetically to your clothing, and uses “a mix of proprietary software and OpenAI’s GPT-4” to power its many features. (If you remember, that includes everything from making calls to translating speech to understanding the nutritional information in a candy bar.)

Most interesting of all: the AI Pin has a “Trust Light,” which lights up anytime the device’s camera, microphone, or other sensors are recording data in some way.

Humane has been hyping the AI Pin for months, all the way back to a TED talk in April in which co-founder Imran Chaudhri showed some demos.

Chaudhri has called the Pin “a new kind of wearable device and platform,” and said it doesn’t require a smartphone or any other device — which raises lots of questions about how the Pin is going to work. It’s no surprise that there’s a lot of large language model-based tech in here, though, given how much Humane has talked up the Pin’s AI capabilities. Chaudhri is one of a number of former Apple employees at the company, and Humane has played up that connection in positioning the Pin as the next big thing.

See Chaudhri’s Ted talk below (worth re-seeing even if you have seen it earlier) :

5.Russia faces a labor shortage as workers are increasingly required for its arms industry. 

President Vladimir Putin has pointed to the country’s top-line GDP growth as proof of its resilience to Western sanctions. But those numbers are bolstered by defence spending, the Financial Times reported, and mask structural problems in the wider economy: 300,000 men were mobilized last year, and many more — mainly educated young men — fled to avoid conscription, hitting IT and other skilled sectors.

Moscow moving the economy to a war footing drew remaining workers into arms production, leaving civilian industries struggling: Employees are being required to put in longer weeks, and manufacturing vacancies are way up.

Russia is not alone among industrialised economies in having a very tight labour market, and the fact that its population is ageing and shrinking only worsens the shortages. But the war makes Russia’s crisis particularly severe.

Russia’s unemployment rate has fallen to 3 per cent, its lowest level in 30 years, leaving businesses struggling to find workers for the labour-intensive industries that dominate the country’s economy.

Russia is short of 500,000 to 700,000 IT workers, the minister for digital development said in August. One manager in the telecoms sector said senior professionals were “a rare commodity”.