Reliance Retail buys Clovia; Sarah and Ajit Isaac fund new IISc centre; Cricketer Mahela Jayawardene co-founds cloud-sec startup

Reliance Retail, part of the Reliance Industries conglomerate, is acquiring an 89 percent stake in direct-to-consumer brand Clovia for $125 million. Indian Institute of Science has entered into an MoU with Ajit Isaac, founder and chairman of Quess Corp, and his wife Sarah Isaac, for establishing a Centre for Public Health at the IISc campus. Plus, Sri Lankan Cricketer Mahela Jayawardene co-founds a cyber security venture.  Reliance Retail, part of the Reliance Industries conglomerate, is acquiring an 89 percent stake in direct-to-consumer brand Clovia for $125 million as the largest Indian retail chain looks to expand its footprints in the apparel and innerwear categories, TechCrunch reports. Eight-year-old Clovia, which operates a ‘bridge-to-premium D2C brand’ and sells over 3,500 products across innerwear and loungewear categories for millennial women, had raised about $25.8 million before Sunday’s announcement. India’s Income Tax Department has found and seized “a large number of incriminating pieces of evidence” that reveals a Pune and Thane-based unicorn startup, referring to Infra.Market, “booked bogus purchases” and disclosed an additional income of more than $29.4 million, TechCrunch reports. Infra.Market’s investors include Tiger Global, Nexus Venture Partners and Accel, and is valued at $2.5 billion. The startup helps construction and real estate companies procure materials and handle logistics for their projects. The company “made huge unaccounted cash expenditure and obtained accommodation entries, aggregating to the tune of over Rs 400 crore ($52.7 million),” the department said in a statement, according to TechCrunch. The Indian Institute of Science has entered into an MoU with Ajit Isaac, founder and chairman of Quess Corp, and his wife Sarah Isaac, for establishing a Centre for Public Health at the IISc campus. The Isaacs have committed a sum of Rs. 105 crore towards setting up this Centre, which will be called the Isaac Centre for Public Health (ICPH), and will be a part of the postgraduate Medical School, soon to be established on campus. The Centre will be operational by 2024. Sri Lankan cricketer Mahela Jayawardene has teamed up with technology entrepreneurs Chandita Samaranayake and Stefano Harding, to co-found Dygisec, a Singapore based cyber security company, according to a press release from the company. With operations in Sri Lanka, Singapore, the US, and with plans to expand into Australia and the UK, Dygisec will offer its agent-less, data-driven cloud compliance policy engine called Triton. The company also plans to form a Cloud Security Academy to train and certify 5,000 cloud security experts representing women, financially-challenged and differently-abled individuals in Sri Lanka over the next three years. Loop, a startup building a user research tool for software product development teams, has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding led by VC firm Speciale Invest. Additional funding for the startup, founded by Kritika Oberoi and Akash Tandon, is coming from First Cheque, angel investors and a grant from Sequoia Capital India as part of the Sequoia Spark program. Looppanel allows product and design teams to analyse and share insights from Zoom-based user interviews in minutes. Product managers and designers can quickly test their assumptions and prototypes with their own customers. Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds: https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds