Tata Digital taps Mad Street Den as ‘AI partner of choice’; Apple supplier plays down lockdown impact; Liminal raises $4.7 mln

Tata Digital has partnered with Mad Street Den, an AI platform provider, to make Tata Neu, the so-called ‘super app’ it is developing for retail consumers, a more personalised and connected experience for users. Apple supplier Foxconn says the impact of March Covid lockdowns in China is lower than expected on production. And crypto startup Liminal raises more funding. Notes: Tata Digital has partnered with Mad Street Den, an AI platform provider, to make Tata Neu, the so-called ‘super app’ it is developing for retail consumers, a more personalised and connected experience for users. Tata Digital has selected Mad Street Den as its AI partner of choice, the company said in a press release yesterday. Tata Neu will use Mad Street Den’s Blox AI platform to personalise its app from fashion to finance, gadgets to groceries, hotels to health and tech to travel, bringing together the Tata Group’s multiple consumer brands into one online commerce destination for users. The app, launched in April, has seen some 7 million downloads so far. Mad Street Den, founded in 2013, is a Chennai and Silicon Valley company, founded by Ashwini Asokan, Anand Chandrasekaran and Costa Colbert. The startup is backed by investors including Falcon Edge, Sequoia Capital, and Exfinity Ventures. “The Tata Group touches over a hundred million consumers in India” Sauvik Banerjjee, CTO of Tata Digital, said in the press release. “We’ve been working with Anand and Ashwini at Mad Street Den to fulfil this proposition of personalised customer experiences across our brands. I have seen this platform grow from just retail, to unleash its true value of powering any use case across industries, data types, images, videos, text and so much more,” he said. Blox works with large enterprises to help them become ‘AI-native,’ the company said in its press release. “What makes blox.ai different is that we are not in the business of selling point solutions that don’t address the business problem. Our AI solutions absorb multi-dimensional data, real-time, responding to customers and users dynamically to deliver value across the value chain,” CEO Asokan said. “Once you are live with the platform, what you get is a singular view of your business, customers, inventory, content, process, all speaking to each other,” Chandrasekaran, the CTO, said. Working with the Tata Neu app is also the ultimate case study on what Blox can do with multiple business verticals in a single app,” he said. One of Apple’s biggest contract manufacturing partners, Foxconn, said the impact of China’s Covid lockdowns on its operations wasn’t as bad as expected, CNBC reports, citing a Nikkei Asia report on Tuesday that is behind a paywall. Foxconn Chairman Liu Young-way said the company has seen a more limited impact from the lockdowns than it anticipated, and it raised its outlook for the current quarter and the full year as a result. Key manufacturing facilities have been operating at normal levels and product development is ongoing, the company said, according to Nikkei, CNBC reports. The Wall Street Journal reported on May 21 that Apple is looking to expand production in countries including India and Vietnam. Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds: https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds