Vedanta, Foxconn to build $7-8 bln chip foundry in India; Pine Labs raises $150 mln; CRED in talks to invest in smallcase

Vedanta, Foxconn to invest $7.4 billion to build India chip foundry In a move that could give India at least a toehold in the global semiconductor fabrication market, Vedanta Group and Foxconn are partnering to build a chip foundry in India that could be ready as early as 2024, Economic Times reports. The fab will focus on 28nm technology to make chips that could go into smartphone components, among other things, and Vedanta Group will invest $7.4 billion in the project, according to ET. Apple expected to release new laptops with the faster M2 chip Apple is gearing up to release several new Macs with an M2 chip later this year, according to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter. The company will debut a 13-inch MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, 24-inch iMac, and a redesigned MacBook Air, all running on the new M2 chip, and Gurman expects the new chip to be slightly faster than its predecessor. He expects the M2’s CPU to also share the same eight-core architecture as the M1, but have more graphics cores. In more Apple news, some retail employees are beginning to quietly unionise, in part because hourly wages have remained stagnant while Apple’s profits have soared, Futurism reports, citing news from the Washington Post that is behind a paywall. Two store locations are preparing to file paperwork with the US National Labor Relations Board and more are in earlier stages, and many of the organisers have switched to Android phones to avoid any potential spying from Apple, according to the report. Pine Labs raised $150 million at the valuation of over $5 billion Pine Labs has raised $150 million in a mix of primary and secondary funding from Alpha Wave Global, in a deal that values the New Delhi fintech company—headed for an IPO—at more than $5 billion, Economic Times reports. The equity and secondary investments are about half and half, according to ET. CRED in talks to invest in smallcase In more fintech startup news, CRED, entrepreneur Kunal Shah’s credit card and data company, is in talks to invest in another Bangalore startup, smallcase that helps people invest in small, curated baskets of stocks, TechCrunch reports. CRED’s proposed investment values smallcase in the range of $300 million to $400 million, according to TechCrunch. smallcase is backed by investors including Amazon, Sequoia Capital and Zerodha, India’s biggest online broker. BigBasket acquires Kerala startup Agrima Infotech BigBasket, India’s biggest online grocer, has acquired Agrima Infotech, a startup incubated by Kerala Startup Mission, which has developed a customer vision technology platform, the company said in a press release. BigBasket will implement Agrima’s technology at the self-checkout counters of its offline stores—a segment that the company has been looking to expand into, after its acquisition by the Tata Group last year. Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds: https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds