Techcrunch blog!: Reliance Industries launches low-priced fashion marketplace for Indian shoppers

Friday, May 26, 2023

Today, India's richest man is investing in low-cost fashion, ChatGPT becomes available in even more countries, and Sam Altman gets chatty. Meanwhile, we want you South American startups! Apply to Startup Battlefield 200. There will not be a Monday newsletter due to the Memorial Day holiday in the U.S. Now, let's dig into your Daily Crunch for Friday. — Christine

First up, Reliance Industries, which is Ajio's retail fashion arm in India, has a new endeavor called Ajio Street, which offers clothing and accessories starting as low as 199 Indian rupees, or $2.40. Here's where it gets interesting: Mukesh Ambani, known as India's richest man, runs Reliance. Apparently, "deploying an affordability-led approach to achieve market dominance has been a longstanding strategy" for Reliance." Read more. Also, find out why Reliance is being referred to as India's eventual e-commerce kingpin.

Next, Sam Altman has his hands in everything. Yesterday we brought you news that OpenAI's ChatGPT was available in 11 countries. Now that's jumped to over 30. Find out where else. Also, OpenAI is taking the democratic approach to deciding what rules AI systems should follow. Read more about what that involves. And finally, Altman himself shares his optimistic view of our AI future.

Rounding out the top three stories of the day is Info Edge, which decided to write off its entire investment in a manufacturing technology startup in India. Learn about who that is.

Not ashamed: Instead of trying to mask its Chinese identity, low-code application developer Seafile is taking the symbiotic relationship approach by forming a German joint venture. Get the scoop.

Data decisions: Meta's closing out a busy week with some assurances to U.K. antitrust regulators that it will limit how it uses ad data to boost Facebook Marketplace. Read more on how it plans to do that.

Road trippin': Ford and Tesla are now BFFs. Elon Musk did a Twitter Spaces with Ford CEO Jim Farley, where Musk referenced that Tesla might "open source more code" to other automakers. Meanwhile, the two companies reached an agreement that gives electric-driving Ford owners access to over 12,000 Superchargers across the U.S. and Canada.

Now here's some more mobility moments:

Applied Intuition to buy autonomous trucking SPAC Embark for $71M

Following successful mission, Virgin Galactic targeting June for first commercial spaceflight

Electric truck maker Nikola at risk of being delisted from Nasdaq

Image Credits: Brais Seara / Getty Images

Profitability over growth: 5 investors explain their mantra for South Korean startups

South Korea saw a unicorn boom in recent years, but it’s still feeling the impacts of a global market correction.

“Venture funding in Asia in the first quarter of 2023 declined 33% from Q4 2023 and 57% from Q1 2022,” reports Kate Park, who surveyed five investors to get their predictions for 2023 and find out how they’re advising their portfolio companies:

Han Kim, general partner, Altos Ventures
Tim Chae, managing partner, 500 Global
JP Lee, CEO and managing partner, SoftBank Ventures Asia
Yeemin Chung, managing director, BRV Capital Management
Eunse Lee, founder and managing partner, 541 Ventures

Three more from the TC+ team:

Pitch Deck Teardown: Faye's $10M Series A deck

AI might be the least of edtech's worries

Skyflow expands its regional footprint as it adds generative AI support to its data privacy tooling

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