Listen: Udaan, OYO burn through cash; Firstcry enters education; Rostow Ravanan’s SaaS innings; Schneider Electric and smart factories

This week saw B2B ecommerce platform Udaan report mounting losses for the financial year 2018-2019 on account of heavy investments to grow its logistics and credit verticals. During the year, it reported a 450% jump in total expenditure to Rs 363 crore, regulatory filings dated November 22 showed.

Meanwhile, Oravel Stays, the Gurugram-based company that owns hospitality brand OYO, saw its expenses increase five-fold during the financial year 2018-2019, leading to significantly higher losses. Losses for the year stood at Rs 2,385 crore against Rs 360 crore in the previous year.

In other news, Pune-based omnichannel baby products retailer FirstCry entered the pre-primary education business with the acquisition Oi Playschool. Notable investors in FirstCry include SoftBank Group Corp, Chiratae Ventures, Valiant Capital Partners, New Enterprise Associates and SAIF Partners.

 After the Mindtree saga, Rostow Ravanan, co-founder of the Bengaluru headquartered information technology firm and former CEO, plans to start a SaaS venture. The company will focus on the healthcare and manufacturing sectors.

 Flipkart seems to be tapping more into local voice assistants for its expansion plans. It has added a smart assistive interface feature, dubbed Flipkart Saathi, to help first-time users on the platform and make them comfortable with the overall shopping experience.

In the enterprise arena, French industrial giant Schneider Electric launched its second smart factory in India on Thursday.

And finally, Mumbai headquartered Yes Bank recently launched its very own API sandbox, which allows its partners to plug specific banking functions into their own corporate solutions.

Stay on top of all things tech in this week’s episode of TechThisWeek.