Weekly Roundup with Flexiple

Welcome to the ninth edition of the weekly roundup by Flexiple.

Every week, we bring to you some of the best news related to Future of Work, Freelancing,  Startups, Technology and any major developments that we as professionals need to know. So, if you have missed any news, here is your chance to catch up with it. You can join the roundup conversation in the comments section and share your thoughts on the news shared below.

It has been a rough time for Indian entrepreneurs, with small, medium businesses grappling with the Goods and Services Tax (GST) due to lack of clear guidelines and its complexities, and startups receiving income tax notice on angel investments. According to the startups, the tax is an outcome of unfair assessments, which forces them to spend exorbitant resources and time on appealing against it. The tax has led to a 50% decrease in angel investments.

Just seven months after Uber launched its on-demand food delivery app UberEats, its homegrown rival Ola will be acquiring FoodPanda’s India business to deliver food on the go. This will be a second attempt by Ola to make a foray into food delivery business after closing the Ola cafe business in 2016.

With more enterprises moving to the cloud, the IT majors - Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are competing with each other to provide cloud computing services to businesses and government agencies. The latest entrant in this field is Alibaba, who announced last week that they would be opening their first data centre in Mumbai in January. The company will be helping small and medium enterprises to monetise by moving to new age services.

After raising $7 million from RB investors and others, Teabox - the tea brand startup is planning to expand its backend infrastructure and will open offline stores in airports to create more awareness. The e-commerce player that aggregates 150 tea gardens in India and Nepal and that has over 250 varieties of tea, has a subscription-based model and generates over 40% of its sales from the US.

2017 was a year of revival for several startups, with Indian internet startups raising over $9.9 billion - a 125% jump from the previous year. However, most of these funds were pumped into unicorns instead of other companies. One factor that took the startup ecosystem by surprise was the resurrection of Softbank. After burning its fingers last year with poor business decisions and investing in early startups, the Japanese telecom giant shifted its focus to more established players such as Flipkart, PayTM, and Ola.

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