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Facebook’s $5.7 billion investment in India’s Reliance Jio Platforms that could help the American social media juggernaut make inroads into tens of millions of shops in the country is being reviewed by the local antitrust watchdog.

The Competition Commission of India said on Wednesday that it is reviewing Facebook’s proposed multi-billion dollars investment in Reliance Jio Platforms for a 9.9% stake in the top Indian telecom operator.

Bloomberg first reported about the antitrust review, citing CCI chairman Ashok Kumar Gupta. The Indian watchdog declined to elaborate the aspects of its examination, but told the outlet that it assesses every deal that could misuse users’ data and may consider amending the current rules for some mergers and acquisitions in the country.

A Facebook spokesperson in India did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a recent filing, Facebook said the proposed transaction and commercial agreement with Reliance Jio Platforms, which has amassed over 388 million subscribers, are “pro-competitive, benefits consumers, kirana stores (neighborhood stores) and other small and micro local Indian businesses, and take forward the vision of digital India.”

Analysts have said that Facebook’s proposed investment in billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio Platforms, its biggest investment in recent years, could help the social media giant expand its reach in India, which is already its biggest market by users count.

Facebook’s eponymous service reaches about 350 million users in India, while its messaging service WhatsApp has amassed over 400 million users. WhatsApp is by far the most popular service in the world’s second largest market.

In late April, when the two companies announced that they had agreed for a deal, Facebook said it planned to work with Reliance Jio Platforms to empower 60 million small businesses in India.

Early signs of this collaboration was apparent a week later when JioMart, a joint venture between Reliance Jio Platforms and Reliance Retail (India’s largest retail chain), started to allow customers to place orders and track shipment through WhatsApp.

Some analysts said that the deal with Ambani, India’s richest man and an ally of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, could also help Facebook stay on the good side of the Indian government.

In India, where Facebook’s Free Basics program was blocked in early 2016, the firm has been stuck in a regulatory maze to get clearance for a nationwide rollout of WhatsApp Pay.

Facebook launched WhatsApp Pay in beta mode to a million users in the country in 2018, only months after Google launched its payments service in India. While WhatsApp Pay remains stuck with a million users, Google and Walmart’s PhonePe have established clear dominance in India’s mobile payments market.

On Monday, Facebook launched WhatsApp Pay in Brazil, the instant messaging service’s second biggest market and said it looks forward to launching the payments service in more nations.

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It was around 20 years ago when Baoli Ma hid in his bedroom feeling helpless and lonely for being a gay man in China.

Life has changed dramatically for Ma since then. This week, BlueCity, the gay dating and lifestyle platform he created, has filed for an initial public listing on Nasdaq.

“To me, herein lies the power of the internet — it empowers us to elevate ourselves, and to bring warmth to others across all corners of the world living in loneliness, helplessness and fear because of their sexual orientation,” wrote Ma, chief executive of the company, in the prospectus.

The company said it aims to raise $50 million from the IPO, while it has not determined its offer price for each American depositary share (ADS). The proceeds from the public offering will go towards investment in new technologies as well as expansion in domestic and international markets, which currently account for about half of its monthly users.

Ma, a former closeted police officer, founded the LGBTQ-focused online forum Danlan.org in 2000. In 2011, he quit his job to launch Blued, the gay dating app under the parent entity BlueCity.

Early on, Blued was widely seen as a copycat of Grindr — a Californian startup that was bought by a Chinese company before it was forced to sever ties over security concerns. Blued has since devised numerous features to distinguish itself. Designed for users to chat and live broadcast, the app is primarily used by homosexual men, although it includes services for the broader LGBTQ population. To that end, it entered into a letter of intent in June for a potential equity investment to acquire a Chinese lesbian dating app.

As of March, Blued boasted 6 million monthly active users and 49 million registered users. It has attracted a loyal following in overseas markets like India, Korea, Thailand and Vietnam.

The majority of Blued’s revenues come from virtual items sales during live broadcasting, which represented 88.5% of its total revenues of $107 million in 2019. Other monetization streams included advertising and memberships that gave users premium features in the app.

The company began exploring health services for the LGBTQ community in recent years, offering everything from providing HIV consultancy to connecting clients with overseas surrogate mothers.

Some of the business risks BlueCity cited were government policies and negative public sentiment toward the queer community across different regions. In early 2018, the Indonesian government asked the Google Play Store to block Blued alongside dozens of other apps in the same category. It’s also crucial to ensure user safety. In 2019, Blued had to briefly freeze registration after being condemned for failing to enforce age verification, exposing underage users to sexual exploitation.

While China decriminalized homosexuality in 1997 and removed it from the list of mental illnesses in 2001, public discourse on the community remains fraught. Sina Weibo, a popular Chinese microblogging service, sparked a big outcry among the queer community and many Chinese citizens when it announced banning content related to homosexuality. The company later reversed the decision.

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BYD Co., the Chinese auto giant backed by Warren Buffett, is rushing to make China self-sufficient in the production of electric vehicles. On Monday, the firm said in a filing it has secured 800 million yuan ($113 million) in a Series A+ round for its chipmaking arm, BYD Semiconductor.

At stake is the race to make so-called insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBT), an integral silicon component in EVs’ power management system that’s at the core of BYD Semiconductor. The electronic switch is dubbed by industry experts the “CPU of an EV” for it reduces power loss and improves reliability. It’s the second-most expensive part of an EV after batteries, accounting for around 7-10% of the total cost according to market research.

BYD is fighting a fierce competition against Germany’s semiconductor giant Infineon Technologies AG, which produced 58% of the IGBTs used in China’s electric cars in 2019. BYD finished with an 18% share that year, noted a report from Citic Securities.

The prospects of IGBT production are bright, as the technology not only powers a booming EV industry worldwide but is also used in other high-energy applications such as air conditioners, refrigerators, and high-speed trains. The global market for IGBTs is estimated to near 10 billion yuan ($1.41 billion) in 2020 and quadruple to almost 40 billion yuan by 2025, according to the Citic report.

The outsize funding arrived just two months after Shenzhen-traded BYD hived its chip unit off into an independent company ahead of a separate public listing. Due to oversubscription from investors, the subsidiary raised the new round on the heel of its 1.9 billion yuan ($270 million) Series A closed in late May.

Parent company BYD holds a 72.3% stake in the chip arm following the two funding rounds, which have lifted the valuation of the subsidiary to 10.2 billion yuan ($1.44 billion).

As the only Chinese company that can produce IGBTs independently, the semiconductor maker has drawn heavyweight backers across the board. Its investors range from Sequoia China and state-backed CICC Capital from the Series A round, to Korean conglomerate SK Group, smartphone maker Xiaomi, Lenovo Group, ARM, China’s largest semiconductor foundry SMIC, and investment affiliates of Chinese carmakers SAIC and BAIC in the latest A+ round.

BYD started out as a manufacturer of electronics components in 1995 and has since expanded into automobiles and renewable energy. Headquartered in Shenzhen, it powers all of the city’s electric buses and taxis. It’s also ramped up expansion into overseas markets as China scales back state subsidies on electric cars.

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After months of talks and trials, WhatsApp has finally pulled the trigger on payments in its app. Today the Facebook-owned messaging service announced that users in Brazil would be the first to be able to send and receive money by way of its messaging app, using Facebook Pay.

WhatsApp says in its blog post that the payments service — which currently is free for consumers to use (that is, no commission fee taken) but businesses pay a processing fee to receive payments — will work by way of a six-digit PIN or fingerprint to complete transactions. You use it by linking up your Whatsapp account to your credit or debit card, and initial local partners for the service include Banco do Brasil, Nubank, and Sicredi. Cielo, a payments processor, is also a partner in the service. “We have built an open model to welcome more partners in the future,” it noted.

The news comes a little bit as a surprise: the company has been testing this payments service among users in India for months, so many assumed that the world’s second largest internet market would be the debut region for the service. But Facebook remains stuck in a regulatory maze in India that has prevented it from expanding the payments service in its biggest market.

WhatsApp has been used informally for commercial purposes almost from the very start: small business owners have used the platform to exchange messages with users around the sale of goods, what is in stock and so on. But under the wing of Facebook — which acquired the company in 2014 for $19 billion — the company started the big task of bringing in a more formal set of business services.

That’s included the launch of WhatsApp Business, which lets SMBs post catalogues and stock links within the app, and advertisers on Facebook can create links through to their WhatsApp accounts. Now with payments, WhatsApp, which has amassed over 2 billion users, is finally taking a more comprehensive commercial plunge.

“Payments on WhatsApp are beginning to roll out to people across Brazil beginning today and we look forward to bringing it to everyone as we go forward,” the company said.

Users in Brazil will be able to use the payments service on WhatsApp to make purchases from local businesses without leaving their chat, the Facebook-owned service said.

“The over 10 million small and micro businesses are the heartbeat of Brazil’s communities. It’s become second nature to send a zap to a business to get questions answered. Now in addition to viewing a store’s catalog, customers will be able to send payments for products as well,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Although WhatsApp has in theory been working on payments for years, from what we understand there were a lot of delays in part due to how Facebook wanted WhatsApp to implement it. Now that it’s launching with Facebook Pay, it seems that we know how that struggle landed.

More to follow…

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Sherman Ye founded VESoft in 2018 when he saw a growing demand for graph databases in China. Its predecessors like Neo4j and TigerGraph had already been growing aggressively in the West for a few years, while China was just getting to know the technology that leverages graph structures to store data sets and depict their relationships, such as those used for social media analysis, e-commerce recommendations, and financial risk management.

VESoft is ready for further growth after closing an $8 million funding round led by Redpoint China Ventures, an investment firm launched by Silicon Valley-based Redpoint Ventures in 2005. Existing investor Matrix Partners China also participated in the Series pre-A round. The new capital will allow the startup to develop products and expand to markets in North America, Europe, and other parts of Asia.

The 30-people team is comprised of former employees from Alibaba, Facebook, Huawei, and IBM. It’s based in Hangzhou, a scenic city known for its rich history and housing Alibaba and its financial affiliate Ant Financial, where Ye previously worked as a senior engineer after his four-year stint with Facebook in California. From 2017 to 2018, the entrepreneur noticed that Ant Financial’s customers were increasingly interested in adopting graph databases as an alternative to relational databases, a model that had been popular since the 80s and normally organizes data into tables.

“While relational databases are capable of achieving many functions carried out by graph databases… they deteriorate in performance as the quantity of data grows,” Yu told TechCrunch during an interview. “We didn’t use to have so much data.”

Information explosion is one reason why Chinese companies are turning to graph databases, which can handle millions of transactions to discover patterns within scattered data. The technology’s rise is also a response to new forms of online businesses that depend more on relationships.

“Take recommendations for example. The old model recommends content based purely on user profiles, but the problem of relying on personal browsing history is it fails to recommend new things. That was fine for a long time as the Chinese [internet] market was big enough to accommodate many players. But as the industry becomes saturated and crowded… companies need to ponder how to retain existing users, lengthen their time spent, and win users from rivals.”

The key lies in serving people content and products they find appealing. Graph databases come in handy, suggested Yu, when services try to predict users’ interest or behavior as the model uncovers what their friends or people within their social circles like. “That’s a lot more effective than feeding them what’s trending.”

Neo4j compares relational and graph databases (Link)

The company has made its software open source, which the founder believed can help cultivate a community of graph database users and educate the market in China. It will also allow VESoft to reach more engineers in the English-speaking world who are well-acquainted with the open-source culture.

“There is no such thing as being ‘international’ or ‘domestic’ for a technology-driven company. There are no boundaries between countries in the open-source world,” reckoned Yu.

When it comes to generating income, the startup plans to launch a paid version for enterprises, which will come with customized plug-ins and host services.

The Nebula Graph, the brand of VESoft’s database product, is now serving 20 enterprise clients from areas across social media, e-commerce, and finance including big names like food delivery giant Meituan, popular social commerce app Xiaohongshu, and e-commerce leader JD.com. A number of overseas companies are also trialing Nebula.

The time is ripe for enterprise-facing startups with a technological moat in China as the market for consumers has been divided by incumbents like Tencent and Alibaba. This makes fundraising relatively easy for VESoft. The founder is confident that Chinese companies are rapidly catching up with their Western counterparts in the space, for the gargantuan amount of data and the myriad of ways data is used in the country “will propel the technology forward.”

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A wave of digital banks, or neo-banks, has flourished in recent years in Western nations as people begin to flee megabanks.

While most of these startups are yet to prove they can turn a profit, entrepreneurs are beginning to replicate similar ideas in South Asian markets, where most people don’t have accounts with traditional banks at all. And for now, venture capitalists are backing this attempt.

Tonik Financial, a two-year-old startup in the Philippines, said on Monday it has raised $21 million in a new financing round to launch its digital bank aimed at the Southeast Asian market by September this year.

Sequoia Capital India and Point72 Ventures led Tonik’s Series A round, while existing investors Insignia and Credence participated in it, the startup said.

Tonik, which recently received the license to operate a digital bank in the Philippines, said it will commercially launch the digital bank in the third quarter of this year.

Greg Krasnov, the founder and chief executive of Tonik, said according to the his estimates the retail savings market in the Philippines is worth $140 billion and the Southeast Asian nation also presents a $100 billion opportunity in unsecured consumer lending. TechCrunch could not independently corroborate these market estimations.

Krasnov, who has previously incubated four financial services startups in Asia, said the coronavirus pandemic has prompted people to double down on their savings and has made it apparent that the vast majority of people in the Philippines need access to a digital bank.

“In the Philippines, where over 70% of the population remains unbanked, we are observing a rapid jump in consumer demand for digital banking and digital transfers since the start of the year,” he said.

“We are preparing to bring a highly differentiated experience to the Filipino consumer to address these needs and are honored to be supported in this by the regulators who have encouraged innovation and welcomed technology solutions to bolster financial inclusion,” he added.

In several South Asian markets, where like the Philippines, much of the population remains unbanked, startups are racing to fill the void. But interestingly, most of them are serving startups and other small and medium businesses — and not individuals.

In India, for instance, Bangalore-based NiYo Solutions, and Open are two of the heavily-backed startups have amassed over a million businesses on their platforms.

RazorPay, another Bangalore-based startup, last year launched a range of features such as corporate credit cards, and a single dashboard to help businesses manage transactions and provided them with the ability to automate recurring payouts. Some of these features are currently not offered by a traditional bank.

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Sinch said on Monday it has agreed to buy Indian firm ACL Mobile for £56 million (roughly $70 million) in what is the third acquisition deal the Swedish mobile voice and messaging firm has entered into at the height of a global pandemic.

The Swedish firm said acquiring ACL Mobile will enable it to leverage the Indian firm’s connections with local mobile operators in the world’s second largest internet market as well as in Malaysia, and UAE and expand its end-to-end connectivity without working with a third-party firm.

20-year-old ACL Mobile, which has headquarters in Delhi, Dubai, and Kuala Lumpur, enables businesses to interact with their customers through SMS, email, WhatsApp and other channels. In a press statement, the Indian firm said it serves more than 500 enterprise customers including Flipkart, OLX, MakeMyTrip, HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank.

“With ACL we gain critical scale in the world’s second-largest mobile market. We gain customers, expertise and technology and we further strengthen our global messaging product for discerning businesses with global needs,” said Sinch chief executive Oscar Werner.

The Indian firm, which employs 288 people, reported gross profits of $14.2 million on sales of about $65 million in the financial year that ended in March. During the same period, ACL Mobile claims it delivered 47 billion messages on behalf of its enterprise customers.

“Although the long-term growth outlook is favorable, lower commercial activity in India due to the Covid-19 pandemic means that the near-term growth outlook is less predictable,” Sinch said of ACL Mobile’s future outlook.

ACL Mobile is the third acquisition Sinch has unveiled since March this year. Last month the company said it was buying SAP’s Digital Interconnect for $250 million. In March, it announced a deal to buy Wavy.

Sinch, founded in 2008, employs more than 70 people in over 40 locations worldwide and is increasingly expanding to more markets. Last month it said acquiring SAP’s Digital Interconnect will help it expand in the US market. The company says it is profitable.

“Together with Sinch we are scaling up to become one of the leading global players in our industry. I’m excited about this next chapter and the many new opportunities that we can pursue together,” said Sanjay K Goyal, founder and chief executive of ACL Mobile.

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Chinese internet giant ByteDance has announced plans to discontinue two of its apps in India, its biggest overseas market, and urged its users to move to TikTok.

Vigo Video and Vigo Lite, two apps that allow users to create and share short-form sketches and lip-syncing to Bollywood songs, posted a message early Monday (local time) to announce that they would be discontinued at the end of October this year.

In their message, titled “a farewell letter,” ByteDance said it was saddened to shut down the apps but did not offer an explanation for the decision. Indian news outlet Entrackr first spotted the letter.

Unlike TikTok, ByteDance’s most popular app, Vigo Video and Vigo Lite have struggled to make inroads in the world’s second largest internet market. While TikTok has more than 200 million users in India, Vigo Video had about 4 million monthly active users last month and Vigo Lite could only amass 1.5 million users, according to one of the top mobile insight firms — data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch.

While Vigo Video gained fewer than 1 million users in a year, Vigo Lite shredded just as many during the same period, the data showed.

Both the apps counted India as their biggest market but have been available in several other markets, including neighboring nation Bangladesh, for instance. It’s unclear whether ByteDance is discontinuing the app in every market. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move, despite the apps’ poor reception in India, comes as a surprise. Recruitment posts submitted by ByteDance as late as last month described Vigo as one of the company’s biggest businesses in India.

Other posts reveal that the company is looking to hire executives to aggressively explore ways to monetize its services in the country. ByteDance’s TikTok app has been scrutinized in India in recent weeks for failing to actively remove videos that promoted violence, animal cruelty, racism, child abuse, and objectification of women.

In its message to users on Vigo apps today, ByteDance said it will help them migrate their videos to TikTok. On TikTok, “you will be able to show your talent to a larger group of friends. We are eager to see you [there]!” the message reads.

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Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. This week, we have updates from Alibaba’s rapidly growing cloud computing unit, Apple’s controversial decision to remove two podcast apps from its Chinese App Store, and more.

China tech abroad

TikTok’s besieged rival

Zynn, a TikTok rival that had rocketed to the top of the download charts a few weeks since its launch in May, was removed from Google Play this week over plagiarism. Developed by Kuaishou, the nemesis of TikTok’s Chinese sister Douyin, Zynn is another made-in-China app that has recently taken the international market by storm.

In a statement (in Chinese) this week, Kuaishou said the removal was triggered by one complaint about a user-generated video that had stolen content from another platform. As venture capitalist Turner Novak observed, much of Zynn’s early content seemed to be ripped from TikTok.

The main driver of the app’s rise, however, is its reward system; it essentially pays users to use and promote its app, a strategy that has proven popular among China’s rural and small-town populations. Nasdaq-listed content aggregator Qutoutiao has used the same tactic to grow.

Whether this pay-to-use strategy is sustainable is yet to be seen. Zynn is apparently making efforts to retain users through other means, claiming it’s in talks with “celebrity-level” creators to enrich its content.

Alibaba hunts for global influencers to sell more

Influencers are in high demand these days. After proving the strategy of driving e-commerce sales through influencer live promotion, Alibaba decided it wanted to bring the model to overseas markets. As such, it put out a notice to recruit as many as 100,000 content creators who would help the Chinese giant promote products sold on its international marketplace, AliExpress.

Data center in Tibet to connect China to South Asia

Many may know that China has turned one of its poorest provinces Guizhou into a pivotal tech hub that’s home to many cloud services, including that of Apple China. Now China is morphing Tibet into another cloud computing center. One main project is a 645,000-square-meter data facility that will facilitate data exchange between China and South Asia.

China tech at home

Dingtalk as an OS

At its annual summit this week, Alibaba Cloud reiterated its latest strategy to “integrate cloud into Dingtalk (in Chinese),” its work collaboration app that’s analogous to Slack.

The slogan suggests the strategic role Alibaba wants Dingtalk to play: an operating system built on Alibaba Cloud, the world’s third-largest infrastructure as a service behind Amazon and Microsoft. It’s a relationship that echoes the one between Microsoft 365 and Azure, as president of Alibaba Cloud Zhang Jianfeng previously suggested in an interview (in Chinese).

Dingtalk, built initially for enterprise communication, has blossomed into an all-in-one platform with a myriad of third-party applications tailored to work, education and government services. For instance, the Ministry of Education can easily survey students and parents through Dingtalk. The app is now serving 15 million organizations and 300 million individual users.

On top of Dingtalk integration, Alibaba Cloud said it will hire up to 5,000 engineers this financial year to fuel growth in areas including network, databases and artificial intelligence. The recruitment came after Alibaba committed in April to spend 200 billion yuan ($28 billion) over the next three years to build more data infrastructure amid increased demand for services like video conferencing and live streaming as businesses adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Apple bans podcast apps

Just as podcasts are gaining ground in China, two foreign podcast apps that appeal to independent content creators were banned from the Apple App Store. The move echoed Apple’s crackdown on Chinese-language podcasts on its own podcast platform last year this time.

Investor’s favorite app is back

Speaking of app removal, this week, many venture capitalists and product managers in China are celebrating the return of Jike (即刻). The social media app, which has a loyal following within the Chinese tech circle, was removed nearly a year ago from app stores for unspecified reasons, but many speculated it was due to censorship.

The app is a kind of a hybrid of Reddit and Twitter, allowing users to discover content and connect based on interests and topics. Many VCs and internet firm employees use it to trade gossip and share hot takes. Its death and life are a reminder of the immense regulatory uncertainty facing tech companies operating in China.

Sought-after Hong Kong listings

Two of the largest U.S.-traded Chinese companies are floating their shares in Hong Kong for secondary listings amid fraying ties between Beijing and Washington. NetEase, the second-biggest gaming company in the world after Tencent, jumped 6% from its offer price to HK$130 on the first day of trading this week. JD.com, the Alibaba archrival, has reportedly priced its offering at HK$226 a share.

Chip company Eswin raised $283 million

Eswin, a semiconductor company founded by the boss of Chinese display technology giant BOE Technology, has completed a sizable funding round as the Chinese government encourages domestic chip production.

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Speaking of Reliance Jio Platforms, the top Indian telecom operator said on Saturday it has secured another investment.

L Catterton, a U.S. private equity firm will invest $250 million for a 0.39% stake in Jio Platforms, becoming the ninth investor to back the Indian firm at the height of a global pandemic.

L Catterton, a firm known to invest in consumer tech businesses, has backed dozens of young and established firms over the years including Peloton,  style=“font-size: 1.125rem; letter-spacing: -0.1px;”>Vroom, ClassPass, Owndays and PVR Cinemas.

The announcement, which makes L Catterton the ninth investor to back Jio in eight weeks, comes hours after the three-and-half-year-old telecom network said it was selling stake worth $600 million to TPG. The new investment, like that of TPG, values Jio Platforms at $65 billion.

Reliance Jio Platforms has now secured more than $13.7 billion by selling about 22.3 stake to Facebook, Silver Lake, KKR, Vista Equity Partners, General Atlantic, Mubadala, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, TPG, and L Catterton in the past eight weeks.

“We look forward to partnering with Jio, which is uniquely positioned to execute on its vision and mission to transform the country and build a digital society for 1.3 billion Indians through its unmatched digital and technological capabilities,” said Michael Chu, co-chief executive of L Catterton, in a statement.

Investors’ bullishness on Jio Platforms, which has amassed over 388 million subscribers, shows their growing interest in India’s telecom market. Media reports have claimed in recent weeks that Amazon is considering buying stakes worth at least $2 billion in Bharti Airtel, India’s third largest telecom operator, while Google has held talks for a similar deal in Vodafone Idea, the second largest telecom operator.

Jio Platforms also operates a bevy of digital apps and services including music streaming service JioSaavn (which it says it will take public), on-demand live television service JioTV and payments app JioMoney, as well as smartphones, and broadband business. These services are available to Jio subscribers at no additional charge.

Pankaj Jain, a high-profile angel investor, told TechCrunch that Jio Platforms’ digital services suite appeared to have helped it attract foreign investors. “Foreign investors see that owning the pipes is a race to the bottom in terms of ARPU (average revenue per user) but having so many bundled services seems like it’s the future for telecommunications companies. By solidifying their content strategy, they have appealed to investors that are seeing this same strategy play out in other markets,” he said.

“Unfortunately, it’s still to be seen whether content can help increase margins significantly in India.”

Though Reliance Jio Platforms has not revealed why it is raising so much money, this capital could be deployed to cut oil-to-retails giant Reliance Industries’ net debt of about $21 billion, said Mahesh Uppal, director of communications consultancy firm Com First, in a conversation with TechCrunch.

Ambani pledged to clear Reliance’s due by early 2021. Reliance Industries had no debt in 2012, but that changed when the company decided to enter the telecommunications market.
“I particularly look forward to gaining from L Catterton’s invaluable experience in creating consumer-centric businesses because technology and consumer experience need to work together to propel India to achieving digital leadership,” said Ambani in a statement today.