India, the world’s most populous country and the second-largest internet market after China, is becoming increasingly digitally active. However, this rapid digitization comes with a growing risk of online fraud.

Cyber fraud is mounting in India to the point where the Indian government estimates it could amount to 0.7% of the country’s GDP — over $14 billion — within the next year. Even the government-backed systems, including Aadhaar, have been targeted by bad actors in some cases.

New Delhi keeps introducing new regulatory requirements to limit fraudulent digital transactions. Nonetheless, these updates often place a burden on businesses to regularly update their tech. Efforts to eradicate digital fraud sometimes also result in disruptions. For instance, the recent clampdown on unauthorized use of the permanent account number disrupted transactions for some fintech platforms.

Equal, a Hyderabad-based startup, aims to address all this with its suite of identity verification and financial data-sharing products.

The two-year-old startup helps businesses streamline know-your-customer (KYC) requirements, fraud prevention, and regulatory compliance by integrating more than 50 identity databases and thousands of API providers. The startup also recently acquired an undisclosed stake in account aggregator OneMoney to combine its identity verification services with the latter’s consent-based financial data sharing.

“Data sharing is still a major problem in this country if it’s not done digitally with consent,” Keshav Reddy, the son of GVK Group’s vice chairman GV Sanjay Reddy, told TechCrunch.

Reddy founded Equal with former Swiggy engineering director Rajeev Ranjan after moving back to India from the U.S.

For over the last two years, Reddy bootstrapped Equal, and the startup has added more than 350 customers, including State Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Reliance Jio, Airtel, Uber, and Zoom.

The startup has now raised a Series A round of $10 million at a post-money valuation of $80 million to scale its operations, expand the product suite, and forge strategic partnerships. The round was led by Prosus Ventures, along with Tomales Bay Capital and Reddy himself, and saw participation from other investors, including Blume Ventures, DST Global, Gruhas VC, and Quona VC.

Equal is not alone in the space, as the market already has players such as Perfios (backed by Warburg Pincus and Teachers’ Venture Growth), IDfy (backed by TransUnion), and Bureau (backed by GMO VenturePartners). However, Reddy told TechCrunch that unlike the competition, Equal plays the role of an aggregator and partners even with some of its competitors.

Ravi Kumar, co-founder and CEO of Upstox, who has also invested in Equal’s maiden round and is one of the early customers for its identity verification and account aggregator, told TechCrunch that it’s the cost and uptime that gives the trading platform a reason not to look for building a similar tech in-house.

Upstox has been using Equal for about a year and is processing around 350,000 transactions a month. Before that, Kumar said, the platform was relying on existing ID-verification providers.

“Equal has been able to aggregate across a slew of different APIs and ensures very high uptime between all those different connections,” he said.

Amazon’s next ideas for growing its grocery business could blur the lines between Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh by enmeshing the two businesses’ fulfillment networks in a new set of experiments, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Amazon has reportedly started shipping Whole Foods products from 26 Amazon Fresh fulfillment centers and plans to build a microfulfillment center at a Pennsylvania Whole Foods Market and stocking it with Amazon Fresh household goods and groceries. Another part of the plan includes an experimental “Amazon Grocery” inside a Chicago Whole Foods that offers brands and groceries that the upscale store wouldn’t normally carry, according to WSJ.

The goal of the tests is to give Amazon customers a way to buy products “ranging from organic produce to Tide detergent and Cheez-It crackers” from one source, rather than multiple stores, the Journal writes. Doing that could give its grocery businesses “greater scale with online customers” as it tries to drive deeper into a market dominated by companies like Walmart and Kroger, which already distribute orders from their many brick-and-mortar stores.

• Fujitsu and AMD partner to develop energy-efficient HPC/AI platforms
• Partnership aims to broaden access to AI, support open-source
• Monaka chip features 288 cores, 2nm process, Armv9-A architecture

Fujitsu and AMD have announced a new strategic partnership focused on developing HPC and AI platforms.

This collaboration will combine Fujitsu’s ARM-based processor technology with AMD’s GPU expertise, aiming to build energy-efficient and open-source solutions addressing the growing demand for diverse, cost-effective computing architectures.

• Fujitsu and AMD partner to develop energy-efficient HPC/AI platforms
• Partnership aims to broaden access to AI, support open-source
• Monaka chip features 288 cores, 2nm process, Armv9-A architecture

Fujitsu and AMD have announced a new strategic partnership focused on developing HPC and AI platforms.

This collaboration will combine Fujitsu’s ARM-based processor technology with AMD’s GPU expertise, aiming to build energy-efficient and open-source solutions addressing the growing demand for diverse, cost-effective computing architectures.

A portrait of mathematician Alan Turing is thought to be the first artwork by a humanoid robot to be sold at auction – fetching $1,084,800 (£836,667).

One of the most advanced robots in the world, Ai-Da, a pioneering humanoid artist, also set a new record in the art world with the sale of “A.I. God”, at Sotheby’s Digital Art Sale.

The large-scale portrait far exceeded its estimated value of $120,000 to $180,000 (£93,000 to £140,000).

Apple’s foray into the XR wearable segment may not have stirred the same kind of success that it tasted with the likes of the iPhone or the Apple Watch, but the company is still moving ahead with future iterations. While plans of a cheaper headset may have been pushed, the Vision Pro could get a successor within a year, or so.

In the latest edition of his PowerOn newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman writes that Apple might introduce the second-generation Vision Pro headset somewhere between Fall 2025 and Spring 2026. That window puts the official reveal in roughly the same frame as the launch of updated iPhones and the sporadic Mac hardware.

As far as changes go, Apple is reportedly experimenting with multiple ideas. But Gurman claiims that one of the design candidates for the Vision Pro 2 would look exactly like its predecessor. That won’t be out of character for Apple, as the company regularly iterates on internal hardware without making without changing the external aesthetics of its gear across the iPhone, Mac, or Apple Watch portfolio.

It sounds like a sane strategy Vision Pro successor because it’s a product with arguably the most sophisticated engineering work that Apple has delivered in years. It would make sense — especially from an R&D investment perspective — to maintain the fundamental architecture and make upgrades where it’s needed, which is added processing firepower and refined software experience.

Talking about upgrades, Bloomberg has previously reported that the second-gen Vision Pro would likely be upgraded to the M5 silicon. Apple is currently busy overhauling the Mac lineup with M4 series processors, an exercise that will continue well into 2025.

According to well-known industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the next Vision Pro headset could enter production in the second half of 2025 and will bring a switch from M2 to an M5-class processor. Another notable upgrade will reportedly be support for Apple Intelligence.

In the meanwhile, Apple has also started conducting internal research around smart glasses. Earlier this year, the likes of Meta and Snap showcased their respective work on smart glasses, with a focus on interactive AR applications running atop bespoke hardware. Apple apparently doesn’t want to miss out on the race.

“With smart glasses, the company could approach the category from a number of directions. That includes essentially creating a version of its AirPods in glasses form,” Gurman writes. So far, Apple hasn’t officially commented on its future XR ambitions, so take these predictions with a healthy dose of skepticism, for now.