Don’t miss these five ETtech must-reads from this week

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Ecommerce orders dip after Covid-19 uptick: After a pandemic-fuelled surge in online shopping, the industry is seeing moderate growth over the past few months. The slowdown is more than what the industry had anticipated. Data from Unicommerce, an ecommerce-focused warehouse solutions provider, showed a 16% volume growth in order shipments for the March quarter compared with the same quarter last year. Growth has been hit by low volumes, and discounts, we found out.

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Also read | ONDC logs slow ecommerce uptake, snags may hit expansion

Large tech startups undergo valuation correction: Funds managed by New York-based investment management firm Neuberger Berman have marked down the valuation of the shares they hold in Pine Labs by 38% and PharmEasy’s parent API Holdings by 21%, according to filings made with the US SEC. On Wednesday, ET reported that funds managed by US investment firm Vanguard had marked down the valuation of Ola by 35% to $4.8 billion. Prior to this, Invesco had slashed Swiggy’s valuation to $5.5 billion, from a peak of over $10 billion, while Blackrock cut Byju’s valuation by half to about $11 billion.

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ONDC, Zomato-Swiggy and the food delivery space: The benefits of scale enjoyed by Zomato and Swiggy could outweigh the open protocol and resource pooling offered by the ONDC when it comes to food delivery, brokerage firm Jefferies said in a report. This was after reports that prices on brands such as McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Behrouz Biryani, among others, are at 30-80% discounts on ONDC ordering platforms including Paytm, Magicpin and PhonePe compared to what consumers have to pay for the same items at Swiggy and Zomato.

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Also read | Explained: ONDC vs Zomato-Swiggy and what it means for the food-delivery space

Meity steps in as WhatsApp scam calls flood users: Following rampant scam calls on WhatsApp from international telephone codes, the IT ministry stepped in and said it will issue a notice to WhatsApp seeking to know the reasons behind the sudden spurt. The Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said WhatsApp will also be asked to detail the preventive measures put in place to prevent such calls and messages.After this, WhatsApp’s engineering teams have moved to introduce new “classifiers” which can identify these calls and mark them as spam, sources in the know told ET.

Byju’s raises Rs 2,000 crore in debt funding: Byju’s has closed a Rs 2,000-crore round from Davidson Kempner Capital in a structured credit transaction against the cash flows of its test prep subsidiary Aakash Educational Services. According to the people cited above, the transaction, which closed on Friday, is a three-year loan facility with an equity upside linked to Aakash’s planned public listing in the near future. This comes weeks after its office premises were searched by Directorate of Enforcement (ED) officials.

Also read | BlackRock cuts Byju’s valuation

(Graphics & illustrations by Rahul Awasthi)