Exclusive: Airbnb’s Brian Chesky on India’s potential; over 50% staff at Indian unicorns seeking jobs

Also in this letter:
■ TCS to build its own ChatGPT alternative
■ UPI merchant payments to hit $1 trillion by FY26: report
■ ETtech Done Deals

ETtech Interview | India to be one of our biggest growth markets this decade: Airbnb CEO

In 2022, Airbnb’s revenue grew 40% year-on-year to $8.4 billion and net income rose to $1.9 billion, making the year its most profitable yet. In an exclusive interview with ET, cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky spoke about India being one of the biggest growth markets, global inflationary pressures and bouncing back from Covid-19. Key takeaways.

On business in India: “Our business is doing exceptionally well. Overall nights booked in India jumped 70% for full-year 2022 with pre-pandemic 2019, while domestic nights grew almost 110%. This growth is largely due to the domestic market. Although our penetration in India is lower than the US, I believe we are just scratching the surface of what is possible.”

On India in Airbnb ecosystem: “India is an exciting new market for us. We have 1,000 employees there, and I believe it will be one of the biggest growth markets, if not the biggest, in this decade. What I find exciting about India is its robust culture of hospitality. A unique aspect of Indian culture will only help to further our business growth in the country.”

On bouncing back from Covid-19: “When Covid-19 hit, we had to do a pretty big reduction. As our business grew faster than we could hire, we started noticing that with smaller teams focused on fewer problems, we became a lot more productive. So, we decided to hire back the people we lost, but we’re pacing ourselves and not hiring them all at once.”

Read the full interview here

Over 50% of Indian unicorn employees hunting for new jobs

Rising job insecurity and murmurs of more layoffs are making talent even from large startups jittery, as 51% employees of India’s top 24 unicorns are eyeing better opportunities. Further, job seeking activity among this talent pool has nearly doubled in the last six months.

Data decoded: These unicorns employ over 2.4 lakh white-collar people, according to data from specialist staffing firm Xpheno. A year ago, the active job seeking talent from these firms was under 25,000. Today, among the jobseekers, 85% are in active employment.

Catch up quick: We reported on April 27, citing data from recruitment firm Careernet, that startups laid off about 9,400 employees between January and March this year, with experts suggesting that the situation might not get better anytime soon.

Also read | Layoffs in 2023: Dunzo, Unacademy among Indian startups & tech firms that have cut jobs

TCS to build its own ChatGPT alternative

As the race for generative artificial intelligence (AI) heats up following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT last year, India’s largest IT firm TCS has decided to join in.

What’s driving the news? The project, still in its initial stage, is looking to harness the vast internal code, data and resources the firm has. The solution will be built through in-house algorithms that use large language modelling functions similar to generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT but for enterprise code generation.

Tell me more: TCS COO N Ganapathy Subramaniam told us TCS’ work on use cases for proprietary generative AI algorithms has to mature further. He believes enterprise usage of such solutions still requires finetuning of ownership and IP of the end products.

New roles needed: Subramaniam sees a huge opportunity in creating new roles for “prompt engineers” within the organisation who can effectively communicate contextual queries to large language models for enterprise requirements.

Also read | From coding buddies to HR assistants, Indian IT firms take to generative AI

Pakistan, China involved in cyber espionage on our networks: Meta

Meta on Wednesday said in its adversarial threat report that it detected and acted against three cyber espionage operations in South Asia, including one linked to state actors from Pakistan.

Report details: “We took action against about 120 accounts on Facebook and Instagram linked to a hacking group in Pakistan that predominantly targeted people in India and Pakistan, including military personnel in India and among the Pakistan Air Force. Our investigation connected it to state-linked actors in Pakistan,” the report for the first quarter of 2023 noted.

China’s role: Coordinated inauthentic behaviour (CIB) networks that originated from China created a media company in the West, hired freelance writers from around the world and offered to recruit protestors in order to influence Meta users from across the globe, the report stated.

2024 India elections: Meta is confident of handling the volume of political content that will be generated in India before the 2024 general elections, its global vice president of content policy Monica Bickert told us. It plans to deploy tools to identify content and trends that start going viral on Meta’s platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

UPI merchant payments to reach $1 trillion by FY26: Report

Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the flagship component of the India Stack, is expected to see $1 trillion in merchant payments by FY26, according to a report by consulting firm Bain & Co.

Drivers of growth: UPI merchant payments will see a growth rate of 40-50%, driven by increased awareness, merchant acceptance, new payment features, and international payment corridors, hitting the $ 1 trillion mark, per Bain & Co. report.

Half a trillion run rate: Merchant transactions worth $40 billion were settled through UPI in March 2023, as per the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). This brings the sector’s payment run rate to $500 billion. By FY26, the share of UPI and mobile wallets in the $3.2 trillion digital payments market is expected to increase from 11% in FY22 to 28%.

Also read | APAC to become top fintech market by 2030: Report

Tweet of the day

ETtech Done Deals

Supply chain software startup Pando raises $30 million: San Jose- and Chennai-based supply chain software startup Pando raised $30 million, led by Iron Pillar with participation from San Francisco-based Uncorrelated Ventures, and existing backers Nexus Venture Partners, Chiratae Ventures, and Next47.

IoT startup ZestIoT bags $6.5 million: ZestIoT, an Internet-of-Things (IoT) and AI-enabled aviation industry management platform, said it has raised $6.5 million in a Series A funding round, led by IvyCap Ventures.

Kiwi picks up $6 million: Kiwi, founded by former Freecharge CEO Siddharth Mehta, raised $6 million in a maiden funding round from Nexus Venture Partners, Stellaris Venture Partners, and angel investors.

Other Top Stories by Our Reporters

SaaS major Freshworks posts first adjusted operating profit: Nasdaq-listed software firm Freshworks on Tuesday reported its first adjusted operating profit of $3.9 million as a public company.

PhonePe goes live with UPI Lite: Payments major PhonePe has gone live with the UPI Lite feature, allowing users to initiate low-value payments of up to Rs 200 without entering a PIN.

Global Picks We are Reading

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