Groww’s pre-IPO dough; Big Tech’s India win

Happy Wednesday! IPO-bound Groww is shoring up new funds as it doubles its valuation. This and more in today’s ETtech Morning Dispatch.

Also in the letter:
■ Fintech leaders’ new SRO
■ Government’s AI Kosh pitch
■ Sizing the AI opportunity

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Lalit Keshre, cofounder, Groww

Fintech startup Groww is in discussions with investors for a pre-IPO funding round, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Driving the news: Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and existing backer Tiger Global have held talks with Groww to invest around $200 million. The fresh capital could potentially double the company’s valuation to $6.5 billion from the value ascribed to it in 2021, these sources added.

Also Read: Stock broking startup Groww in talks for IPO valuing it at $6-8 billion: sources


Fintech funding: The deal comes amid a surge in wealthtech funding activity. Groww's rival Dhan has been in the market for a $200 million round valuing it at $1.2 billion, as we reported earlier this year. Meanwhile, Fisdom is in acquisition talks with Groww. Overall, fintech dealmaking has gained momentum in recent months, as we reported earlier.

Also Read: Groww pays $160 million tax for domicile shift; losses rise

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The Indian government’s decision to scrap the 6% equalisation levy on online ads is expected to not only please Big Tech but also ease compliance burdens and eliminate severe penalties for company personnel, experts told us.

What's happening?

• India plans to abolish the equalisation levy on online digital advertising services, a tax that primarily impacts US tech firms such as Google, Meta, and Amazon.
• The change, part of the Finance Bill 2025, is set to take effect on 1 April, pending parliamentary approval. The move aims to ease US trade concerns and support ongoing bilateral negotiations.

Expert's take: Dhruv Garg, founding director at the Indian Governance and Policy Project (IGAP), described the levy as a “sore point in India-US trade relations” and said its removal could “have a positive impact” while also lowering advertising costs for Indian businesses.

Current state: US president Donald Trump has pledged to impose retaliatory tariffs on countries enforcing digital taxes on American tech firms, with the measures set to begin on April 2.

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Prominent fintech founders, including those behind Jupiter, Fi and Lendingkart, have come together to establish a new industry organisation. They await approval from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to function as a self-regulatory organisation (SRO) for the sector.

New entity: Fintech Convergence Council (FCC) members have floated this new entity as an offshoot of the council, aiming to secure an SRO licence from the RBI, sources told us. Some of the early members include:

• Jitendra Gupta, founder, Jupiter
• Sajith Narayanan and Sumit Gwalani, cofounders, Fi
• Harshvardhan Lunia, CEO, Lendingkart
• Anurag Sinha, cofounder, OneCard

Word for word: “This body will be representative of the entire fintech industry, from payments to lending, to digital currency,” one of the sources told us. To make the body representative of the diverse sector, founders from insurance, wealthtech and regtech have also been roped in.

Also Read: From CBDC, UPI ATM to Payments SRO: RBI lays out route map for fintech industry

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Government invites private firms to share anonymous data for AI Kosh: The government has proposed inviting private firms, including startups, to share anonymous, non-personal user datasets with the AI Kosh platform. A senior official told ET that the initiative aims to enhance artificial intelligence development in India and supply data for training large language models (LLMs).

AI is a huge opportunity, much more than SaaS: Girish Mathrubootham | Artificial intelligence and AI agents could generate a billion-dollar opportunity for India, surpassing software-as-a-service (SaaS, said Girish Mathrubootham, cofounder of Freshworks.

ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok are not very different from each other right now: Perplexity CEO: Perplexity chief executive officer Aravind Srinivas stated that there is currently little differentiation among major generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) products. Speaking to Zerodha’s cofounder Nikhil Kamath’s podcast, Srinivas said, “All of them are doing similar things. There is not a genuine differentiation between ChatGPT, Anthropic, Grok or Gemini right now.”

Paytm Payments Services stops working with third-party platforms, moves to direct transaction processing: Paytm Payments Services, a subsidiary of Paytm, has notified merchants that it will cease processing transactions through third-party routers such as Juspay and will exclusively accept transactions sent directly to its own payment gateway.

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■ EU lawmakers warn against ‘dangerous’ moves to water down AI rules (FT)

■ Apple says it’ll use Apple Maps Look Around photos to train AI (The Verge)

■ A look at a very Silicon Valley approach to repopulation (Wired)