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Fintech Startup MissCallPay among the 4 promising innovations flagged off by RBI with launch of UPI 123Pay

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MissCallPay Team

Mumbai based MissCallPay, a fintech startup that works through voice based payment system, has been included as one of the digital solutions on the UPI 123Pay platform for inclusive solutions aimed at feature phone users.

MissCallPay is one of the four players that RBI selected as digital solutions for the newly launched UPI 123Pay platform. The users using even a feature phone can access their bank account and perform routine transactions such as receiving & transferring funds, regular purchases, bill payments and others by giving a missed call on the number displayed at the merchant’s place.  The customers will receive an incoming call asking to authenticate the transaction by entering UPI Pin. The product is endorsed for its safety features and ability to work over non-smart phones, thus penetrating rural and semi-urban population.

Mitesh Thakker, Founder – MissCallPay said, “It gives us immense pleasure to be part of the launch of UPI 123Pay. I am thankful to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), for having faith in our innovation to transform rural Bharat into mainstream India, through seamless transactions and financial inclusion.” He added that in the year 2022, MissCallPay aims to serve at least 20 million people through strategic partnerships and process 100 million transactions monthly beginning 6 months from commercial operations.

The fintech product of MissCallPay is a digital payment service that does not need internet services to facilitate payments, and instead uses telecom’s most basic feature — cellular network —  to enable payments. This means that people with a basic, starter feature phone can also accept and initiate online payments. This not only helps feature/ button phone users but also helps non-tech savvy smart-phone users to use MissCallPay, and also offers a solution to security conscious smartphone users who keeps safety and security as the most important criterion for digital transactions.

As Thakker added, “MissCallPay’s mission is all about Making Payments Simple for digitally challenged billion users. We enable simple UPI based mobile payments over a feature phone, smartphone, and in near future over voice bots like Amazon Alexa, Ok-Google, User doesn’t need to be digitally literate and there is no need for hardware terminal POS or QR code or at times internet. Users transact in the local language, can make payments remotely. Proximity as required for swiping a card or scanning QR code is also not required here. 

While making payments simple, We also hope to make UPI 123Pay payments as one of the safest payment methods possible and have made payment process phishing and spoof proof, the safety and security will only help gain trust of digitally challenged Bharat population. And thus help the government realise the dream of digitally inclusive India.

MissCallPay reach out to more than 1 lakh small merchants across the country and in talks with other entities including banks. 

About MissCallPay

Established on 28th September 2017, MissCallPay (BRAND) is a fintech start-up based in Mumbai that aims to focus on financial inclusion and Digital payments among masses which is the primary priority of the government. This start-up aims to bring convenient solutions to the Bharat population and boost digital payments on feature phones which has not disrupted the industry. MissCallPay was sowed amidst the demonetization crisis that saw a huge leap in digital payment but left behind the rural & non-tech savvy population. 

The concept of MissCallPay is the brain-child of Mitesh Thakker who is a serial entrepreneur & Design Thinker. He has 21 years of experience in selling, marketing and building IT products and has 6 patents to his credit.

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All-in-One Web3 Gaming Ecosystem Blockus Raises $4M Pre-Seed After Completing a16z Incubator Program

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The announcement comes during the Game Developers Conference week, where the company will host a special side event

Blockus, an emerging, innovative force at the intersection of blockchain technology and gaming, today announced a significant milestone, securing $4M in pre-seed funding. This successful raise follows Blockus’s participation in the prestigious a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator, which not only provided access to mentors and advisors but also allowed the startup to connect with potential investors.

The pre-seed round was led by Maple VC and included Altos Ventures as well as known angel investors such as Zhuoxun Yin from Magic Eden, Michael Ma from CreatorDAO, and Bryan Pelligrino from LayerZero.

Blockus is dedicated to transforming the gaming experience by enabling studios to onboard their players and build on-chain gaming features with ease. The company has already gained traction in the market, with over 30 partners already signed, including Ambrus Studio, the team behind E4C: Final Salvation. The funding will allow Blockus to accelerate its growth, expand its team, strengthen sales operations, and invest heavily in product development.

“This pre-seed raise marks a pivotal moment in our journey,” said Jess Zhang, Co-founder & CEO at Blockus. “The trust our investors, like Maple VC, have placed in us is both humbling and inspiring. We’re ready to unlock the next level of innovation in the gaming industry, and we’re excited to bring our blockchain solutions to even more studios and developers.”

With a rapidly expanding market – approximately 62% of all dApp activity comes from gaming projects, and Web3 gaming is expected to reach $600B by 2030 – Blockus is in a prime position to capitalize on this growth.

“We’re thrilled to witness Blockus’s latest achievement,” said Johnson Yeh, Founder & CEO at Ambrus Studio. “As innovators in the gaming space, we’re proud to partner with a company that’s pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. The potential for Web3 in gaming is immense, and we’re confident that Blockus will play a major role in shaping its future.”

The announcement is made in the lead-up week to Game Developers Conference (GDC) taking place in San Francisco. There, the company will host a dedicated event on March 21 at 7 p.m. at the iconic SPIN bar to engage with the Web3 gaming community, and current and potential partners.

“Blockus has the potential to be the catalyst for a new era of gaming, built on the principles of decentralization and player ownership,” said Andre Charoo, General Partner at Maple VC. “The founders’ deep understanding of both gaming and Web3 technologies, combined with their track record, makes them an exceptionally compelling team to back. We believe Blockus is poised to lead the way in the Web3 gaming revolution.”

To celebrate its funding milestone, Blockus is extending a special offer of $20,000 in credits to potential clients for the two weeks following the announcement period. This offer presents a unique opportunity for game developers interested in exploring how Blockus can elevate their game experiences.

About Blockus

Blockus is a complete Web3 gaming economy ecosystem. Beautifully built, fully compliant, and seamlessly integrated into games, the company’s mission is to create a future where players have true ownership of their in-game assets and where gaming experiences are more immersive, engaging, and rewarding.

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Cosmology Raises $5M to Simplify Web3 Application Development

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Cosmology

The “Adobe for Web3” makes building dApps accessible to a wide range of developers, not just those who have expertise with the entire blockchain stack

Cosmology, the tech suite that enables developers to build Web3 apps in the Cosmos ecosystem, has closed its $5M seed round, co-led by Galileo and Lemniscap with participation from Dispersion, Hashkey, Tuesday Capital, the Osmosis Foundation, Chorus One, Informal Systems, and angels including Kevin Lin, Zaki Manian, Leland Lee, and Ethan Beard. As an official part of the Interchain Stack, Cosmology empowers over 2,000 developers to build applications like dYdX, Osmosis, and Celestia. This funding allows Cosmology to support the growth of the interchain, and provide tools that make app development accessible without requiring deep technical blockchain knowledge.

“Having spent nearly three decades at the intersection of design and technology, I see the potential of Web3 and the need to lower the barriers to development,” said Dan Lynch, Founder of Cosmology. “Our mission is to empower a broad range of developers, driving innovation and the shift from Web2 to Web3. We achieve this by enabling builders to swiftly turn their ideas into launched applications, focusing on big-picture concepts rather than the low-level technical details of blockchain.”

Cosmology’s tools make the development of Web3 applications dramatically simpler for developers throughout the interchain and have been downloaded over 5 million times. They’ve created tools like Telescope, which generates easy-to-use TypeScript libraries for developers to access the functionality of Cosmos blockchains, and Cosmos Kit, a universal wallet adapter for quickly making apps that easily interact with Cosmos blockchains and wallets.

“Dan’s work building developer tooling has led to huge growth in the number of applications being built in Cosmos,” said Sunny Aggarwal, Founder of Osmosis. “Cosmology is making app development on the 100+ blockchains in the ecosystem a streamlined, elegant process.”

Initially focused on front-end tools, Cosmology is now broadening its scope of services to offer a comprehensive full-stack environment for developers. The team now includes experts in key blockchain technologies like Tendermint, Cosmos SDK, and IBC Protocol, enhancing its suite’s capabilities across the board. This expansion gives Cosmology extra bandwidth to support developers from design to deployment, covering everything from user interface design all the way to backend blockchain and smart contract tooling.

“Cosmology is the bedrock underlying everything being built right now in the Cosmos and Celestia ecosystems,” said David Feiock, Managing Partner at Galileo. “As an integral part of building application-specific blockchains, Cosmology tools like Telescope materially reduce the complexities for developers allowing for much quicker innovation and iteration cycles, which will be an essential component of this next phase of growth in crypto.”

Commenting on the announcement, Roderik van der Graaf, Founder of Lemniscap, said: “To date, the perceived complexity of Web3 has kept many Web2 developers from exploring novel use cases that would enhance their product offerings. Cosmology is playing a pivotal role in enabling developers to incorporate Web3 elements in their applications, while circumventing the steep Web3 learning curve. We’re delighted to have co-led this funding round and look forward to supporting Dan and the team in executing a strong growth strategy in 2024 and beyond.”

“Dan’s experience building and exiting low-code platforms like Brandcast is invaluable in the Web3 space, where building applications can prove daunting,” said Pat Gallagher, Managing Partner at Tuesday Capital. “Cosmology is democratizing the digital landscape for businesses and developers alike with an Adobe-style suite of products that lower the barrier to entry, so decentralized application development doesn’t require the full-stack expertise that very few software engineers possess.”

“In the early days of the internet, the concept of every business having its own website once seemed like a pipe dream. Today, we’re at a similar point in time before the brink of a revolution with the Internet of Blockchains. Much like low and no-code platforms transformed Web2, making digital participation accessible to all businesses, I see a future where Web3 is equally open and user-friendly,” said Dan Lynch.

As Cosmos becomes an increasingly interwoven mesh of blockchains, Cosmology is at the forefront of enabling developers to build interchain-native applications. This raise helps the team further build out the essential tooling that’s making Cosmos one of the most attractive places to build in Web3 today.

About Cosmology

Cosmology is creating the Adobe of Web3 – a suite of products that work interdependently to catalyze creativity for builders.

Cosmology is building a unified developer experience for cross chain dApps, streamlining everything from low-level encoding and signing to user interfaces and wallet adapters. Our tools are becoming the standard in the interchain, where our community has now grown to 100+ chains and countless smart contract projects across the Cosmos ecosystem.

Hundreds of developers leverage Cosmology’s software to build DEXes, wallets, governance tooling, NFT platforms, lending, leverage, and liquid staking protocols. These include Osmosis, dYdX, Celestia, Cosmostation, Stride, Juno, DaoDao, Stargaze, Mars Protocol, Leap Wallet, AstroTech, Persistence, Quicksilver and more.

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Seattle based Enzzo Announces $3M in Seed Funding to Accelerate Hardware Product Development

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Enzzo supercharges the product definition and requirements process for companies creating hardware. The $3 million seed investment was led by Unlock Venture Partners with participation from PSL Ventures and the Mayfield/Pioneer Square Labs AIStudio Fund.

Enzzo, a company reimagining how hardware products are created by leveraging generative AI, announced today that it raised a $3 million seed investment led by Unlock Venture Partners with participation from PSL Ventures and the newly created Mayfield/Pioneer Square Labs AIStudio Fund. With this round of funding, the company will be expanding the team refining and building its platform.

“I know what it takes to define and ship great products,” said Andy Liu, Managing Director of Unlock Venture Partners, and former VP at VIZIO. “Enzzo is reimagining the process to amplify the abilities of product companies and manufacturers to take an idea, understand the requirements and cost, and get it to market faster with higher quality than ever before. It is a real game-changer for all hardware-related companies.”

Defining new products is challenging enough for software, but hardware’s unique variables and regulatory requirements add complexity. Companies and teams creating hardware are interested in moving faster from a vision to an in-market product but must start by defining the product and developing requirements, which typically take weeks to months. The definition phase is critical, as any hardware changes become increasingly expensive as development progresses, underscoring the critical need for comprehensive requirements and risk assessment from the outset.

To address these problems, Enzzo empowers teams to define innovative products and their requirements faster and more efficiently than is possible today – from weeks or months to days – saving time and expense. Enzzo runs in modern web browsers and leverages the power of foundation models along with company-provided data to prompt, synthesize user inputs, and then generate key outputs. The service features product management expertise accessible via a chat interface, a collaborative workspace for team members and partners to work on requirements, and document generation capability to accelerate the definition of new products.

“Enzzo represents what we believe is the new way that product teams will work by leveraging gains from AI in combination with human creativity to define and create hardware products faster,” said Ford Davidson, co-founder and CEO. “We are thrilled to have awesome investors helping us to grow the company and catalyze the next wave of hardware product innovations.”

Enzzo is a spinout of Seattle-based startup studio Pioneer Square Labs. “I have known Enzzo CEO Ford Davidson for over 20 years and we worked closely together building Dashwire into a successful acquisition by HTC in 2011,” said Geoff Entress, Managing Director. “Ford’s incredible background helping create new category devices and services at Microsoft, HTC, Amazon and, most recently, Meta make him the perfect leader to build Enzzo into a massive player in the hardware space.”

About Enzzo
Enzzo, Inc. is a Seattle, Washington-based company founded in 2023 by product innovators who have worked on award-winning products at startups and tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Samsung, HTC, and Roku.

About Unlock

Unlock Venture Partners is an early stage venture capital firm run by founders and operators that invest in world-changing technology companies based in Seattle and Los Angeles.

About PSL Ventures
PSL Ventures is a venture capital fund located in Seattle, WA. The fund is affiliated with Seattle-based startup studio Pioneer Square Labs. The organization partners with exceptional founders at the earliest stages to help build and invest in market-defining technology companies, primarily based in the Pacific Northwest.

About Pioneer Square Labs (PSL)
Pioneer Square Labs is a Seattle-based startup studio that creates and launches technology startups.

About AIStudio Fund
AIStudio Fund is an investment vehicle backed by Mayfield to invest in AI spinouts of Pioneer Square Labs.

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