Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Here.fm, a new web-based communication platform founded by Jesse Boyes and Seth Harris, has today announced the close of a $2.9 million seed round from FirstMark with participation by Y Combinator and a group of angel investors.

Here is all about giving people the chance to create personal, shareable and flexible video chat rooms. Boyes and Harris, like the rest of us, moved to Zoom to collaborate when the pandemic hit and felt that there were several shortcomings.

Harris explained that it felt very impersonal and formal to switch into presentation mode with his cofounder and buddy, and that notes and other content in those meetings disappeared when the meeting ended, “like a wormhole.”

They set out to add more layers to virtual communication.

“There are four main components to communication,” said Harris. “What you’re saying, where you are, what you’re doing, and how you move. Everything we use today almost exclusively focuses on what you say, and very little on what you do. Zoom is a phone call with pictures.”

Here, in contrast, is a fully customizable room with video chat built on top of it, giving users the ability to decorate their room with virtual items, gifs, backgrounds, notes, pictures, etc. And, of course, these users can also customize their own video chat window and those of others, arranging them in the room in the size and shape that they prefer.

As with any other video chat software, users can also share their screen.

Harris and Boyes aren’t ready to commit to a certain business model or even use case, but would rather prefer to see how users approach the platform. Some have built out product war rooms, while others have set up their own virtual Blue Bottle shop to have coffee with each other. Others have set up Pilates classes that look and feel more like an actual Pilates studio than a Zoom call would.

That’s not to say they haven’t started thinking about revenue at all. There is potential here to offer payments processing for folks hosting classes or paid events, and there are also options to paywall persistence of the room and the items inside it, or even to charge for premium virtual objects or goods.

Here launched two months ago and thousands of rooms have been created since, with the average user session being 41 minutes.

Competition in this space is heating up. Mmhmm offers similar tools to customize the video chat room, but focuses more on presenting than hanging out. Macro is a tool that sits on top of a Zoom call to help ensure meetings are productive and efficient. And then there are the dozens (if not more) startups that sprung to action at the onset of the pandemic to build out the next-generation of video chat.

But Boyes and Harris don’t see competition as the greatest challenge to the company.

“Here is a product problem, it is not an execution problem,” said Harris. “It is about generating a very strong emotional response in our users when they come in.”

Yuanfudao, a homework tutoring-app founded in 2012, has raised $2.2 billion from investors, surpassing Byju’s as the most valuable edtech company in the world. The Beijing-based company is now worth $15.5 billion dollars, almost double its valuation set in March.

The company views the new capital as two separate extension rounds of its March raise, a $1 billion Series G financing event. The G1 round was led by Tencent with participation from Hillhouse Capital, Boyu Capital and IDG Capital. The G2 financing was led by DST Global, with participation from CITICPE, GIC, Temasek, TBP, DCP, Ocean Link, Greenwoods and Danhe Capital.

The money will be used to develop curriculum and expand Yuanfudao’s online educational service, amid a larger boom in remote learning. In 2018, the company told TechCrunch that a majority of its revenue came from selling live courses. Its goal then was to fund and bring more AI into its products, and improve its user experience.

In the two years since, Yuanfudao has doubled its total users to 400 million students across China. Today’s funding suggests that it will push more live, online coursework and broaden out its closed loop system of learning.

Currently, Yuanfudao offers a variety of products: live tutoring, online Q&A arm, and math problem checking arm.

Yuanfudao’s physical footprint, which includes 30,000 employees in teaching centers across China, could fuel its online services. In 2014, it set up an AI Research Institute and technology laboratory with elite schools including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Microsoft. The goal? To bring insights from that institute directly into the app. The company sees AI as an opportunity to see what student weaknesses look like, which it can then address in teacher curriculum and product design.

Asia more broadly has a stronger education market because of consumer spending and a cultural focus on outcomes in education. Thus, the shift to digital learning has poured fuel on an already booming education market. One report says that the education economy in China alone could be worth $81 billion in two years.

As my colleague Rita Liao pointed out, Yuanfudao is nowhere near alone in the race to win the tutoring market. Other well-funded companies include Zuoyebang, a Beijing-based startup that focuses on online learning and last raised $750 million in June; and Yiqizuoye, which has Singapore sovereign fund Temasek as an investor.

Lyft riders will soon have the option for paying and splitting fares using Venmo, the company said in a blog posting this morning. Venmo joins Lyft’s other payment methods of PayPal, credit cards, debit cards, Lyft Cash and more.

To enable the payment method, users need to authorize Venmo in the Lyft app.

Lyft says this feature is rolling out this month and will be available across its network in the coming weeks.

This feature comes to Lyft several years after first hitting Uber in 2018. Through Venmo users are able to create a financial social network of sorts where users share transactions including ridesharing charges. For services like Uber and Lyft, this unlocks a new form of marketing where users note their ridesharing service of choice. And, in theory, if your closest friends use a particular service for rides, you’re more likely to follow in kind.

Splitting fares happens in the Venmo app. After the ride is complete, users need to find and select the Lyft transaction in their Venmo payment feed. From there the Venmo user can select the person they want to split the charge. However, Lyft offers a native fare splitting service that does not require Venmo.

It’s only been a few months since Lili announced its $10 million seed round, and it’s already raised more funding — namely, a $15 million Series A.

The startup, founded by CEO Lilac Bar David and CTO Liran Zelkha, is creating a bank account and associated products designed for freelancers, with features like early access to direct deposit payments and the ability to set aside a percentage of income for taxes.

The account (and associated Visa debit card) is free of overdraft fees or minimum balance requirements; Bar David said the company only makes money from card processing fees.

She also said that the platform has seen rapid growth this year, with transactions up 700% since the beginning of the pandemic and nearly 100,000 accounts opened since the launch in 2019.

Bar David suggested that the economic turmoil caused by COVID-19 has prompted (or forced) more skilled workers — such as programmers and digital marketers — to turn to freelancing. Meanwhile, she’s also seen “a big shift from part-time freelance to full-time freelance.”

Bar David predicted that the recent growth of the freelance economy won’t simply disappear once the pandemic is over, because workers are discovering the benefits of freelancing.

“If you have a 9-to-5 job, you’re dependent on one employer,” she said. “If something happens you’re out of a job … If you’ve got a diversified customer base, you’re not dependent on just one source of income.”

In recent months, Lili has added new features like automatically generated quarterly income and expense reports, a digital debit card (which customers can use before the physical card arrives in the mail) and the ability to send and receive money via Google Pay (Lili already supported Cash App and Venmo).

Bar David said the startup decided to raise more funding to expand its engineering team and further accelerate its growth. Apparently she was preparing for a traditional Series A fundraising process (albeit one that was conducted in the middle of a pandemic), but “our current investors were so tremendously impressed by the product-market fit and the growth” that they were willing to fund almost all of the new round.

So the Series A was led by previous investor Group 11, with participation from Foundation Capital, AltaIR Capital, Primary Venture Partners and Torch Capital — along with new backer Zeev Ventures.

“As the global workforce evolves at a rapid pace, we are excited to lead another round of funding to help Lili capitalize on unprecedented demand and offer an entirely new solution to help freelancers seamlessly save time and money,” said Group 11’s Dovi Frances in a statement.

Six years ago, Amazon essentially created a new consumer electronics category. Expectations weren’t particularly high when the first Echo device debuted in November of 2014. Amazon, after all, has never shied away from throwing a new device against the wall to see what sticks — if anything, that’s become a defining characteristic of the last half-dozen years of Alexa devices.

The Echo stuck. In 2019, 146.9 million smart speakers were shipped globally, according to figures from Strategy Analytics. That figure marked a 70% increase over the year prior. Of that figure, Amazon owned a 26.2% market share.

That’s a success story by any measure. Of course, any competition present is also a knock-on effect of Amazon’s success. Google’s original Home speaker was released two years later, and Apple’s HomePod came out the year after that. While each certainly offered their own unique take on the category, it’s hard to imagine them making the same mark had Amazon not helped define the smart speaker category way back when.

Along with being the smart speaker grandaddy, Amazon’s also updated its devices with the most frequency. Google Home just got its second iteration (now Nest Audio) and the original HomePod is still on its first version. Last month, we got the fourth generation versions of both the Echo and the Echo Dot. The refreshes are about more than just getting people to buy new devices (of course, that’s a big part of it, too) — they’re also about adapting to learnings about how people use these sorts of devices.

After all, the original Echo had little to go on beyond internal testing. Take audio. The initial Echo was smart first and a speaker second. Sure it could play music, but that was really just a secondary feature. First and foremost, the product was about conversing with Alexa. In 2017, however, Apple showed everyone the importance of focusing on audio quality with the HomePod. For many consumers, it made a lot more sense to purchase a quality speaker with an assistant built in, rather than a purpose-built smart speaker with lousy audio quality.

Subsequent versions of the Echo started to prioritize audio. Of course, the company never really did so to such a degree that the entry-level product could stand toe to toe with, say, the HomePod (though the Echo Studio is an attempt to approximate that on a somewhat tighter budget), but audio has increasingly become less of an afterthought across the company’s product line.

This year’s redesign centers on an audio upgrade yet again, along with an aesthetic overhaul that attempts to focus some of that newfound sound. The fourth-generation Echo is, in a word, round. Eschewing generations of cylinders, the company has gone with a design that is perfectly spherical (except the flat bottom to stop it from rolling off your table top). I suspect one learning that lead to the new design was where users place speakers in their homes.

Previous generations have been focused on a more three-dimensional listening experience, assuming, I suppose, that people are sticking these speakers in the middle of a room, rather than up against the wall. While the new Echo is round, however, the hard plastic bottom arcs upward, monopolizing about two-thirds of the device’s back. This time out, the company’s opted for a pair of front-firing 0.8-inch tweeters (one more than gen-three), coupled with a three-inch woofer (same as last year).

The speaker leans a but too heavily on the bass by default for my tastes, though you can adjust those setting via the Alexa app (I took it down about two notches). The sound quality is solid for the size and price point. I was able to get pretty decent playback listening to Spotify. Head to head, I think the Nest Audio delivers a richer, fuller sound — and if you’re currently assistant-agnostic, that’s the one I’m recommending based purely on sound.

Of course, the sound is much fuller if you’ve got a pair of the $99 devices in stereo mode. Amazon thoughtfully sent along two for testing that feature specifically. A similar feature is available for both Google’s Nest devices and Apple’s HomePod and HomePod Mini. Given that two Echos are roughly the price of one Echo Studio, the math might make sense, depending on your home setup.

I do like the design here. Though sitting next to the Nest Audio, it’s hard to shake a sense of convergent evolution with all of these smart speakers. As it happens, both of my review devices are the same color, and really look like they could have sprung out of the same product line, with their dark fabric coverings. I do, however, appreciate the design work that’s being done to make them feel a bit more subtle than previous generations — and in a sense part of the furniture.

As I mentioned in my recent review of the Echo Dot (which is physically identical to the Echo in all but size), I’m a bit less thrilled with the design to move the light ring to the bottom. I understand practically why the company did this: it wouldn’t have made sense to slice up the round design with a light ring. But the new design only makes sense if the Echo is close to eye level. Otherwise you’re reliant on its reflection from the surface on which the device sits.

The biggest upgrade here, however, may be the inclusion of a Zigbee hub, which negates the existence of the Echo Plus. It was only a matter of time before the Echo became a smart home hub, and it’s nice that Amazon’s found a way to incorporate that into a device at this price point. It’s a big part of the company’s push to corner the smart home control market. Notably, the new Nest Audio also offers the feature.

An interesting surprise addition is the temperature sensor. In addition to local weather, asking “Alexa, what’s the temperature in here?” it will offer up an average temperature for the room where the Echo resides. Not exactly necessary, but helpful information, I suppose.

Amazon’s nearly annual updates to the line ensure that no new generation represents as radical an upgrade as the one we just saw between Google Home and Nest Audio. But all in all, Amazon’s presented us with a nice little refresh here.

Facebook has been making a big play to be a go-to partner for small and medium businesses that use the internet to interface with the wider world, and its messaging platform WhatsApp, with some 50 million businesses and 175 million people messaging them (and more than 2 billion users overall), has been a central part of that pitch.

Now, the company is making three big additions to WhatsApp to fill out that proposition.

It’s launching a way to shop for and pay for goods and services in WhatsApp chats; it’s going head to head with the hosting providers of the world with a new product called Facebook Hosting Services to host businesses’ online assets and activity; and — in line with its expanding product range — Facebook said it will finally start to charge companies using WhatsApp for Business.

Facebook announced the news in a short blog post light on details. We have reached out to the company for more information on pricing, availability of the services, and whether Facebook will provide hosting itself or work with third parties, and we will update this post as we learn more.

Here is what we know for now:

In-chat Shopping. Companies are already using WhatsApp to present product information and initiate discussions for transactions. One of the more recent developments in that area was the addition of QR codes and the ability to share catalog links in chats, added in July. At the same time, Facebook has been expanding the ways that businesses can display what they are selling on Facebook and Instagram, most recently with the launch in August of Facebook Shop, following a similar product roll out on Instagram before that.

Today’s move sounds like a new way for businesses in turn to use WhatsApp both to link through to those Facebook-native catalogs, as well as other products, and then purchase items, while still staying in the chat.

At the same time, Facebook will be making it possible for merchants to add “buy” buttons in other places that will take shoppers to WhatsApp chats to complete the purchase. “We also want to make it easier for businesses to integrate these features into their existing commerce and customer solutions,” it notes. “This will help many small businesses who have been most impacted in this time.”

Although Facebook is not calling this WhatsApp Pay, it seems that this is the next step ahead for the company’s ambitions to bring payments into the chat flow of its messaging app. That has been a long and winding road for the company, which finally launched WhatsApp Payments, using Facebook Pay, in Brazil, in June of this year only to have it shut down by regulators for failing to meet their requirements. (The plan has been to expand it to India, Indonesia and Mexico next.)

Facebook Hosting Services: No! This is not about Facebook taking on AWS. Or… not yet at least? The idea here appears that it is specifically aimed at selling hosting services to the kind of SMBs who already use Facebook and WhatsApp messaging, who either already use hosting services for their online assets, whether that be their online stores or other things, or are finding themselves now needing to for the first time, now that business is all about being “online.”

This is a very interesting move, since the SMB hosting market is pretty fragmented with a number of companies, including the likes of GoDaddy, Dream Host, HostGator, BlueHost and many others also offering these services. That fragmentation spells opportunity for a huge company like Facebook with a global profile, a burgeoning amount of connections through to other online services for these SMBs, and a pretty extensive network of data centers around the world that it’s built for itself and can now use to provide services to others — which is, indeed, a pretty strong parallel with how Amazon and AWS have done business.

Facebook already has an “app store” of sorts of partners it works with to provide marketing and related services to businesses using its platform. It looks like it plans to expand this, and will sell the hosting alongside all of that, with the kicker that hosting natively on Facebook will speed up how everything works.

“Providing this option will make it easier for small and medium size businesses to get started, sell products, keep their inventory up to date, and quickly respond to messages they receive – wherever their employees are,” it notes.

Charging tiers: As you would expect, to encourage more adoption, Facebook has not been charging for WhatsApp Business up to now, but with more services coming into the mix, and businesses tying their fates more securely to how well they are performing on Facebook’s platforms, it’s not surprise to see Facebook converting that into a play to pay.

Frustratingly, there seems so far to be no detail on which services will be charged, nor how much, nor when, so this is more of a warning than a new requirement.

“We will charge business customers for some of the services we offer, which will help WhatsApp continue building a business of our own while we provide and expand free end-to-end encrypted text, video and voice calling for more than two billion people,” it notes.

For those who might find that annoying, on the plus side, for those who are concerned about an ever-encroaching data monster, it will, at the least, help WhatsApp and Facebook continue to stick to its age-old commitment to stay away from advertising as a business model.

Doubling-down on SMBs

The new services come at a time when Facebook is doubling down on providing services for businesses, spurred in no small part by the coronavirus pandemic, which has driven physical retailers and others to close their actual doors, shifting their focus to using the internet and mobile services to connect with and sell to customers.

Citing that very trend, last month the company’s COO Sheryl Sandberg announced the Facebook Business Suite, bringing together all of the tools it has been building for companies to better leverage Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp profiles both to advertise themselves as well as communicate with and sell to customers. And the fact that Sandberg was leading the announcement says something about how Facebook is prioritizing this: it’s striking while the iron is hot with companies using its platform, but it sees/hopes that business services can a key way to diversify its business model while also helping buffer it — since many businesses building Pages may also advertise.

Facebook has also been building more functionality across Facebook and Instagram specifically aimed at helping power users and businesses leverage the two in a more efficient way. Adding in more tools to WhatsApp is the natural progression of all of this.

To be sure, as we pointed out earlier this year, even while there is a lot of very informal use of WhatsApp by businesses all around the world, WhatsApp Business remains a fairly small product, most popular in India and Brazil. Facebook launching more tools for how to use it will potentially drive more business not just in those markets but help the company convert more businesses to using it in other places, too.

Smaller businesses have been on Facebook’s radar for a while now. Even before the pandemic hit, in many cases retailers or restaurants do not have websites of their own, opting for a Facebook Page or Instagram Profile as their URL and primary online interface with the world; and even when they do have standalone sites, they are more likely to update people and spread the word about what they are doing on social media than via their own URLs.

Buildings are the bedrocks of civilization — places to live, places to work (well, normally, in a non-COVID-19 world) and places to play. Yet how we conceive buildings, architect them for their uses, and ultimately construct them on a site has changed remarkably little over the past few decades. Housing and building costs continue to rise, and there remains a slow linear process from conception to construction for most projects. Why can’t the whole process be more flexible and faster?

Well, a trio of engineers and architects out of MIT and Georgia Tech are exploring that exact question.

MIT’s former treasurer Israel Ruiz along with architects Anton Garcia-Abril of MIT and Debora Mesa of Georgia Tech have joined together on a startup called WoHo (short for “World Home”) that’s trying to rethink how to construct a modern building by creating more flexible “components” that can be connected together to create a structure.

By creating components that are usable in a wide variety of types of buildings and making them easy to construct in a factory, the goal of WoHo is to lower construction costs, maximize flexibility for architects, and deliver compelling spaces for end users, all while making projects greener in a climate unfriendly world.

The team’s ideas caught the attention of Katie Rae, CEO and managing director of The Engine, a special fund that spun out of MIT that is notable for its lengthy time horizons for VC investments. The fund is backing WoHo with $4.5 million in seed capital.

Ruiz spent the last decade overseeing MIT’s capital construction program, including the further buildout of Kendall Square, a neighborhood next to MIT that has become a major hub for biotech innovation. Through that process, he saw the challenges of construction, particularly for the kinds of unique spaces required for innovative companies. Over the years, he also built friendships with Garcia-Abril and Mesa, the duo behind Ensamble Studio, an architecture firm.

With WoHo, “it is the integration of the process from the design and concept in architecture all the way through the assembly and construction of that project,” Ruiz explained. “Our technology is suitable for low-to-high rise, but in particularly it provides the best outcomes for mid-to-high rise.”

So what exactly are these WoHo components? Think of them as well-designed and reusable blocks that can be plugged together in order to create a structure. These blocks are consistent and are designed to be easily manufactured and transported. One key innovation is around an improved reinforced cement that allows for better building quality at lower environmental cost.

We have seen modular buildings before, typically apartment buildings where each apartment is a single block that can be plugged into a constructed structure (take for example this project in Sacramento). WoHo, though, wants to go further in having components that offer more flexibility and arrangements, and also act as the structure themselves. That gives architects far more flexibility.

It’s still early days, but the group has already gotten some traction in the market, inking a partnership with Swiss concrete and building materials company LafargeHolcim to bring their ideas to market. The company is building a demonstration project in Madrid, and targeting a second project in Boston for next year.

Three months on since the former founders of SoundCloud launched their e-bike subscription service, Dance they are today announcing the close of a $17.7 million (€15 million) Series A funding round led by one of the larger European VCs, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures.

Founded by Eric Quidenus-Wahlforss (ex-Soundcloud), Alexander Ljung (ex-Soundcloud) and Christian Springub (ex-Jimdo), Dance has ambitions to offer its all-inclusive service subscription package into expanded markets across Europe and eventually the US. Dance is currently operating the invite-only pilot of its e-bike subscription in Berlin, with plans for a broader launch, expanded accessibility and availability and new cities next year. 

Rainer Märkle, general partner at HV Holtzbrinck Ventures said in a statement: “The mobility market is seeing a huge shift towards bikes, strongly fueled by the paradigm shift of vehicles going electric. Unfortunately, the majority of e-bikes on the market today have some combination of poor design, high upfront costs, and cumbersome maintenance. We analyzed the overall mobility market, evaluated all means of transport, and crunched the numbers on all types of business models for a few years before we found what we were looking for. Dance is by the far the most viable future of biking, bridging the gap between e-bike ownership and more ‘joyful’ accessibility to go places.”

E-bikes tend to be notoriously expensive to purchase and a hassle to repair. That said, startups like VanMoof and Cowboy have brought an Apple -esque business model to the market which is fast bringing the cost of full ownership down.

Most commuters are put off cycling the average 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) commute but e-bikes make this distance a breeze. Dance sits in that half-way house between owning an expensive bike and having to hunt down a rentable ebike or electric scooter close to your location.

Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought individual, socially distanced, transport into sharp relief. UK sales of e-bikes have boomed, seeing a 230% surge in demand over the summer. This has happened at the same time as EU governments have put in more than 2300km of bike lanes, with the UK alone pledging £250 million in investment.

Quidenus-Wahlforss said the startup has been “inundated with positive responses from around the world since we announced our invite-only pilot program.”

Dance’s subscription model includes a fully assembled e-bike delivered to a subscriber’s door within 24 hours. This comes with maintenance, theft replacement insurance, a dedicated smartphone app, concierge services, GPS location tracking and unlocking capabilities.

Smartphone shipments reached an all-time high in India in the quarter that ended in September this year as the world’s second largest handset market remained fully open during the period after initial lockdowns due to the coronavirus, according to a new report.

About 50 million smartphones shipped in India in Q3 2020, a new quarterly record for the country where about 17.3 million smartphone units shipped in Q2 (during two-thirds of the period much of the country was under lockdown) and 33.5 million units shipped in Q1 this year, research firm Canalys said on Thursday.

Xiaomi, which assumed the No.1 smartphone spot in India in late 2018, continues to maintain its dominance in the country. It commanded 26.1% of the smartphone market in India, exceeding Samsung’s 20.4%, Vivo’s 17.6%, and Realme’s 17.4%, the marketing research firm said.

But the market, which was severely disrupted by the coronavirus, is set to see some more shifts. Research firm Counterpoint said last week that Samsung had regained the top spot in India in the quarter that ended in September. (Counterpoint plans to share the full report later this month.)

According to Counterpoint, Samsung has benefited from its recent aggressive push into online sales and from the rising anti-China sentiments in India.

The geo-political tension between India and China has incentivised many consumers in India to opt for local brands or those with headquarters based in U.S. and South Korea. And local smartphone firms, which lost the market to Chinese giants (that command more than 80% of the market today) five years ago, are planning a come back.

Indian brand Micromax, which once ruled the market, said this month that it is gearing up to launch a new smartphone sub-brand called “In.” Rahul Sharma, the head of Micromax, said the company is investing $67.9 million in the new smartphone brand.

In a video he posted on Twitter last week, Sharma said Chinese smartphone makers killed the local smartphone brands but it was now time to fight back. “Our endeavour is to bring India on the global smartphone map again with ‘in’ mobiles,” he said in a statement.

India also recently approved applications from 16 smartphone and other electronics companies for a $6.65 billion incentives program under New Delhi’s federal plan to boost domestic smartphone production over the next five years. Foxconn (and two other Apple contract partners), Samsung, Micromax, and Lava (also an Indian brand) are among the companies that will be permitted to avail the incentives.

Missing from the list are Chinese smartphone makers such as Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus and Realme.

Smartphone shipments reached an all-time high in India in the quarter that ended in September this year as the world’s second largest handset market remained fully open during the period after initial lockdowns due to the coronavirus, according to a new report.

About 50 million smartphones shipped in India in Q3 2020, a new quarterly record for the country where about 17.3 million smartphone units shipped in Q2 (during two-thirds of the period much of the country was under lockdown) and 33.5 million units shipped in Q1 this year, research firm Canalys said on Thursday.

Xiaomi, which assumed the No.1 smartphone spot in India in late 2018, continues to maintain its dominance in the country. It commanded 26.1% of the smartphone market in India, exceeding Samsung’s 20.4%, Vivo’s 17.6%, and Realme’s 17.4%, the marketing research firm said.

But the market, which was severely disrupted by the coronavirus, is set to see some more shifts. Research firm Counterpoint said last week that Samsung had regained the top spot in India in the quarter that ended in September. (Counterpoint plans to share the full report later this month.)

According to Counterpoint, Samsung has benefited from its recent aggressive push into online sales and from the rising anti-China sentiments in India.

The geo-political tension between India and China has incentivised many consumers in India to opt for local brands or those with headquarters based in U.S. and South Korea. And local smartphone firms, which lost the market to Chinese giants (that command more than 80% of the market today) five years ago, are planning a come back.

Indian brand Micromax, which once ruled the market, said this month that it is gearing up to launch a new smartphone sub-brand called “In.” Rahul Sharma, the head of Micromax, said the company is investing $67.9 million in the new smartphone brand.

In a video he posted on Twitter last week, Sharma said Chinese smartphone makers killed the local smartphone brands but it was now time to fight back. “Our endeavour is to bring India on the global smartphone map again with ‘in’ mobiles,” he said in a statement.

India also recently approved applications from 16 smartphone and other electronics companies for a $6.65 billion incentives program under New Delhi’s federal plan to boost domestic smartphone production over the next five years. Foxconn (and two other Apple contract partners), Samsung, Micromax, and Lava (also an Indian brand) are among the companies that will be permitted to avail the incentives.

Missing from the list are Chinese smartphone makers such as Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus and Realme.