Govt to match VC investments in Indian chip startups; Shah Rukh Khan, QED Investors back AI content firm Flam

The government has rolled out a newframeworkfor UPI payments. It has set a 0.4% charge on UPI payments above Rs 2,000 to merchants and capped the fee for payments of Rs 75,000 and above at Rs 300. This ends the zero-MDR (merchant discount rate) regime in place from January 2020. Person-to-person transactions and person-to-merchant transactions up to Rs 2,000 remain outside the scope of MDR. Consumers can continue to transact free of cost using UPI. As competition in quick commerce heats up, Amazon’s Q-comm service, Amazon Now, is racing to capture demand in the smaller markets. The service has expanded to more than 60 cities in less than 10 weeks, including markets such as Tirupati, Guntur, Gurdaspur, Vellore and Warangal. The target is to get to 100 cities by Diwali. Amazon Now has reached $1 billion inannualised gross salesin India over the last three months. Meanwhile, areportby foundit shows that entry-level engineers outnumber the jobs available in the market. Professionals with 0-3 years of experience make up nearly 45% of the candidate pool against a requirement of just 28%. Lastly, close on the heels of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urging for an AI slowdown, co-founder Jack Clark has joined theconversation. He has called for a kill switch that would shut off AI software if things got too dangerous. Here’s your trivia for today: Where was the first YouTube video filmed?(Scroll down for the answer) Amitesh Kumar Sinha, Additional Secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and CEO of the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM), lays out the thinking behind Semicon 2.0, the second phase of the semiconductor mission that turns the government from a grant-giver into a co-investor. This includes a model under which the government will match VC investments in approved chip startups rupee for rupee on the same terms. “Seed funds for startups are grants; the rest is our investment, so the government shares both the upside and the failures,” said Sinha, in an interview to Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory and The Bharat Project, days before Semicon India 2026 opens in New Delhi. AI content firm Flam has raised $40 million in a Series B round of funding led by QED Investors. Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan has also pumped in money, apart from Claypond Capital, Martin Chavez, Olivier Pomel, Venky Harinarayan, and existing investors RTP Global and Dovetail. The Bengaluru- and San Francisco-based tech startup, which enables AI-powered interactive content, was founded in 2021 by BITS Pilani alumni Shourya Agarwal, Malhar Patil and Amit Gaiki. Where was the first YouTube video filmed? We would love to hear from you! To let us know what you liked and disliked about our newsletter, please mail[email protected]. If you don’t already get this newsletter in your inbox,sign up here. For past editions of the YourStory Buzz, you can check ourDaily Capsule page here.

Original source: YourStory