The internet giant, which is currently one of the mobile transaction leaders in India with Google Pay, is piloting a soundbox of its own in the country to alert sellers of confirmations for UPI payments — a mobile payment standard developed and now ubiquitous in India for instant payments and transfers between banks, or two mobile users, or a customer and a merchant. With UPI payments, providers typically do not take any cut on UPI transactions, so soundboxes have emerged not just as a convenience for merchants, but as a monetizing tool for payments providers, too. These Soundpods are being built by Amazon-backed ToneTag, TechCrunch has learned.

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ToneTag, India’s largest voice-based commerce and payments solution provider aims to deploy its ground-breaking technology to resolve digital payment issues faced by micro and small businesses across the country. Through strategic partnerships with major global fintech players, the company is taking steps towards achieving this goal and has already reached and deployed this solution in over 100,000 small businesses and stores across India working with partners like Google, Amazon, ICICI Bank, NSDL and few others. As a proprietary solution to empower the retail ecosystem, the POD 2.0 is a robust payment acceptance and engagement device. Its major functions include both accepting digital payments through Unified Payments Interface (UPI), UPI 123Pay and interoperable QR code, and providing instant audio and visual payment acknowledgement.

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SquareFoot, a tech-enabled commercial real estate brokerage and office listings marketplace, has recruited veteran broker Steve Walbridge as a full-time team member. Walbridge will join SquareFoot's Los Angeles office as an Executive Vice President.

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NEW YORK, NY –Today, BEGiN, the company behind industry-leading early learning programs HOMER, codeSpark Academy, Little Passports, KidPass, and Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street, launch Learn with Sesame, the first offering to come out of their partnership. The new app uses Sesame Workshop’s tried-and-true educational approach alongside BEGiN’s four-step learning framework, ‘The BEGiN Method,’ which builds confidence, promotes problem-solving, and fosters a lifelong love of learning.

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The services will be available in languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, and Bengali. The voice-based digital payments system to be expanded to other languages such as Gujarati, Marathi, and Punjabi in the near future. Within two months of its launch in March, VoiceSe onboarded more than 1 Lakh users and saw more than 2 lakh transactions on the platform.

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Chennai-based debt marketplace Yubi has announced its latest partnership with U GRO Capital, a new generation Lending-as-a-Service (LaaS) business that leverages technology to deliver last-mile credit to MSMEs in the country. The partnership will see the integration of Yubi Co.Lend and Yubi Flow with GRO–Xstream and GRO–Line platforms, respectively. As a result of this double partnership, U GRO Capital will be able to leverage Yubi’s full stack operating system to seamlessly discover, go live and collaborate with multiple partners on Yubi’s platform.

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The services will be available in languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, and Bengali. The voice-based digital payments system to be expanded to other languages such as Gujarati, Marathi, and Punjabi in the near future. Within two months of its launch in March, VoiceSe onboarded more than 1 Lakh users and saw more than 2 lakh transactions on the platform.

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Faircent, the peer-to-peer lending platform, has announced the launch of a co-lending platform Faircent Pro for NBFCs and institutional lenders. The cutting technology solution offered by Faircent will enable co-lending to borrowers who are pre-qualified who are selected on the basis of their preferred parameters, it said in a statement.

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Vancouver-based Hootsuite has appointed Natalia Williams as chief product officer (CPO). Prior to joining Hootsuite, Williams worked at Mailchimp as the email marketing company’s CPO. Before that, she spent almost a decade at Bloomingdales, starting as senior producer of internet production and then worked her way up to vice president of product management and e-commerce operations.

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U GRO Capital, a MSME lending fintech platform, on Monday declared the appointment of Smita Aggarwal as additional independent director of the company. She has thirty years of involvement with finance as a banker, lender, regulator and an investor. She is additionally an individual from the Board of Directors of IIFL Asset Management Company and guest faculty at the Stern School of Business, New York University. 

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U GRO Capital, a non-banking financial company focused on small and medium enterprises, on Tuesday announced opening of public issue of bonds later this week to raise up to Rs 100 crore.

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In line with its commitment to empowering India to make offline digital payments, ToneTag, India’s sound-based proximity communication and payments service provider, has recently rolled out its simple & secure VoiceSe UPI digital payments for feature phone user, in partnership with NSDL Payments Bank and NPCI, under the guidance of RBI.

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Fintech platform U GRO Capital Ltd, which is focused on micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), on Monday said it has raised Rs 138 crore (around $18.5 million) as its first impact-focused debt capital from Swiss firm responsAbility. The company plans to use the fresh funds to back MSME-focused companies in India. 

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ToneTag, India’s fastest-growing sound-based proximity communication and payments service provider is collaborating with Elocity, a global leader in electric vehicle (EV) charging solutions to solve the payment processing challenges in the EV sector.

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