🛵Last-Mile Delivery Service (Issue 022)

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In today’s Issue 📥 :

• Last-Mile Delivery Service.

• The Power of Your Tribe.

• Japan’s blue flower valley.

• Hugging Face Shocks OpenAI.

From B2C Mobility to Last-Mile Delivery Service

Zypp Electric, an Indian electric vehicle (EV) startup, recently raised $20 million in equity investment from new and existing investors, including Goodyear Ventures, 9Unicorns, WFC, Venture Catalysts, LetsVenture, IAN, IVY Growth, Grip, and angel investors. Additionally, the company secured $5 million in debt investment from global impact fund IIX and a large national bank. With the fresh infusion of capital, Zypp Electric plans to enhance operations across its service chain.

Zypp Electric’s journey from B2C mobility to last-mile delivery service

Zypp Electric started as a B2C mobility service in 2017, offering electric scooters for rent or lease. The founders, Akash Gupta and Rashi Agarwal were inspired by the widespread adoption of EVs in Europe and wanted to help India embrace sustainable mobility and reduce pollution.

In the initial years, Zypp’s business focused on last-mile commuting for customers from metro stations to their offices. Customers could rent or lease electric scooters, commute to their office, and then drop them back at the station. This service was available in Gurgaon and a few parts of Delhi.

Expanding into the B2B space

Zypp soon realized the challenges of running a mobility business in the EV space, including the need for a huge capital investment, a large fleet of bikes to meet customer demands, and a widespread charging and swapping infrastructure.

In 2019, Zypp decided to pivot to the B2B space and carve a niche for itself by operating a fleet of EVs and managing drivers for e-commerce players and merchants. The startup’s goal is to make last-mile delivery for local merchants and e-commerce giants carbon-free and reduce delivery costs. It currently delivers groceries, medicines, food, and e-commerce packages from point to point through a fleet of fully automated IoT and AI-enabled scooters.

Using technology to streamline operations

Zypp’s technology stack includes real-time driver verification during onboarding and real-time tracking of vehicle location. The app is integrated with back-end services, allowing drivers to start and stop the vehicle without keys. The technology also tracks battery performance and condition, which can be replaced at Zypp Electric Hubs installed at key touchpoints. The data analysis and intelligence layer helps make quick fleet decisions for maintenance and operations.

Scaling and future plans

Before the pandemic in 2020, Zypp scaled to 200 drivers. During the lockdown, when the movement of only essential services was allowed, Zypp had a lot of requests from local merchants and e-commerce players to deliver goods. The company completed 15 million deliveries on EVs for partners such as Bigbasket, Zepto, Flipkart, Myntra, Zomato, Swiggy, Blinkit, Dunzo, Rapido Bike Taxi, JioMart, Pharmeasy, Tata1MG, Delhivery, Blue Dart in the cities of Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru.

Recently, Zypp partnered with Taiwan-based Gogoro to set up swapping stations. The company plans to expand its fleet of e-bikes from 10,000 now to 2,00,000 and widen its footprint from six Indian cities to 30 cities by December 2025. Zypp aims to be the delivery platform for all the 15 million executives (gig economy workers) in India.

IMPROVEMENT SIP

The Power of Your Tribe: Why Surrounding Yourself with the Right People is Key to Achieving Greatness

If you want to achieve greatness in a particular field, you can’t simply follow the crowd. To be in the top 1%, you need to surround yourself with people who challenge and inspire you, rather than settling for the social norms of the majority.

This concept is exemplified by many successful individuals who have forged their own paths to the top. For instance, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is known for his relentless pursuit of innovation and his willingness to take risks. He has often spoken about the importance of surrounding oneself with people who share that drive:

“I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.” – Elon Musk

Similarly, Oprah Winfrey, a media mogul, and philanthropist have credited her success to surrounding herself with people who challenge her and push her to be better:

“Surround yourself with only people who are going to lift you higher.” – Oprah Winfrey

On the other hand, following the social norms of the majority can lead to stagnation and mediocrity. If we only surround ourselves with people who share our opinions and perspectives, we limit our potential for growth and learning.

As the saying goes, “if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” To achieve true success, we need to seek out those who challenge us and inspire us to reach new heights.

This is not an easy task, as our natural inclination is to imitate those around us. However, by consciously choosing to surround ourselves with those who share our drive and ambition, we can create a tribe that supports and motivates us on our journey to greatness.

HOT SIP

Hugging Face Shocks OpenAI – AI Community Trembles as Worst Nightmare Becomes Reality!

The battleground for generative AI is becoming an increasingly intense one and it isn’t just the big tech companies that want to stake a claim. There’s big money to be made here and it’s coming in from new directions. Last week, open-source AI platform ‘Hugging Face’ announced a partnership with AWS with the promise to “make AI Open and not the other way around”. The deal provides Hugging Face with the scope to integrate their models onto the AWS cloud and developers will be able to work with any of the models available on Hugging Face using the AWS-managed ML service, ‘SageMaker’.

OpenAI Introduces Foundry

The next day OpenAI sneaked in with a new developer platform for users to run their newer models like the GPT-3.5 and a couple of their Da Vinci variants on dedicated capacity. Sam Altman’s startup is calling this service offering ‘Foundry’ and although they haven’t revealed their cloud provider, we can safely assume it is Microsoft Azure.

Foundry Targets Enterprises

While the services from both OpenAI and Hugging Face seem to be standing on the grounds to make AI more ‘democratic’, there’s a big difference. For Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Foundry is “designed for cutting-edge customers running larger workloads” i.e., companies. Additionally, this compute won’t come cheap. A leaked pricing sheet for Foundry found its way onto Twitter—even the lightweight version of GPT-3.5 is said to cost USD 78,000 for three months or USD 264,000 for a one-year time period. Foundry has found its first customers already—social media messaging platforms ‘Snapchat’ and ‘Coca-Cola’ will both be integrating GPT-3.5 into businesses with this service.

Hugging Face Advocates for Open-Source AI

Hugging Face, on the other hand, is fighting this mentality of limiting AI to a few hands with deep pockets. They want generative AI models to be accessible to everyone and not only enterprises. While announcing the partnership, AWS, and Hugging Face released a statement explaining why the generative AI realm needed more open-source models. Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS, stated, “Generative AI has the potential to transform entire industries, but its cost and the required expertise puts the technology out of reach for all but a select few companies.”

API Model Priced 10 Times Cheaper

The company’s continued efforts to break open the playing field are already yielding positive results. A couple of days ago, the Altman-led startup introduced an API for users to build ChatGPT tech for their own applications and products. The happy surprise was that the API would be priced at USD 0.002 per 1,000 tokens, or 750 words, thereby making it a ten times cheaper model than their GPT-3.5 variants. For tiny startups or even researchers, this made a world of difference.

Hugging Face and EleutherAI Form Non-Profit

But as OpenAI is battling to maintain supremacy in generative AI, Hugging Face is looking at other avenues to keep the AI research space open. Just today, EleutherAI announced that it was forming a nonprofit foundation called the ‘EleutherAI Institute’. Founded by a decentralized group of researchers, the entity has unsurprisingly been backed by Hugging Face and Emad Mostaque’s Stability AI, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Lambda Labs, and Canva. All of these companies are technically still ‘independent’ in their business segments.

SMALL SIPS

H3N2 influenza: Hospitals across the country have been reporting thousands of cases of Influenza A subtype H3N2 over the past few months, which causes fever for 3-5 days and a persistent cough that can last up to three weeks.

Developed Economy: India cannot afford lost decades, like the one it is presently experiencing with trend growth falling sharply. This will not only push it further behind China, but it might also age before it grows rich. This would scuttle its geopolitical ambitions and lock it into a middle-income trap.

Commits $1 billion: The World Bank and India signed two complimentary loans on Friday (March 4) totaling US$ 500 million each, in order to strengthen and improve the nation’s healthcare infrastructure, as per PTI reports.

Double sale: Automobile retail sales in India witnessed a double-digit year-on-year growth in February driven by robust sales across segments including passenger vehicles and two-wheelers, automobile dealers’ body FADA said.

Painful: Actor Amitabh Bachchan suffered a muscle tear to his right rib cage while shooting Project K in Hyderabad. The 80-year-old star revealed in a blog post that his rib cartilage “popped” on set while he filmed an action shot, injuring him. He received medical care in Hyderabad and is now recovering at Jalsa, his home in Mumbai.

With CHAI ☕

Ceo: SoftBank CEO to attend OYO founder Ritesh Agarwal’s wedding.

How to: set up Advanced Data Protection on iPhone.

Aww: I’m so hungry 🥺

It’s Interesting: Amit Kumar, a computer science teacher at Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya at Theog, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh. He simplified the teaching of Computer Science by introducing blended learning approaches such as Flipped Classroom using Flipgrid, Blended learning through FOSS and MOOCs, SDGs in Classroom, and Mind Mapping.

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