Ukrainians will have plenty of ways to evade internet censorship if Russia takes over

By the digits

There are 480 startup hubs worldwide.

10% is the proportion of unicorns located outside Silicon Valley and major locations in Europe and Asia.

There are 93,500 job openings for data scientists in India.

The size of the Brazilian fintech PagSeguro's IPO. It was the biggest IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in two years.

Where to watch

You can't see them from California.

One big number

The number of internet users in India is larger than the populations of the US and Western Europe. Even though only half of the population has access to the internet, the country has the second-largest internet user base after China. Tech companies are racing to make the internet accessible by translation into all 22 official Indian languages, as the penetration of the mobile device extends into smaller cities and rural areas.

One $1 trillion question

Who will win the battle for India’s $700 billion retail industry?

Two of the world's richest men are competing for control of the lucrative market, which is expected to grow to over a trillion dollars by the year 2025. In one corner stands Jeff Bezos, who has already spent $5 billion building out Amazon's Indian e-commerce operations. Asia's richest man is the scion of the Reliance Retail group and the owner of 10,000+ brick-and-mortar stores. Bezos is fighting legal challenges to limit his rival's growth because he has more political clout.

Person of interest

Iyin Aboyeji's CV already includes building two of the continent's best-funded startups. He co-founded developer outsourcing firm Andela, which has since raised over $180 million from investors that include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Serena Williams, and an investment firm co-founded by former US vice president Al Gore. Aboyeji moved on to start a payments processing firm that has grown from operating solely in Nigeria to enabling payments in over 40 African countries. Aboyeji is an investor who provides fast-growing, early-stage African startups with crucial funding.

Keep reading

• Silicon Valley is no longer the global model. Instead, look to “the frontier”—entrepreneur clusters largely in emerging markets that operate with far fewer resources and networks.
• Nigeria’s startups need government support to beat Covid-19. Africa’s largest economy is working to protect the future of its promising tech sector.
• A forgotten Indian smartphone brand is trying to cash in. Onetime market leader Micromax failed to compete with Chinese rivals such as Xiaomi, Vivo, and Oppo; now it’s staging a comeback with some nationalist vigor.
• Data scientists are trying to make the internet accessible in every language. Roughly 3.5 billion speakers of around 7,000 non-dominant languages don’t have access to AI-powered translation tools—shutting them out of the internet’s most powerful benefits.
• A local music download service is taking on Spotify and Apple Music in Africa. Mdundo, which has signed up 80,000 African artists with a collective catalog of 1.5 million songs, raised $6.4 million in its 2020 IPO.

Quotable

“In this time of coronavirus-fueled uncertainty, startups should strive not to be like Silicon Valley unicorns, but rather like ‘camels’ of the frontier: ventures that capitalize on opportunity, but also focus on sustainability and long-term growth, i.e. surviving droughts and pandemics from the get-go. —Alex Lazarow, a Bay Area-based venture capitalist, academic, and author who argues that the tech world should look to centers outside Silicon Valley

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Fun fact

Jack Ma's ambitions of becoming the largest shareholder in the world's largest IPO were stymied by Chinese regulators. Quick-witted observers marked the occasion with a proverb that turns the company's name into M.

Brief history

A private tech startup valued over $1 billion was referred to by venture capitalist Aileen Lee. While Lee's point was that companies like this mythical creature are rare and special, today there are nearly 600 of them, with China and the US dominating the space.