Technology

Amazon unleashed a flurry of new products this week at a U.S. press event, but halfway across the world, it is getting deeper into physical retail in the Indian market.

The U.S. e-commerce giant is buying up 49 percent of More in a deal that sees Amazon partner and PE firmSamara Capital pick up the remaining 51 percent. Amazon and Samara have created an entity called Witzig Advisory Services Private Limited which will hold the ownership stake through the deal, which is reportedly worth around $585 million according to Indian media. Regulation prevents Amazon from owning the business entirely, hence it requires a local partner to take a majority stake.

The deal is significant because it represents a major move for Amazon in brick and mortar retail in India, which is one of the up-and-coming global markets. It did, of course, jumped into offline sales in the U.S. when it gobbled up Whole Foods for some $16 billion last yearand this India-based acquisition is similarly strategic.

Amazon is battling Flipkart for dominance in Indiae-commerce market, which is tipped to grow four-fold to reach $150 billion by 2022, according to a recent report from PWC. The India rival got a huge boost when it was bought by Walmart, Amazonchief rival in the U.S, in a $17 billion deal earlier this year.

Thatacquisition got Walmart into Indiae-commerce space and it also presents an opportunityto go further and move into other emerging markets using Flipkarttech and experience, which is something that Walmart has said it is keen to explore.

Now, this More deal gives Amazon a strong position in Walmartcore business — to date, Amazon operates a limited number of fulfilment centers in India. It also comes hot on the heels of another investment which saw Amazon take control of fintech startup Tapzoin a move that boosts its own payment service in India.

Popular ad-blocker AdGuard has forcibly reset all of its users& passwords after it detected hackers trying to break into accounts.

The company said it &detected continuous attempts to login to AdGuard accounts from suspicious IP addresses which belong to various servers across the globe,& in what appeared to be a credential stuffing attack. Thatwhen hackers take lists of stolen usernames and passwords and try them on other sites.

AdGuard said that the hacking attempts were slowed thanks to rate limiting — preventing the attackers from trying too many passwords in one go. But, the effort was ¬ enough& when the attackers know the passwords, a blog post said.

&As a precautionary measure, we have reset passwords to all AdGuard accounts,& said Andrey Meshkov, AdGuardco-founder and chief technology officer.

AdGuard has about five million users worldwide, and is one of the most prominent ad-blockers available.

Although the company said that some accounts were improperly accessed, there wasn&t a direct breach of its systems. Itnot known how many accounts were affected. Meshkov told TechCrunch in an email that the number of affected accounts was likely in the low hundreds.

Itnot clear why attackers targeted AdGuard users, but the companyresponse was swift and effective.

The company said it now has set stricter password requirements, and connects to Have I Been Pwned, a breach notification database set up by security expert Troy Hunt, to warn users away from previously breached passwords. Huntdatabase is trusted by both the UK and Australian governments, and integrates with several other password managers and identity solutions.

AdGuard also said that it will implement two-factor authentication — a far stronger protection against credential stuffing attacks — but that ita &next step& as it &physically can&t implement it in one day.&

When Cleo, the London-based &digital assistant& that wants to replace your banking apps, quietly entered the U.S., the company couldn&t have expected to be an instant hit. Many better-funded British startups have failed to &break America.& However, just four months later, the fintech upstart counts 350,000 users across the pond — claiming more than 600,000 active users in the U.K., U.S. and Canada in total — and says it is adding 30,000 new signups each week. All of which hasn&t gone unnoticed by investors.

Already backed by some of the biggest VC names in the London tech scene — including Entrepreneur First, Moonfruit co-founders Wendy Tan White and Joe White, Skype founder Niklas Zennström, Wonga founder Errol Damelin, TransferWise founder Taavet Hinrikus and LocalGlobe — Cleo is adding Balderton Capital to the list.

The European venture capital firm, which has previously invested in fintech unicorn Revolut and the well-established GoCardless, has led Cleo$10 million Series A round, in which I understand most early backers, including Zennström, also followed on. One source told me the Series A gives the hot London startup a post-money valuation of around £30 million (~$39.7m), although Cleo declined to comment.

In a call with co-founder and CEO Barney Hussey-Yeo, he explained that the new capital will be used to continue scaling the company, with further international expansion the name of the game. Hussey-Yeo says Cleo will be targeting Western Europe, the Americas and Australasia, aiming to launch in a whopping 22 countries in the next 12 months, as Cleo bids to become the &default interface& for millennials interacting with and managing their money.

Primarily accessed via Facebook Messenger, the AI-powered chatbot gives insights into your spending across multiple accounts and credit cards, broken down by transaction, category or merchant. In addition, Cleo lets you take a number of actions based on the financial data it has gleaned. You can choose to put money aside for a rainy day or specific goal, send money to your Facebook Messenger contacts, donate to charity, set spending alerts and more.

However, in the context of traction and Cleobroader global ambitions, it is the decision not to become a bank in its own right that Hussey-Yeo feels is really beginning to bear fruit. His argument has always been that you don&t need to be a bank to become the primary way users interface with their finances, and that without the regulatory and capital burden that becoming a fully licensed bank brings, you can scale much more quickly. I have a feeling that strategy — and its pros and cons — has a long way to play out just yet.