10-minute unicorns 🦄
Apple's deal, OpenSea IPO, and no Winter Olympics for the US.
Market summary: 📊
Markets continue to display extreme volatility. India bounced back to add a percent and half to major indices. US had one of its strongest days in the past year, especially with a strong rebound in tech.
US:
S&P 500 - up 2.07%
Nasdaq - up 3.03%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 1.56%
Sensex - up 1.56%
What’s brewing hot ☕
1️⃣ China connection — The Information says Tim Cook worked out a secret deal with the Chinese to invest $250 billion+ in China’s manufacturing and labor, back in 2016 in order to get the Chinese to cool off the heat on Apple — while it openly slaughtered other American tech companies like GOOGL, FB, MSFT. As a result, China was able to grow up to now become what is Apple’s biggest market after the US in 2021. Fair game, but the US is going to ask hard questions as its relationship increasingly sours with the dragon.
2️⃣ Citi sale coming together — Kotak Mahindra and Axis Bank are the top contenders to buyout Citibank’s Indian retail banking business, says economic times. The deal could value Citi’s operations of some 2.5 million retail customers (most highly valuable while-collar folks), 35 branches, and 4, 000 employees, at about ~$2 billion. To remind ya, Citi decided to exit India retail banking as it reorganizes its global ops which has been on a perennial decline since the 2008 financial crisis.
0 to unicorn in 10 mins? 🦄
Zepto, the 10-minute grocery service run by a couple 20 year olds, is in talks to raise a $250 million round — at a $1B+ valuation, per Entrackr, defying all rules of startup physics to possibly become a unicorn in 6 months straight!
The mobile-first storefront operates in 5 major metro cities currently — running a network of strategically placed dark-stores in densely populated neighborhoods so the math works out! There’s literally zero public info on their operating stats yet.
Worth mentioning — India’s online grocery game is expected to top $21 billion by 2025, hitting 3-5% penetration of the total market.
Zomato (via Grofers), Swiggy (Instamart), BigBasket, JioMart, Tata (StarQuik), along with upstarts Dunzo, Zepto, Dhoom, Satvacart are gunning for a piece.
Meanwhile, quick look at an agri-tech raise ☝️
AgroStar, which runs a agricultural raw material marketplace for farmers, loaded up with a $70 million Series D from Evolvence, Hero Enterprise, and a few others. The Pune-based venture churns data on weather, soil, and other factors to recommend farmers the best input products (seeds, pesticides).
In addition to an app, AgroStar also runs 1,000+ offline touchpoints nationwide, reaching some 5M farmers across 5 major agricultural-states. 👏
No.1 NFT-marketplace is planning an IPO 🙌
What happened — OpenSea, the NFT trading marketplace playing at the center of the digital-art boom of 2021, has hired Lyft-executive Brain Roberts as its new CFO — hinting at an imminent IPO.
Roberts is somewhat of an expert in pitching Wall Street on risky bets. He spent 9 years at Lyft playing a pivotal role in taking them public, when ride-hailing was believed a fad still and Lyft wasn’t making a dime in profit. Although OpenSea is already profitable, it battles with extreme crypto volatility.
Besides, Crypto’s track record on Wall Street has been rocky — so far, traditional street-investors have been cold to the lures of the crypto world. Coinbase (down 16%+), Square (down 15% YTD), SoFi (down 30%) and others have failed to excite too many folks.
Some crypto-maxi’s were disappointed about OpenSea going to the old-markets to raise money, vs. issuing a token and raising $$ from its community — given “decentralization” and Web3 and all that… 🤷♀️
How them IPO markets holdin’? 🧐
Couple quick updates:
RateGain, the travel-SaaS vendor received decent response on day 1 — with 41% shares subscribed by EOD. Average Joe went all in — overbooking the retail portion 2 times over. High net-worth fellas held back a bit over valuation concerns. 2 more days to go. ✌️
Insurance player Star Health, which saw just 79% demand for its bid, is crawling to a weak listing on Dec 10. Shares are apparently changing hands in the grey markets at below IPO prices already. Tch.
Meanwhile, Fabindia is dressing up for its own ceremony, 🥻
The OG ethnic-wear and handicrafts brand, will look to raise $500 million in a bid coming early next year, that values the business at about $2 billion.
Business made about ₹1,500 crores in revenue for the year before COVID, with ~₹100 crores in profits — and has backers like Premji Invest.
Closing out — Twitter bought Quill 🐦
Agrawal made his first move — buying a B2B messaging tool and Slack-rival called Quill, that launched just this year, and had raised $16 million from biggies like Sam Altman and Index Ventures. Deal value wasn’t know.
Quill will shut down its old app, and the team will work on improving the Twitter DMs experiences — a feature Twitter power-users have been requesting for a long long time now. Winning move 🤙
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
🚨 AWS is out - widespread outage in AWS took out critical web services from Associated Press, to Disney+, to Vice.
🤝 Mega chems deal - Reliance signed a $2 billion deal with Abu Dhabi Chemicals Derivatives Company to kick off production facilities in Ruwais.
🤷♀️ Grandpa Biden throwin’ punches - US will boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics 2022 to protest China’s human rights abuses. Athletes will be able to participate, but no formal diplomatic representation will be sent.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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