April unicorns
WazirX coming for more, China losing IPOs, and issss IPL time.
Hi 👋, Tanvi here.
Filter Coffee hits your inbox every morning with notable tech and business news scoops to jump start your day.
Sign up below for free. 👇
Let’s go ahead and get started:
Market summary: 📊
India opened lower on Monday as fear of rising cases gripped the mood. US markets displayed a completely opposite sentiment, celebrating vaccinations and likelihood of return to normalcy.
US:
S&P 500 - up 1.44%
Nasdaq 100 - up 2.02%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 1.54%
Sensex - down 1.74%
What’s hot bruh? ☕
✅ WazirX riding it all in—high on its newfound success, crypto exchange WazirX is now betting that an NFT marketplace of our own could work very well in India. Scant details are available yet, but the incoming platform will look to make it easy for artists across the board, in film, paint, digital creativity, to market and sell their work, which honestly sounds pretty intriguing and timely considering the breadth of ideas, creativity, and talent that routinely emerges on the Indian web. Meanwhile, the WazirX token has nearly 7x’ed in the last week or so after the exchange reported record local trading volumes. The momentum is real.
✅ Consumer hardware ain’t easy—don’t let Apple’s success fool ya! LG Electronics is finally shuttering its loss-making mobile phone division after decades of operation, finally signing off on the end of the mobile wars as it becomes increasingly hard to compete against Chinese knockoffs without a differentiable brand. LG was originally one of the firsts to enter the mobile market, and even as of today the business drives about 8.5% of its revenues. Instead the company believes it's worthy to direct resources to making fancier stuff aligned for the future—like components for electric vehicles or even contract manufacturing of EVs.
Sponsored
Today’s newsletter is powered by…
Screener is a powerful intelligence tool loaded with data on 4,000+ publicly listed companies, used by top investors and financial analysts.
Retail investors end up paying an arm and a leg for financial data, putting them at an expensive disadvantage against large institutions otherwise. We’re big fans of the tool here at Filter Coffee. It's clean, it's neat, and the best part? It's FREE!
China losing its IPOs 😗
When China went after Ant Group, blocking one of the biggest IPOs the world would’ve ever seen, the country made a choice of appearing as a hindrance to free business—and that image has already begun to hurt.
Record number of 76 companies have killed their plans of going public on the Star Market of the Shanghai Stock Exchange since the Ant debacle, choosing to either list abroad or delay plans indefinitely, over unwillingness to let regulators sniff them up too close.
Some context—the Shanghai Stock Exchange had created a new “market” called the Star Market in 2019, meant to mimic the US Nasdaq, and help innovative Chinese tech companies easily raise money from public investors.
Investors in China are just as conservative as here in India, and tech companies often are in the middle of figuring out their business models, balancing explosive growth and high losses, which tends to make traditional investors nauseous. The Star Market was made to solve this problem.
Anyway, now the regulator's tone has suddenly shifted:
Chinese regulators are being very fussy about metrics, demanding ridiculous data including receipts on spending by executives of companies looking to IPO
On the other hand, the US, which has been a favorite destination for Chinese tech companies for an IPO, is actively threatening to force Chinese businesses to delist from US exchanges, coz… tug of war between grandpa Biden and Xi Jinping.
In short, neither can Chinese companies list in China, nor are they feeling welcome in the US under the current circumstances.
Before the Ant IPO debacle, the total number of cancelled IPOs on the Star Market stood at a meager 12. Now, a shameful 180.
What matters—just as China aggressively invests in making its own semiconductor chips and fancy tech around AI and autonomy, all chasing self-sufficiency, the kneecapping of its own tech business seems off agenda. But it sure is great for the rest of Asia, as alternate opportunities start to appear exciting to foreign investors.
Anaaatha one... ☝️
Social commerce platform Meesho wrapped up a $300 million Series E raise, revising its valuation from $700 million to $2.1 billion. That’s the 4th unicorn-maker raise of the year so far!
Softbank’s Vision Fund led the round, riding high on its multi-billion exits already, while existing investor Facebook and a few other notable funds pitched in.
For those hiding under a rock... Meesho runs a marketplace that allows solopreneurs to kick off their digital stores and source merchandise, which they can then sell through their social network directly, mostly through Whatsapp, while Meesho handles most of the fulfillment and backend processing.
It's a fascinating idea and the platform found its beachhead among stay-at-home mums and women entrepreneurs, scaling up to 13 million sellers in under 5 years since its founding. Annually the business books over ₹500 crores in volumes, with 65K+ wholesalers on the platform, operating in 4,800+ cities.
COVID’s blessing to digital commerce obviously offered the business a big boost, and the company also kicked off a new vertical called Farmiso, which lets its network of sellers open online grocery store fronts.
Bottomline: from helping solopreneurs sell on Whatsapp to a potential Shopify-like attempt for India, the runway ahead of Meesho is extremely long and attractive. Still Day 0 in the broad Indian ecommerce game.
Byju’s becomes the very thing it set out to replace 🙆♀️
Days after Byju's wrapped its Series F round, some of that juice was wired to Kota to seal the deal on the $1 billion acquisition of Aakash Educational Services.
Byju’s interest here is unsurprising when you consider their ambition—absolute domination of the K-12 prep and education market in India. Aakash supplements their digital leadership with a proven horse in the offline instruction delivery races, with its 200+ test-prep locations across the country, 250K student enrollments, and a self-sufficient ₹1,000 crores revenue base—throwing unparalleled firepower at Byju’s disposal for a 2 fronted assault.
The synergies emerging from the tag team effort could virtually cement Byju’s dominance in the hybrid education space in India for decades.
Meanwhile, if you’d been holding out for edtech-wrought change in the Indian education industry, well our condolences to you.
Closing out—Bitclout what… asks Singapore 🤔
For the non-Twitter junkies, BitClout is basically a blockchain based social network that links users’ social profiles to a crypto token, allowing anyone to buy a stake in another person, and then reap benefits as the value of your token increases (quick primer).
Anyway, to get the project some steam, makers of the platform created “profiles” of prominent people and reserved them for future claims—ya know just in case the project kicks off, Musk should get the Musk username and the benefit of his token.
Well that isn’t sitting well with some rich, powerful folks, who’re claiming the company is wrong using their name and identity without consent. The Singapore PM, calling his profile a fake, issued a Twitter statement, and then asked the authorities to take it down.
Cease and desists are already being filed, and class action lawsuits are in the making. The fact that the BitClout project's founders are anonymous makes the entire episode just perfect.
Again, feels a lot like 2017 in cryptoland.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🏏 Flavor of the month, Cricket - issaa IPL time, and the ecommerce platforms are ready with their checks for a quick growth boost. In the latest, Myntra will work closely with RCB to sell exclusive fan merch on the platform, while co-sponsoring a behind the scenes film of the team’s progress through the Series.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
You can forward this email or share FC on social media by clicking the button below. Thanks and Ciao! 😀
BitClout.. Hmm! Learnt something new today..