Attacc on engineers ❌
HOOD hits the street, Airlines burning, and Obama supports ball game.
Hi 👋, Tanvi here.
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Market summary: 📊
Adding up to be quite a shitty week in India so far, with another straight down day. US had a mixed day too, as investors try to make sense of the flurry of tech earnings.
US:
S&P 500 - down 0.019%
Nasdaq - up 0.41%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.24%
Sensex - down 0.26%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
✅ Bad boy Vlad — $HOOD is playing with fire. 1 day before its IPO, Robinhood disclosed CEO Vlad Tenev is being investigated by regulators for not being licensed with the FINRA, a self-regulating body that governs brokerages and exchanges on Wall Street. Meanwhile, another investigation is active that’s discovering if Robinhood employees sold off stock in the company (private markets) knowing what was coming during the Reddit turmoil of January 2021. Stock lists tonight, total shit show incoming!
✅ Operators fund — bunch of India’s leading SaaS execs, led by Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham, kicked off a new venture fund with a mandate to invest in product-first ventures across the country. Here’s a look 👇
Times of the no-code 😎
What happened — Bubble, the pioneer in drag-and-drop software development, raised a gigantic $100 million Series A, to, as the founders claim — make the technical co-founder obsolete! Insight partners led the bid.
Founders had been tinkering with Bubble’s idea for almost a decade, bootstrapping along the way, only to secure a $6.5 million seed in 2019. COVID’s boost to digitization brought a whole new breed of customers — including small merchants, online vendors, and non-tech entrepreneurs.
New funds will go to up the platform's features, as well as build out an enterprise offering that will be sold to large corporations.
Bottomline — with companies like $APPN having monster runs selling pretty rudimentary low-code B2B software, sky's the limit for far more robust solutions like Bubble!
While we’re on raises, Indian ventures had a killer day too 🔥
Droom — an online car marketplace raised $200 million, doubling valuation to $1.2 billion, giving us the 17th unicorn of the year. Several other competitors have raised big money here lately, with Cars24 even planning an IPO soon — and the raise may have been a way to counter a full blow market share war incoming. Droom works in 1,000+ cities, and sells cars worth over $1.7 billion each year, making $65 million in revenues. Not bad!
Enterprise messaging platform GupShup raised $240 million from Tiger Global and Fidelity, promising an IPO soon. Gupshup basically sells a platform, and API suite, to help enterprises build communications and messaging apps — winning big from the global boom for digital communication in the COVID world.
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Airlines is a tough business ✈️
Indigo airlines lost more than ₹3,000 crores during the last 3 months, with travel freezing and no signs of rebound in sight.
This’d be the 6th straight quarter of losses for the business, with revenues down 56% from the quarter before.
Without explicit doles or rescue offers from the government, things aren’t looking too bright for the entire sector!
Meanwhile, optimists remain optimistic 🤷♀️
Rakesh Jhunjhunwala is expecting government approvals for his new airline venture within the next 15 days — a venture that the big bull will be seeding with $35 million, for 40% ownership. The airline is expected to have a 70 plane fleet within the next 4 years!
Updates from Semiconductor land 💪
we go public — with regulators (especially the UK) dragging their feet on NVDA’s $40 billion acquisition of ARM holdings, ARM is saying it will go to the public and try to raise $$ from average folks to fund expansion.
NVDA, who’s future hinges on making data-intensive computing platforms, was buying out ARM to beef up its CPU arsenal and take on companies like Intel, AMD.
But with regulators squeamish that it’d create a market dominating monster, $NVDA is caught with its pants down, with stock already starting to feel some pressure.
Meanwhile, Intel made a friend ☝️
Intel found one of its first 2 clients for contract manufacturing — 1. Qualcomm, which will get its LTE chips and processors for smartphones manufactured by the old dog, and 2. Amazon.
Intel promises a plant set up and catching up to become as good as rivals like Taiwan Semi.
Why care — the western tech giants are slowly cozying up to avoid reliance on Asian firms for their semiconductor diet, and these are some early signs of cooperation.
Closing out — Spotify, ouch 😐
It’s tech earnings time — and Spotify closed the second quarter with 165 million paid subscribers — a tad lower than the markets were expecting. Stock was promptly hammered down nearly 8% in New York.
Quick look:
Revenue of €2.33B, up 23% YoY
Has 365M monthly active users
Spotify’s advertising revenues grew by nearly 110% — thank to those annoying ads that may be put there by Satan himself. If you’re a shareholder though, it’s all cool.
Why care so much — weeks ago Netflix had come short on its number of paid subscribers too, which is making investors a bit cautious on whether they’ve been too optimistic in judging addressable markets for these subscription products — especially as competition increases.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🏀 Ball is life - Barack Obama acquired a minority stake in NBA’s Africa business and became a strategic partner of the $1 billion venture.
🥽 Stop ‘em - Facebook will stop sale of the Oculus Quest 2, recalling 4 million pieces of a component used in the headset, after 5000 users complained of experiencing skin irritation.
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Yoo!! seeing Spotify going low on monthly active subscirbers gives chills. Here's a twist their advertising revenues grew by nearly 110%..😉👍
Akash Air (RJ) will not have a smooth journey but steer the initial storms. Team members are veteran of aviation sector.