Beating odds 🤙
Antitrust, Slack moves, and Crypto India clinches a small win.
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Market summary: 📊
Surprisingly good performance so far this week, with Indian markets buoyed by upbeat IT earnings while US markets breathing on hopes of a stimulus. One more day to go.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.80%
Nasdaq 100 - up 0.42%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.82%
Sensex - up 0.76%
Stories and sneakers 👟
Slack threw its competitors a curveball—launching Sneakers, Stories and B2B messaging during its conference yesterday, chasing a million directions in one go.
By adding B2B chats, a seemingly mundane but meaningful feature, Slack managed to open gates on the potentially multi-billion professional socializing as well as inter-company communication space. Users seemed pleased and warmly surprised by the company’s vision to push in this direction! 🙌
About Stories, we don’t think that warrants a discussion anymore in 2020 — your app either dies young or lives long enough to feature Stories (sorry, Harvey Dent). What drove everyone nuts however was Slack’s new line of footwear—a bunch of high end comfort shoes they’ve launched in partnership with apparel brand Cole Haan.
Just goofing around or is this more—sounds absurd and stupidly out of sync with enterprise software but if we’re going to be sitting around in our pajamas staring at the screen, does it make sense for tech companies to make their presence felt beyond your computer screens? What are we missing that Slack recognizes about WFH?
One thing is for sure — boundaries between home and work have permanently blurred and if a D2C category was to emerge in this arena, Slack is an ideal player to do it.
Or it could be just another “goodie” move that was meant to throw off competitors. Try copying that MSFT teams!
Draper bets on Indian crypto 💰
Legendary valley investor, Tim Draper, signed a check for one of India’s burgeoning crypto exchanges, Unocoin, pitching in for their ongoing $5 million Series A round, which values the company at $20 million. Amidst jolts from regulators and continued fogginess on the horizon, the nascent crypto community in India has been gasping for any vote of confidence and this raise will certainly help boost confidence.
Unocoin has been around the block for a while — founded in 2013, they claim to operate the largest BTC-INR platform in India, with surprisingly high 13 lakh users (doubt they’re active), of which at least 3 lakh are KYC-verified customers. Funds will go to boosting security, improving processes, and product experience. Good luck boys!
Turning heads to the ISA space —
Pesto Tech, one of the most promising coding school upstarts to come out of the 2018 ISA boom, raised from big name Angels including Ryan Hoover, Sahil Lavingia, Ankur Nagpal and Anand Chandrasekaran. The amount remains undisclosed but the fact that Pesto managed to entice these biggies highlights attractive figures and progress on their books.
With persistent dearth in software talent worldwide and with remote flipping the recruitment industry on its heels, coding schools are suddenly looking very attractive and many are looking to make a thumping comeback in the capital circles.
Finally, quick cheer for agri-tech🌱—
Ergos, an agri-finance play, raised ₹38.5 crore in Series A round with Chiratae Ventures and Aavishkaar Capital pitching in. The company runs a yield-based financing platform, simplifying credit access for farmers while adding transparency, visibility and liquidity to the process of selling grain. With a stellar team at the helm, progress has been quite respectable—they support over 20,000 farmers with a physical presence in over 60 locations across the state of Bihar! 👏
This matters — lately we’ve noticed multiple startups of similar kind that are simplifying pricing and financial access for farmers, operating in the heartland, and raising big funds from mainstream investors. It's truly heartening to see tech, for once, take on and meaningfully solve a mammoth challenge India has battled with for ages.
Google’s in hot soup, again 👀
Google is being taken to task on a fresh antitrust case in India, apparently its 4th in a row, this time for wrongly using its market dominant position with Android OS to exploit the Smart TV market.
They allegedly put in place “exclusivity” contracts with OEM manufactures — basically asking Xiaomi and TCL that they’d have to use Android OS on TVs if they want to use Google’s Android OS on Smartphones, and vice versa. There’s little clarity on the exact scope of the allegations and charges just yet.
Google has been found at similar fault countless times in the past, in numerous jurisdictions worldwide, often for forcing OEMs to have pre-installed Google apps (like Maps, Search) or for blocking pre-installed competitor apps on smartphones.
In India, 3 of the 5 Smart TVs bought use the Android OS apparently, and for a company that already owns a disproportionate share of the smartphone market, coming anywhere close to adding mandatory clauses is clearly an overreach. CCI is investigating the matter and looking to see if it has enough meat to bring charges.
But but but…—it almost appears Google has pissed off the wrong person within the establishment, with back to back attacks mounted on the tech giant—first for app stores and now this. Wasssap bout that?
Some color on Airbnb IPO 🧐
Going public is one of the hardest things a startup does, but to pull it off amidst a generational recession, which by the way nearly killed your business but eventually ended up driving more growth than ever before? That’s some ungodly stuff right there.
It’s a back from the ashes moment for AirBnb and the company hopes to raise over $3 billion for its IPO scheduled as soon as December of this year.
The mood couldn’t have been set any better— Snowflake, Palantir, OpenDoor, and other high flying tech-plays have made the market immensely frothy, which considerably tilts the scale in Brian Chesky’s favor when negotiating with Wall Street sharks. Eyes are set for a $30 billion valuation, 67% higher than April valuation.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🎡 Disney loses a Star - Uday Shankar Sharma, a leading media executive in India, has quit from the role of chairman of Star and Disney India. Shankar will remain at the helm of Disney till end of year to identify his successor.
📱 Fired up, ready to shoot - Amazon has pumped ₹700 crore in Amazon Pay, its Indian digital payments business, in a move meant to incentivize users with cashback and other doles to adopt AMZN Pay as the festive season comes up.
📦 Logistics investments - Flipkart has acquired 140 acre land, spending ₹432 crore to set up a fulfilling center in Gurgaon which will be the largest of its kind in Asia. The development will cost around ₹3,500 crore in total and will add over 12,000 jobs.
👊 We can beat ‘em - Paytm believes it can add around 1 million mini apps on its platform before Google plans to make billing compulsory for Indian developers by April 2022. The company will invest around ₹10 crore in its developer ecosystem.
💉 What a relief - India’s drug regulator has declined a proposal from Dr. Reddy’s laboratory to test COVID-19 vaccine Sputnik-V and conduct a large study in the country asking the lab to first conduct trials on a smaller scale.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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