Market summary: 📊
In all a flat week in India. After a couple positive days in the middle, India pulled back to finish Friday in the red.
US:
S&P 500 - down 1.90%
Nasdaq - down 3.07%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 1.31%
Sensex - down 1.31%
Weekend caffeine shot☕
✅ 5 more years for Chandrasekaran — Tata Sons extended the tenure of its Chairman, N Chandrasekaran, by 5 more years on the recommendation of the Board and Ratan Tata today. Chandrasekaran has been instrumental in stewarding the Tata empire towards a digital future — while adding hundreds of billions to the market cap of the entire empire. Besides, the Tata Digital business is apparently looking to quickly raise $$ at a $20 billion valuation. Too much unfinished business to get a new guy in so soon. 🤷♀️
📹 NFT’s reach YouTube — the OG video distribution platform is adding NFT identification and recognition to its existing platform, following giants like Twitter and Instagram already doing so. Exact deets are limited, but it looks like creators will be able to “own” their content as an NFT, and even allow fans to buy into top videos, audio, and other content — letting creators monetize beyond what YouTube has them paying from ads it runs. Interesting possibilities for sure!
Parag couldn’t get the bird to fly 🐦
What’s poppin’ — despite power users like us spending HOURS scrolling through Twitter, company management continues to struggle to monetize the platform effectively.
As usual, the first quarter post Jack Dorsey was a disaster too — they missed revenue targets, rising costs pulled profits down, and users logging in came below what Wall Street was looking out for.
Quick look at the numbers:
Revenue of $1.57 billion, up 22% YoY
Profit of $182 million, down 18% YoY
Monetizable daily-active-users grew 13% to 217 million
Apple’s privacy updates, which had been eating Facebook’s targeting algorithms and naturally their revenues, weighed down Twitter too — which led to the profit shortfall. For years now Twitter has been promising subscriptions, payments, and a host of other ways to monetize, but progress has been shallow and investors are losing patience.
Bottomline — since its IPO in 2013, Twitter stock has returned nada. Zilch. The dog of the dogs in the digital advertising business. Kick ass product tho! 🤷♀️
Who got some weekend cash? 💰
EVs are all the rage. Altigreen, an electric cargo three-wheeler manufacturer closed a $40 million Series A from Sixth Sense Ventures, Reliance and a few others.
Like many others in this business, Altigreen started off as a manufacturer of drivetrains for EVs and hybrid vehicles about a decade ago, before jumping in to make its own vehicles now. So far, the company has sold about 200 vehicles mostly for last mile delivery use cases, and has 26 patents to its name. Fresh money raised will go towards ramping production capabilities, R&D and expansion.
And then in the cosmetics world, 💅
Early stage venture Renee Cosmetics raised $10 million in a Series A round from Mensa Brands, Equanimity Investments and a bunch of others.
Renee is founded by the co-founders of men’s grooming brand Beardo, which was picked up by Marico in 2020. Anyway, this venture sells vegan cosmetic products for women through an omnichannel model. Revenues top ₹60 crores a year!
Aight peeps, that’s all we have for today! Quick look at major stuff that went down this week…
🎥 Pandemic ate Bollywood’s business — Indian film industry lost upwards of ₹15,000 crores in revenues since March 2020, says an industry report. Revenues for both 2020 and 2021 came at barely 30 of a full year pre-pandemic. With the rise of streaming, and with the younger generations leaning heavily towards creator-led content, gaming, esports, hard to imagine a full recovery.
🤯 Polygon surprised the markets with a mega-round — homegrown crypto project Polygon raised a massive $450 million round from Sequoia, Softbank, Tiger Global, and almost 40 other investors. Polygon runs a network that basically helps the Ethereum Blockchain from being overextended and burdened, making it cheaper to process transactions. Currently, they support 2.5 million monthly active users, across 7,000+ apps including marketplaces like Opensea and Metaverse apps like Sandbox.
🧐 Billions in stolen Bitcoin found — US law enforcement seized more than $3.6 billion in stolen Bitcoin from a popular couple working in tech and living in New York City. The Bitcoin in question, about 120K coins in total, which were originally stolen in 2016, when the crypto exchange Bitfinex was hacked.
💰 Binance invests $200 million in Forbes — Forbes, which was already preparing to go public via a SPAC deal with $400 million from institutional investors, received $200 million from Binance, replacing half of those investors. Although it's hard to understand Binance's motivation for the deal, the crypto exchange has been the subject of heavy regulatory and media scrutiny and a tight relationship with a popular media outlet can be a great way of balancing PR.
Quick look at the top acquisitions this week 🤝 –
Sharechat is rumored to be buying out the short-video platform MX TakaTak in a $600-$700 million cash + stock deal, bringing the first mega exit in the short-video race that began just over 2 years ago when TikTok was banned in India.
Microsoft is planning to buy out the cybersecurity firm Mandiant (originally called FireEye), for about $5 billion.
And then we have a bunch of new Unicorns this week as well 🦄 —
Pune-based logistics startup Xpressbees raised $300 million Series F, at a $1.2 billion valuation.
Small merchant-focused commerce platform, ElasticRun closed a $300 million Series E, 3x’ing valuation to $1.5 billion.
And finally, Livspace, a home interior and renovation services platform raised $180 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. 2021 record won’t last that long!
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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