Market summary: 📊
India extended Tuesday’s momentum into another day, finishing strongly in the green on the back of good earnings. US had a positive day as well.
US:
S&P 500 - up 1.45%
Nasdaq - up 2.10%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 1.14%
Sensex - up 1.14%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
🔥 Year of fintech — a record $210 billion in venture capital was pumped into the fintech sector through 2021, nearly 2x that of the year before. Payments space got the most, about $51 billion. Crypto saw investments spike 5x to nearly $30 billion for the year. Also, India particularly stood out on the global landscape, getting 4 of the largest 10 fintech deals in APAC region apparently.
👊 Lucky Zuck — there may be a silver lining to the ongoing rout in the Facebook stock. US regulators were just about to pass a whole set of regulations and antitrust bills to rein-in Big Tech giants, and the threshold to define “big-tech platforms” was apparently limited at $600 billion in market cap — which includes Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, but now excludes Zucker-boy’s Meta. Flying under the limit, Facebook may be once again allowed to do acquisitions, takeouts, and avoid some scrutiny. Huh.
Primer on “how not to steal billions in Bitcoin” 😹
What happened — in a bizarre unfolding story, US law enforcement yesterday seized more than $3.6 billion in stolen Bitcoin from a popular couple working in tech and living in New York City!
The dude, Ilya Lichtenstein, a Y-combinator alum is 34, and his wife, Heather Morgan, a Forbes columnist and founder of a bunch of cybersecurity firms is 31, who even daylights as a cybercrime advisor to large companies. The irony!
Anyway, so this is how the story goes. The Bitcoin in question, about ~120K coins in total, were originally stolen in 2016 when the crypto-exchange Bitfinex was hacked.
The hackers were offloading a bit here and there, using untraceable crypto coins like Monero, as well as gift cards. Authorities had been trying to locate identities, until they got a hit earlier this year when a large chunk of the stash was offloaded recklessly.
Turns out, the duo were creating wallets using email addresses created in India to cover their trails. After much effort, the FBI was able to link these email addresses and wallets to personal and business accounts of 2 people — Heather and Ilya.
Based on which, warrants were obtained to snoop on public cloud storage used by the duo, and voila… authorities found private keys to the $3.6 billion just lying there in plain text. You cannot make this shit up! Here’s Wall Street Journal.
Worth mentioning — it's unclear whether the culprits arrested had actually orchestrated the hack themselves, or were just laundering the $$ for somebody else. More likely the latter.
Fun fact — the duo had an active TikTok presence, where Heather even jokes about stealing billions in Bitcoin at some point on the app. Bruh!
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What’s popping in Venture Town? 🦄
Logistics startup Xpreesbees is the latest to join the unicorn club — after raising $300 million for a Series F from Blackstone, TPG, and others, at a $1.2 billion valuation.
Xpressbees, like a modern day Blue Dart, works specifically with ecommerce players and digital brands to offer end-to-end logistics, warehousing, sorting, and delivery services. Currently, they’re operating in 3K cities, processing over 3 million packages a day, with revenues growing 70%+ with the boom in digital commerce.
Worth mentioning — that’d be 8 unicorns for 2022 so far, and we’re barely a month and half in. Breaking 2021’s record?
And then two quick early stage raises, 💰
Our friends at Airmeet closed a $35 million Series B earlier this week for their online event management platform, at a $150 million+ valuation! Offline corporate events have gone dinosaur-mode post COVID, and Airmeet arms companies and event managers with the right tools to handle operations, marketing, analytics, and other tasks associated with online events.
And then YC-backed KarbonCard, which offers credit cards to small businesses, closed a $15 million Series A round. KC’s no-fee cards coupled with an expense management suite are used by 2,000+ customers — processing transactions worth $30 million.
Nykaa delivered a good quarter 🔥
What happened — the cosmetics giant managed to grow its business quite strongly on the back of a strong festive and holiday season, despite inflation and Omicron presenting hurdles.
Quick look at the numbers:
Revenue of ₹1,098 crores, up 36% YoY
Total merchandise volumes grew 49% YoY to ₹2,043 crores
Profit of ₹28 crores, down 59% YoY — mostly due to rising marketing and hiring expenses, which spoiled the mood a bit
Nykaa averaged ~22 million monthly active shoppers buying its products
Among many bright spots was Nykaa’s emerging Fashion business — which grew a whopping 137% YoY, to now form 26% of Nykaa’s total transaction volumes.
Bottomline — the gigantic valuation hinges a lot on Nykaa rapidly expanding beyond its core cosmetic business. So far progress looks good.
Closing out — Microsoft ain’t done with M&A yet 👀
What’s poppin’ — reports suggest Microsoft is planning to make another acquisition, buying out a cybersecurity business called Mandiant, for about $5 billion.
Mandiant was originally called FireEye, and basically sells an intelligence suite and services that helps companies identify breaches, pinpoint effects, and then devise a response strategy.
Last month, Microsoft shocked the markets when it announced its security business alone was growing 45%+ YoY, amidst strong tailwinds supporting the sector, to bring $15 billion+ in annual revenues — literally more than any cybersecurity pure play company out there! This deal could add another sweet billion to the revenue base.
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
👏 Kids growing up - India’s mutual fund industry added 14 lakh new SIPs in January, taking total SIP count to 5 crores! Progress.
👋 Goodbye - Sam Bowen, the guy who oversaw the development of Peloton’s hardware products leaves amidst ongoing chopping spree.
🏫 Back to school - CBSE will conduct 10th and 12th class board exams offline starting from April 26.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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