Copper 🔌
Fintech IPO, Gen AI wins, and Byju's mess.
💸 Israel and Hezbollah accepted a U.S. brokered deal to stop the fighting in Lebanon. Oil fell $2.
📈 Sensex took a breather on Tuesday, ending down 0.13%.
Let’s hit it!
1 Big Thing: Pine Labs to IPO in 2025 📈
Pine Labs, the renowned payment processor, is gearing up for an IPO mid-next year—planning to raise a biggg billion dollars.
What matters: the IPO could value the company at over $6 billion, in-line with the valuations it has been receiving from global investors. There’s a pre-IPO round coming together early next year, with roughly $100 million worth secondaries exchanging hands.
Quick refresher: founded in 1998, Pine Labs started by helping petrol pumps in India accept card payments. During the payments boom of the 2010s, it expanded rapidly to become one of India’s largest merchant payment processors, offering point-of-sale terminals, payment gateways, and more.
Now based in Singapore, the company is in the process of flipping its domicile to India.
Numbers: Pine’s top-line has shown healthy growth—revenues for the most recent year topped ~₹1,700 crores, up roughly 10% YoY. The company still lost ₹300 crores last year. But that’s unlikely to deter investors.
Big picture: while India’s fintech narrative faced a rough patch in the public markets, Paytm’s gradual recovery sets a promising stage for new listings.
2. Vedanta’s copper bet 💰
Vedanta Copper, a subsidiary of Vedanta Limited, will invest $2 billion in copper-processing facilities across Saudi Arabia—doubling down its chips on the global copper boom.
What matters: the investment will fund the construction of a state-of-the-art smelter and refinery with an annual capacity of 400,000 tonnes. For perspective, that would be roughly 40% of all copper refining capacity of India.
Zoom out: copper is critical for EVERY emerging technology—electric vehicles, data centers, renewable power, semiconductors, you name it. Global copper demand is expected to rise by 40% by 2040.
Copper prices are through the roof, and nations around the world are investing to ensure they have adequate supply, much like Saudi Arabia.
Quick fact: on average, an EV contains approximately 83 kg of copper, nearly four times that of a traditional internal-combustion vehicle.
3. Meesho brings AI to your service 📞
Meesho is using a GenAI-powered voice bot for majority of its customer support, which has apparently cut support expenses by 75%.
The details: the bot handles 60,000 calls daily in English and Hindi, resolving queries with a 95% success rate. Meesho plans to expand it to six more Indian languages. Potential aaS business in the making?
Big picture: roughly a year ago, buy-now-pay-later giant Klarna had disclosed using AI bots to eliminate as many as 700 agents, shocking the entire customer support and call center industry.
While we are on AI, the use cases are expanding 🤖
The Trust of the Tirupati temple will use AI to streamline queues for devotees at the temple, and help bring devotee wait times to two to three hours. Fr fr.
4. No stopping quick-commerce 🛵
Inc42 reports that PhonePe launched its rapid delivery service, called Pincode, offering 10-20 minute delivery of groceries in select cities. 🥱
The details: instead of running dark stores, Pincode will operate a marketplace—partnering with local kiranas.
No inventory will be held on hand. Logistics firms Shadowfax and Loadshare will service customer needs at the last mile. Don’t ask what the moat is.
Hot game: meanwhile, with competition heating up, Zomato is set to raise another ₹2,000 crores through a qualified placement to ramp up Blinkit.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🤝 Space x AI: Hyderabad-based TakeMe2Space is set to launch an AI lab on ISRO's PSLV C60 in December 2024. The lab is designed to provide computing resources for research in space.
🔌 EVs, simplified: Ola Electric launched four new e-scooter models, starting at ₹39,999, trying to win over the cost conscious base.
🤷♂️ Byju’s mess: GOI has asked the regional Hyderabad registrar to open a formal investigation into Byju’s financing and accounting malpractices.
That’s a wrap for today!
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missed you my angels
So happy you guys are back. Was terribly missing my daily dose of filter coffee