Crown swap 🤷♀️
FB marches on, Shipping is expensive, and Buzzfeed's first Pulitzer.
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What’s brewing hot? ☕
✅ Another one — days after acquiring game-engine maker Unit 2 Games, Facebook made yet another gaming related acquisition, buying out Big Box VR, the creators of a widely popular virtual reality game, Population One. That’d be FB’s 9th major gaming acquisition of the past 12, as Zuck skips several intermittent paradigmatic shifts to bet on the metaverse as his ultimate goal post of domination.
✅ Seats full, ready for take off — 7,600 folks put their bids in for the third seat alongside Mark and Jeff Bezos on the Blue Origin rocket for a roundtrip around the planet, and a bid of $28 million was declared the winner. Usually, a flight like this would cost about $500K to $1M, but the premium here goes to a funded charity. Passenger identity will be withheld until a fourth passenger is announced in a few weeks.
Overall a really sleepy weekend! 🥱 Let’s quickly run through the stuff that matters…
Quick look at couple major deals we’re following 🧐
First, globally — global recruiting platform Eightfold AI, which sells an AI based resume mining service to enterprises, raised $220 million from Softbank, at a $2 billion valuation.
Processing thousands of resumes is a bottleneck holding up the talent acquisition for large companies, with traditional ATS systems doing a fairly poor job of filtering and matching candidates.
So, Eightfold works with a company’s recruitment software to apply machine learning to thousands of bulk resumes it collects, and then recommends the “best” job to a candidate based on his or her skills. 100+ large enterprises use the company’s products, which has raised $400 million+ to date.
Key insight — recruitment software market is a $3 billion+ annual gambit, but the broader HR operations opportunity runs into hundreds of billions, rife with inefficiencies which makes the entire space a hot target for investors even this far in the global software boom.
Now turning heads back home real quick, 📚
Edtech king BYJU’s raised another $350 million from UBS Group, Zoom founder Eric Yuan, and a few others, revising valuation to $16.5 billion — a “symbolic” $500 million over PayTM’s last on paper round, which makes it the highest valued private startup in India currently.
Byju’s was growing 100%+, bringing in $800 million+ last year — then a second round of pandemic, a washout academic year, and the acquisition of Aakash, Toppr, and Epic — all probably accelerated growth rates even further.
And considering Byju’s profitability (vs. PayTM’s -38% profit margins), we’re guessing the crown certainly won’t be passed back for sometime at least 🤷♀️
Shipping gettin’ outta control 🤯
Thanks to soaring consumer demand from economies in recovery, closed ports in some regions due to new COVID outbreaks, and shortage of workers, global shipping channels are running massive backlogs which is spiking shipping prices.
Estimates suggest transporting a container full of cargo (the 40 feet large metal boxes you see on massive ships) from Asia to Europe now costs nearly 547% more than it used to on average for the last 5 years — impact of which will be felt on everything from regular commodities (your coffee, tea) to specialized orders (like electronics).
Three ways the near term impact will be felt:
Retailers and businesses absorb the extra costs — which means lower corporate profits, and your favorite stocks take a hit
Extra costs are passed onto consumers — which adds to already brewing worries of rising prices
Or, halt trade — items run off shelves, and “marketplaces” suffer
Big picture — stocks of logistics service providers Blue Dart, Gati, DHL, Fedex have been blasting through the roof over the past year, but pricing spikes show that there’s ample harvest left in the market.
While we’re on commerce and shipping, ☝️
Amazon’s Prime Day event, the week long soiree of discounts and offers running June 21st is expected to bring in $12 billion in sales this year, a spike of 20%!
Would be last chip of Bezos’ shoulders before retirement a week after.
Closing out — Buzzfeed does some “journalism” for a change 👏
Megha Rajagopalan won Buzzfeed its first Pulitzer prize this Friday, in the International Reporting category, for the feisty investigative piece on the concentration camps run by China in the Xinjiang region.
Here’s a complete list of the winners for a record news year of 2020, which includes monumental events like the pandemic’s breakout and the racial protests stemming from the murder of George Floyd. Boy what a year!
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
😲 Trouble for giants - US Congress introduced a few bills to curtail the monopolistic overreach of tech giants. If approved, GOOGL, AMZN, FB, AAPL could be torn apart, but hard to believe the US is eager to limit its largest corporations in the midst of a global tech war.
🤞 Survived - 29-year-old Danish footballer, Christian Eriksen suffered a cardiac arrest during a Euro 2020 game against Finland. Thanks to the alertness of his teammates, Eriksen survived and was rushed to the hospital.
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