Deliver grocery, pay bills 💰
Spanx sold, Stripe's acquisition, and Gita Gopinath leaving IMF.
Market summary: 📊
India turned around sharply mid-week, giving bulls a much welcome dose of reality. US had a mixed day, with tech pulled back over shaky earnings.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.37%
Nasdaq - down 0.14%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.83%
Sensex - down 0.74%
What’s brewing hot ☕
✅ “Slap tech” day at RBI — central bank took a couple of financial players to task last-night over compliance issues. PayTM Payments Bank was handed a ₹1 crore slap-in-the-face fine for putting in some non-factual information in its license application to become a Payments Bank. Meanwhile Western Union, the money transmitter, was cut a ₹28 lakh ticket for breaking rules that limit how many times individual customers can receive cross-border payments. Good morning.
✅ Gopinath is out — IMF’s Chief Economist, Gita Gopinath is moving on, quitting to return to a gig back at Harvard starting January of next year. Gita was IMF’s first ever woman economist and spent 3 years at the fund leading a division that forecasts global economic growth.
Ola re-entering grocery delivery, learning from Uber 🛒
What happened — Ola still thinks it can do grocery delivery, launching the business once again after a botched attempt in 2016. Former Café Coffee Day CEO, Vinay Bhopatkar, will lead the unit.
More than anything, it's a desperate and smart attempt to diversify the revenue base… Ride hailing is recovering, but at max may be 70-80% back to normal, and monetizing at that level is hard. Besides, a large portion of the frequent riders are now stuck with remote work, traveling nowhere farther than their pajama closet and the kitchen-coffee machine.
Big market — before you get all “i don’t need my grocery delivered” on us, the category is appealing mostly to a growing base of extremely busy professionals, who also aren’t too keen on takeout (healthy eating and all that). In India alone, the market is pegged to top $40B+ by the end of the decade!
Besides, Uber has had quite the success with diversifying into food delivery — so much so that Uber’s Food Delivery volumes have surpassed its ride hailing business, paying the bills during the pandemic.
Can grocery do that for Ola?
Stripe made its first India acquisition 💰
What happened — the OG payments-API provider acquired BLR based Recko — which sells automated bookkeeping software, to solidify its portfolio of adjacent products.
Recko basically provides a platform to digital-first companies to track and match their payment records, giving finance teams a 24x7 grip on money flows. PharmEasy, Myntra, Meesho, Lenskart and several top ventures are its customers. Stripe hopes the acquisition helps it to catch up with the ever-growing roster of adjacent software offerings from local rival RazorPay.
Deal value wasn’t known, but Recko raised $7 million as part of its Series A, so prolly around ~$50-75M? 💸
Who got the big monies? 💸
CredAble, a supply chain financing startup, closed a $30 million Series B round from Plutus Management and Oaks Asset Management.
CredAble works with large corporations to offer working capital loans to the company’s vendors, making sure vendors have liquidity when they need it, using data to deliver better decisions than the neighborhood bank chacha. 100K+ borrowers draw ₹3.5K crores worth loans a month using the service.
Then to another financing raise, 👇
RevFin, which offers loans for electric-vehicle buyers, raised $4 million in a pre-Series A round from a couple of angels.
Loans exclusively for EVs sound odd, but that’s a niche that several traditional financiers are yet to catch up on, and RevFin works across 100 towns, with ₹3 crores+ in monthly volumes.
Closing out — Spanx sold for billions 💸
Private-equity giant Blackstone acquired a majority stake in the bootstrapped-to-billions female-shapewear and undergarment venture Spanx, valuing the business at $1.2 billion. 👏
Spanx was founded by Sara Blakely in 2000 with $5,000, which became one of the hottest consumer startups of the past decade, making her one of the youngest female billionaires in 2012. Blackstone is actually the first outside $ Spanx has ever taken! Great story, better exit!
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
👨 New man - Pine Labs pulled in Flipkart executive Phanimohan Kalagara as its new CTO, beefing up ranks before IPO.
🏀 Crypto goes NBA - Coinbase has signed a deal with the NBA to become a sponsor of all its leagues. Sports + Culture + Crypto = $$
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