Doge dumped 👋

BTC skyrockets, Dailyhunt raise, and Google playing smart.

Feb 09, 2021

Hi 👋, Tanvi here.

Filter Coffee hits your inbox every morning with notable tech and business news scoops to jump start your day.

Let’s go ahead and get started:

Market summary: 📊

Good start to the week in India with Sensex comfortably settling over 51K. US markets had a good day too, with technology particularly leading the way.

US:

S&P 500 - up 0.74%
Nasdaq 100 - up 0.67%

India:

Nifty 50 - up 1.28%
Sensex - up 1.22%

What’s brewing hot? ☕

✅ Mumbai Airport, sold—Adani enterprises finally closed on its deal to acquire controlling stake in Mumbai airport, buying out 23% ownership from 2 South African companies. So far, the Adani empire has acquired nearly 6 airports across the nation as GOI aggressively moves to privatize these facilities.

✅ If China comes for you, you’ve arrived—didn’t take the Chinese too long to finally ban Clubhouse, giving it the similar cold treatment the other US tech giants have received. Clubhouse isn’t directly available on the Chinese App Store, so it's unclear how people accessed it, but some chat rooms were out debating topics that are strictly a no-go with the Chinese (like Tiananmen Square). Anyway, the servers aren’t responding anymore in the region.

✅ Too “Koo-L'' for Twitter—Twitter’s found its latest political foe in the Indian IT Ministry, which has decided to abandon the platform, and take all of its accounts over to Koo, an indigenous Twitter clone. TF is that name! Basically, the IT ministry asked Twitter to take down some tweets it had flagged for inciting violence during the protests in Delhi. Neither did Twitter take the Tweets down nor did they bother to respond. Hurt IT ministry, decided to pack its bags, and is now thinking of suing camp Dorsey.

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Hyundai and Apple bromance goes kaput 🙄

Couple days ago we mentioned Apple was all set to sign up Hyundai as its manufacturing guy for the Apple Car. Well turns out it was all speculation, and Hyundai and its sister company Kia came out clarifying that Apple isn’t working with them anymore, and in fact talks had been stopped entirely at least a month ago.

The markets were pissed and hammered Hyundai stock which was down like 7% on Monday. Although Hyundai used the press time to talk about its own EV, with promising capacity to recharge upto 80% in 18 minutes, but who ever asked about that?

Meanwhile, Apple’s plans as far as we know haven’t changed, and they’re dead serious about making this car happen.

Some more of that Arab cash 💰

Dailyhunt raised a solid $100 million Series H round from Qatar Investment Authority and Glade Brook Capital Partners, with a bunch of other investors pitching in, continuing the unending streak of middle eastern money eagerly pursuing Indian growth ventures.

Just a month or so ago, Dailyhunt had raised another $100 million from Google, Microsoft and a few others, becoming one the latest unicorns India saw during the pandemic. They basically run a news aggregation platform across 14+ languages in India, catering to more than 285 million users nationwide—mostly serving audiences in the heartland, taking their step 1 towards digitization.

However, fresh funds are actually being diverted to Josh, Dailyhunt’s short video platform out to fill the void left by TikTok.

It's one of the leading replacement candidates out there, and so far has managed to book 85 million monthly active users, with 40 million of daily actives & playing 1.5 billion videos daily.

While we’re on raises, ☝️

Nexthink, a global IT experience management startup, raised $180 million in a Series D round from Index Ventures and a bunch of investors. The company’s valuation is now set at over a billion. Raining almost 1 unicorn a day.

Nexthink basically sells software that helps IT teams of large companies better serve employees inside the enterprise by getting their issues addressed really fast. The platform provides ready made chat bots to address questions, deal with tickets, as well as tools to collectively measure and collect intelligence on how well IT operations have performed overall.

So far, the business actually looks quite promising—the company has 100+ customers with more than 5,000 employees, and reports over $100 million in total revenues.

Taking on Stripe 💳

What’s happening: Global Payments Network, an old school payment processing company, threw everyone a surprise by announcing a partnership with Google, wherein Google will use the processor’s infrastructure to offer its own payment APIs to Google Cloud customers. Kinda like Google’s own Stripe, where GPN controls the infrastructure while Google controls the front end.

For those unaware, like how Stripe works for online stores, merchant acquirers like GPN basically offer your offline neighborhood supermarket or hospital or restaurant chain the option to accept cards, net banking, etc. etc. and at the end of the day, send all the aggregated $$ into the company’s bank account.

And some of these old school guys run massive operations. Stripe may be popular online, but they probably own less than 1% of the total payment volumes processed worldwide. HUGE market with lots of old school big fish dominating the offline space.

Going forward: the markets had already closed their books on the old-school offline payment processors, calling it an all out victory for modern platforms like Stripe that were forged on the internet.

However, with such partnerships in place, old guys like GPN could leverage their offline systems, put up a solid digital front, and quickly reach millions of merchants and see some life coming back to them.

Also, as part of the deal, GPN will migrate and host its outdated IT infrastructure supporting its merchant acquiring business on Google Cloud, kicking some valuable business to Google’s emerging cloud franchise.

Too early to read the impact of this news, but Google is definitely playing 3D chess with its options right now.

Closing out—Musk dumps doge 👋

The price of Bitcoin popped 20% yesterday on news that Tesla has acquired nearly $1.5 billion of the currency, and is planning to accept the currency for purchase of vehicles in the future.

This is the staunch vote the ecosystem has been demanding for nearly a decade now. Tesla is one of the largest corporations in the world, and $1.5 billion isn’t a small sum. More companies are likely going to be pulled into doing this just to ensure they’re not losing out. And eventual online booking of cars could further give BTC a much deserved push in digital commerce.

Meanwhile, Dogecoin, which was up nearly 16x in the last month alone after Musk, Snoop Dogg relentlessly pumped it, is suddenly feeling out of love. Still price has nearly doubled overnight.

What else are we snackin’ 🍿

💰 Tech stands up to GOI’s call - Amazon, Swiggy, Ola and Uber have collectively committed around ₹500 crore to the Government’s social security fund which will provide health insurance benefits to over a million gig workers, in a scheme finalized under the Employees’ State Insurance Corporation. GOI is taking baby steps to ensure equitable participation in the India growth story for unorganized labor nationwide.

Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.

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