Dream 11's got ambitions 🏏

Inflation cooling, Edtech raises, and Disney wins.

Aug 13, 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: 📊

Despite ground cracking open in small caps, Indian stocks made a good move up on Thursday. US ended up high after almost a week of circling in place.

US:

S&P 500 - up 0.30%
Nasdaq - up 0.41%

India:

Nifty 50 - up 0.50%
Sensex - up 0.58%

Quick shot of espresso ☕

✅ Things cooling off a bit —retail inflation pulled back considerably for July, now trending at about 5.59%, well under the expected levels of RBI. Key categories like Food pulled back considerably, down ~1.5% against last month to settle at 3.96%. Supply chains easing up a bit, production facilities coming online, and people returning to work are helping things. Good for your wallet, as well as for your portfolio, with all those input-cost savings directly helping boost corporate bottom lines.

✅ M&A galore — startup M&A activity has been piping hot. YourStory says a total of 119 M&A deals have happened in 2021 so far, taking total deal volume to $3.8 billion, nearly 3x over all the deal volume for 2020! Bjyu’s obviously leads, spending $2B+ on buying out competition, while Groww, BharatPe, as well as companies across hot categories like Pharma were major contributors.

Dream 11 has plans beyond fantasy gaming 🏏

What happened — Dream 11 is launching a $250 million fund under the banner of Dream Capital, to invest $1M to $100M in startups in gaming, sports, and fitness-tech.

While its common for mature companies to have a large “corporate venture” arm, the size of the pot here relative to the stage of the business, is quite unusual. But gaming, esports, and related categories sometimes fail to attract the love of mainstream investors, and a player that thoroughly understands the arena can make a huge difference via synergies!

Anyway, 8-or so investments have been made already into merch platforms, esports streamers, and gaming studios, and more will come over the next 6 months!

What matters — with 125M users on board, Dream 11 has been pulling off a fascinating re-alignment of its own business to capture a broad set of opportunities in emerging areas — some of which have just begun shining in India! Talk about the Metaverse?

Vivek Raju @vivekraju93

I don’t know how I missed this but TIL Dream11 has expanded to become Dream Sports Group and has silently built an empire.

Edtek never gets old 💰

Eduritus countered rival UpGrad, with a massive $650 million raise at a $3.2 billion valuation. Usual suspects Softbank and Accel led the round.

The company works with notable global universities to offer these upskilling courses locally in India, directly or sometimes in association with corporations looking to upskill their talent.

Last year they made $185 million in revenues, which is big, and post raise this becomes the 23rd Unicorn of 2021. Funnily, the CEO sold a $100 million stake in this particular round.

Meanwhile, venture street also had a promising seed day 👏

First up, Everstage, a SaaS startup simplifying sales commissions, raised a $1.7 million round from 3one4 Capital. Founded by a bunch of Freshworks execs, the company basically simplifies computation and calculation of sales commissions, replacing an antiquated spreadsheet-driven process.

Then in social commerce, Elevation Capital led a $3.5 million seed round into a shopping platform called Ping. The company still runs in stealth, but is playing with conversational shopping — at first, helping artisanal bakers and food vendors in your neighborhood build online stores and sell products to loyal customers.
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How them bikes selling? 🏍️

Need a pulse on middle class India, look at two-wheeler sales! Hero Motor Corp’s second quarter was pretty promising, despite bijnes freeze’s in April and May, AND rising prices.

Quick look:

Revenues popped 85% YoY to ₹5,500 crores
Blasted 700% growth in net profits, bringing in ₹365 crores for the quarter
Sold 1.025 million units of bikes and scooter

Among other positives, Hero improved its market share by about 2% compared to last year, another indicator of how the “well polished” giants actually benefited from the 2020-slump, to streamline their ops, and come out at the top.

Going forward — with the holiday season coming up, combined with some pent up savings from staying at home the past few months, the outlook is shaping up really nicely.

Closing out — some signals from techland 🚨

While Netflix struggles to grow its subscriber numbers, Disney has become unstoppable. The company added 175 million paid subscribers — across its streaming platforms including Hulu, ESPN+, Disney+, and Hotstar. The way how the company has transformed itself into a digital-play, this late into the game, is truly remarkable!

Holiday spending helped Airbnb blast a 300% growth rate for this quarter — with total booking volume on the platform growing to $13 billion! Chesky is doing a phenomenal job of slowly pulling the company out of the rut it found itself in 2020, with cash drying up and demand freezing.

Lastly, Bumble agreed with Tinder in saying the kids are out dating again now that the vaccine shots are through. Paid user growth spiked 20% to 3 million.

What else are we snackin’ 🍿

🔥 Big balls fundraise - popular VC house Stellaris Venture Partners raised a $225 million fund II to double down on early stage investments.

😞 Afghan crisis - the Taliban’s war for control of Afghanistan has intensified, with major cities of Kandahar and Herat falling to the insurgents.

Are You Drinking Jonah Hill GIF by Jordan Belfort

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