Everybody wants to lend 💰

Venture deals, Big tech went shopping, and Coinbase vs. SEC

Sep 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: 📊

India ended flat for another day — a much welcome pause after a couple weeks of unstoppable exuberance. US turned South too, as inflation worries sour mood.

US:

S&P 500 - down 0.13%
Nasdaq - down 0.35%

India:

Nifty 50 - down 0.05%
Sensex - down 0.05%

What’s brewing hot? ☕

✅ Notion comes to HYD — Notion acquired Indian SaaS startup automate.io. The startup offers a no code platform that, as the name suggests, automates basic productivity processes like for example “get an email from this person? - okay update my notion”. Anyway, Notion will build on Automate’s team and develop a tech center in Hyderabad apparently, its first move in India.

Akshay Kothari @akothari

Who said LinkedIn InMails don't work? 😅

✅ Creators go mainstream — GenZ star and YouTube legend David Dobrik shook hands on a 10-episode travel series with Discovery for the Discovery+ streaming service. Laggard streaming platforms, struggling to compete against Netflix, Amazon and the rest, are trying to woo content creators and audience segments beyond their core base by such unconventional moves. Secondly, creators with ready-made mass appeal have never been more “valuable” when ad prices are high and attention gets scarcer. Won’t be surprised if similar deals follow in India too.

BNPL is the flavor of the year 😎

What’s poppin’ — PayPal acquired Japan based buy-now-pay-later player Paidy for $2.7 billion, to catch up with its rivals and push the service further in the Asian market.

PayPal was starting to look like a fossil compared to its newer, modern payment processing competition (Square, Stripe, RazorPay, Shop Pay etc.) but the company has been keenly reinventing itself. This includes buying out Braintree in 2013, then turning Venmo into the default P2P app in the west, then adding Crypto, Stock investing and other features to it...

and now finally Buy-now-Pay-later, to close the ultimate credit loop.

But broadly, the global BNPL market is literally on fire right now. So far in 2021:

Square acquired AfterPay for $29 billion
Amazon chose to work with Affirm
Apple is launching its own BNPL service
From PayTM or Flipkart, all domestic ecommerce + payments companies have added or are testing some format of the technology

Big picture — BNPL will power nearly $700 billion in ecommerce purchases by 2025 around the world. The method could easily eclipse credit cards by the turn of the decade.

Edtech marries fintech 🔥

Leap Finance, a fintech venture that offers financing options to Indian students moving abroad for school, closed a $55 million Series C round from Owl Ventures, Harvard and Sequoia.

Moving overseas is a financial nightmare involving change of bank accounts, credit cards, wires to pay fees — stuff that regional banks are often in-equipped to support. Millions are left paying higher commissions in the process. Anyway, Leap started with student loans and now has moved into bank accounts, credit cards, and served 60K students in the past 18 months.

Then a quick look at ecommerce, ☝️

ET reported that logistics-as-a-service player Shiprocket is working with Temasek for a $200 million round that will value the business at over $800 million.

Shiprocket sells a software platform to D2C brands and small businesses that integrates a wide range of third-party logistics providers, offering on-demand shipping and delivery solutions. Revenues topped $90 million on the back of COVID’s bump to ecommerce.

Tech giants bought some new toys 💪

Microsoft decided to beef up its productivity suite by acquiring Clipchamp, an Australian video editing platform that makes it easy for companies to store all video files in one place. Demand for video-editing tools is peaking and Nadella must’ve felt some FOMO, given Adobe recently bought Frame.io, and Canva is suddenly a $15B giant in plain sight. Clipchamp has some 17 million users.
Back home in India, Byju’s bought out another entrance test-prep tool Gradeup, wrapping up its 8th acquisition of the year. Yawn. Gradeup offers JEE, NEET, IAS and other exam coaching to some 25M+ students, and will now be rebranded as Byju Exam Prep.

Closing out — Coinbase is being investigated 🧐

Coinbase and US-SEC (equivalent of SEBI) are locking horns in a brutal fight. Coinbase wanted to launch a new decentralized lending product offering 4% interest to people staking their crypto assets. Turns out the SEC point blank refused, and followed up with threats of investigation.

After questioning employees and Coinbase management, SEC says it plans on actually suing Coinbase over undisclosed charges.

Coinbase CEO took to Twitter to break out the entire episode, while the SEC was paraded for being an innovation-killer.

Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong

1/ Some really sketchy behavior coming out of the SEC recently. Story time…

Key takeaway — resolution of the conflict, either way, could set the benchmark for regulation of the decentralized finance industry. But meanwhile, investigations are not good for publicly traded businesses, and $COIN took a dump.

👋 Peeps, we’re out for Chaturthi

Hey y’all, so… since it's Ganesh Chaturthi this weekend, I thought of giving the Coffee team a break. We’ve been grinding solid for the past few months, and considering how bumpy this year has been, everybody deserves some cool time with family! Besides, the markets are closed tomorrow anyway.

We’ll be resuming coverage beginning Tuesday, September 14th! See y’all then, and Happy Chaturthi folks! 🤗

What else are we snackin’ 🍿

🏦 Expanding empire - Amazon is working with investment advisory Kuvera to offer wealth management services in India. TF?

👨 Man hired - Ford hired former Apple and Tesla exec, Doug Field as its chief advanced technology officer to improve its software systems. Too late sire!

Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.

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