Fancy wheels 🚗

Apollo Tyre beats, P2P soaring, and healthtech in fashion.

Feb 05, 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: 📊

Another good day for India with the broad market now up over 5% since the Budget session on Monday. US had a good bounceback, with tech stocks showing strength after stellar earnings.

US:

S&P 500 - up 1.09%
Nasdaq 100 - up 1.18%

India:

Nifty 50 - up 0.71%
Sensex - up 0.71%

Fresh from the oven ☕

✅ Parler CEO booted—remember Parler, the app loved by Trump fans that set out to create a Twitter alternative for conservative political supporters. Well, they had quite a run until the insurrection made conversations virulent and AWS kicked them off their servers while Apple banned the app from the Play Store. Anyway, the board wasn’t happy with the way the CEO dealt with the crisis and has now booted him off the role, which signals a fresh launch may be coming.

✅ More cars make Apollo king—automobile demand in India may have frozen mid-2020, but by Diwali people were lining up to buy more cars than ever. Apollo Tyres is reaping benefits of that upcycle in demand, as the company’s tire products are literally flying off shelves. Total revenues for their December quarter grew like 17% YoY (don’t see that in the tire business everyday). Stock popped 7% and is getting pretty close to it's all time high.

✅ Google’s got a sweet surprise—in a new feature update, Google’s Pixel phones will allow users to check their pulse using nothing but a camera. Basically by holding the phone’s front camera to capture a user's face, the Google Fit app will read breathing patterns visually, process them using some fancy AI, and then give people a report on their respiration rate. Quite revolutionary, and it's surprising how fast the pandemic has pushed the envelope on creation of these simple yet useful health-tech tools.

Damn those some sleek wheels 🍎

Never take Apple rumors seriously, that’s the wisdom on the street—but this time the company looks oddly steadfast in its commitment of rolling out a self driving car.

In the latest move, Apple and its manufacturing partner Hyundai-Kia are close to wrapping up a deal to make the “Apple Car” at Hyundai’s manufacturing unit in the state of Georgia, USA.

What else do we know:

It will be a fully autonomous vehicle, designed from the ground up, no driver whatsoever
Other manufacturers will be pulled in as well, over time
Apple exclusively focusing on last-mile mobility (think cities and such)
Production estimated to kick off 2024

Do they really have the tech tho—analysts and skeptics are left wondering if Apple does have an ace up its sleeve, because so far, the visible data points suggest Apple is a laggard in this game.

Making a fully autonomous vehicle is very different from making a revolutionary smartphone in close quarters. You need millions and millions of miles in testing, regulatory approvals, access to top talent to build software (this is one of most complex software problems the world has dealt with to date), infrastructure to roll out cars.

For example, Google’s Waymo has been testing on the roads for 10 years now, riding 20M+ autonomous rides over that time, and they’re barely able to fix all leaks. What’s Apple’s process?

For what it's worth, they’ve been on the road too, and last time the state of California disclosed testing data (companies are required to do that there), Apple’s performance was dismal.

Going forward—manufacturing is the easiest equation of the deal. The real challenge is software, commercial deployment, and management of the infrastructure. Nobody has a clue what Apple is thinking and its very unlike “brand Apple” to compete in markets where it cannot absolutely dominate. Nice suspense building tho.

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What’s hot on Venture Street 💰

Mobile Premier League raised $95 million from its Series D round, with Composite Capital and Moore Strategic Ventures leading the round and a bunch of other funds pitching in. Post deal valuation is $945 million, barely short of a unicorn.

The fantasy gaming platform supplies an engine that powers nearly 70+ games across different sports categories, many of which are socially competitive, with cash based incentives for winners. They’ve been venturing into esports as well, recently holding “College Premier League”, which pulled in more than 13,000 games from 100 colleges, aggressively pushing the frontier on the nascent but emerging space in India.

Nearly 60 million users in India use the platform, and they’re barely getting started. Fresh funds will go towards marketing, to keep competition like Dream 11 in check, as well as to conduct more tournaments and events across the country.

In another promising raise,

InnerHour, a mental health startup, raised a promising $5.2 million Series A round from Lightbox, with Capricorn Ventures and a bunch of other angels pitching in.

COVID and lock downs have resurfaced mental health issues, and venture attempts at attacking the problem have received great response worldwide (Calm, Headspace kicking ass). India particularly, with relatively poor health-tech infrastructure, limited access, and expensive treatments, could use all the help we can get.

By far, InnerHour reports some 9 lakh+ downloads, and fresh funds will go to ramp up their offerings, improve accessibility, and provide round the clock services.

The P2P payment explosion 💥

Well we dearly wish PayTM went public and disclosed its payment volumes, growth rates, and other details—but until that happens, we gotta look at western businesses to see how the game is heating up.

PayPal blew the doors off for its quarter. Total payment volumes up 39% YoY to a MASSIVE $277 billion. That’s for 1 quarter! The real star of the print was PayPal’s P2P payment business Venmo, which now processes nearly $188 billion in total payments every year, growing nearly 60% in the most recent print. Here’s a look at the quarter for the nerds.

With digitization of commerce proceeding swiftly all over the world, lots of merchants, especially those doing cross border transactions, rely on PayPal to conduct business in the new normal. The catalysts won’t fade soon, and investors promptly took the stock up 7% yesterday in anticipation of continued breakout performance.

What else are we snackin’ 🍿

☁️ Google Cloud India gets a new head - Google Cloud has appointed Bikram Singh Bedi as the managing director for its India business. Bedi previously set up the AWS’ business in India and was also its India and South Asia head for six years. Quite a steal for Google which is firing from all cylinders to bring its cloud business at par with MSFT and AMZN.

🏛️ Niche banking picking pace in India - SHEROES is set to launch a neo banking platform dedicated solely to women entrepreneurs. The platform is being positioned as a Mahila Bank and will offer third party savings, loans, insurance and investment products for starters.

Otherwise a quiet news day yesterday with the budget-led market rally still dominating the news cycles. We’ll be back with some more stuff tomorrow. 👋

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