FB takes a day off 🥱
Rollups heat up, Byju's gets some dough, and more IPOs.
Market summary: 📊
India kicked off Monday on a high — adding almost a percent to major indices. US meanwhile continued to drop like a hot potato, with tech stocks given a solid beating.
US:
S&P 500 - down 1.30%
Nasdaq - down 2.16%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.91%
Sensex - up 0.91%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
✅ Another fintech bid — Fino Payments Bank becomes the latest tech-play to be approved for an IPO — looking to raise ₹300 crores from the markets. Founded way back in 2006, Fino became a Payments Bank in 2017 under the newly released framework by RBI to create a special category of digital-payment banks to bring basic banking services to India’s millions of unbanked population. Currently the platform processes ₹45,000 crores+ in payment volumes, operates nationwide, and reports reasonable profitability. Here’s a link to their prospectus.
✅ Back to the old days — Folks were left facing the reality of their lives after all of Facebook’s services went offline for more than 7 hours! Reason for the outage remains unknown. FB hasn’t seen an outage this bad since 2008, when the service with 80M users was down for about 2 hours. Investors clearly didn’t like this and FB stock was down 5% during trading. 👀
Mondays are for big raises 💰
Byju’s pulled in another $300 million from a bunch of investors led by Oxshott Capital Partners at a whopping $18 billion valuation.
The company has been on a crazy acquisition spree, buying out 9+ companies for over $2 billion this year alone. Talks of a potential IPO next year are also ongoing strong, and fresh capital will be put towards pushing international expansion.
Then looking at fintech for a bit, ☝️
BLR-based neobank Fi Money is looking to raise $50 million from B Capital and Falcon Edge, more than doubling valuation to $250 million. Founded by a couple ex-Google Pay employees, the company is offering a no-fee, savings focused, banking experience primarily targeting millennials.
FYI, Fi’s competitor Jupiter had recently raised a mega round. Bring on the neo-banking wars!
India’s ecommerce roll-up party lit 🤝
First — ET says global ecommerce rollup king Thrasio wants to buy out Indian consumer durables brand, Lifelong Online — marking the company’s entry into the local digital commerce market. Lifelong deals in electronic appliances found in the kitchen, as well as grooming, and even fitness machines. Last year, the business made revenues of about ₹40 crores.
Then, one of the top-horses in the Indian roll-up races, GlobalBees, acquired a women focused direct-to-consumer brand called andMe — which sells nutritional supplements and fitness products. Deal price wasn’t known, but GlobalBees is playing it quite aggressively — after raising $150M in a Series A recently, and also acquiring The Better Home barely a month ago.
Some handholding — for those unaware, roll-ups are basically companies that are in business of acquiring multiple distinct independent digital brands popular on platforms like Amazon, and operating them under an umbrella firm — one that shares resources on marketing, logistics, and other admin, improving efficiency, reducing costs, and boosting profits. ✌️
Bottomline — buzzing activity here is great for D2C brands that see no sustainable profitability or exit in sight.
Facebook got even bigger problems 🌊
What happened — the Wall Street Journal has recently been doing multiple hit pieces on Facebook — showing proof on how the company’s management is fully aware of the social and political damage its platform is causing, and yet chooses to turn a blind eye.
On Sunday, the whistleblower who actually leaked internal documents to WSJ paving way for the hit pieces did a full TV interview — adding more credibility to the crusade against the company. Here’s a link.
Frances Haugen was an FB Product Manager, working on tools actually meant to “clean Facebook up”, but was apparently distressed by the lack of actions taken. Her accusations include — FB’s treating of certain famous users, with privilege, FB not being honest with regulators about the full impact of election-misinformation campaigns, and covering up how Instagram’s algo hurts emotionally vulnerable teenage girls.
What next — Lauren is now scheduled to testify in front of the US senate, while she’s also applying for a Whistle Blower Protection program. Meanwhile, fresh inquiries are being commissioned into Facebook.
Closing out — GOI lines up another IPO 💪
What happened — India’s largest power utility company, NTPC (national thermal power corporation) will be raising $2 billion from the public markets via IPOs of 3 of its major business units.
Founded in 1975, NTPC is about 55% owned by the government and has an installed base of ~66 GW energy generation capacity. For its IPO, it will sell stake in a couple of its renewable energy businesses — with 10GW of power capacity, and a joint venture operation it has going on with the Steel Authority of India.
Bottomline —markets are extremely bullish on India’s transition away from coal towards renewable energy — which could drive plenty enthusiasm for this bid.
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
💳 Sea card - SBI launched an eCash card in partnership with the Indian Navy to facilitate payments in sea and other areas with no real time connectivity.
🏆 Nobel Winners - American scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Medicine — for their discovery of human receptors that allow us to understand how temperature, touch, and force initiate our nerve impulses.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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FB taken day off- Atleast our privacy remains ours for few hours. Wish FB do it once in a year.