Food roll ups are here 👀
Cybermeet, ReNew listing, and Afghan trade.
Hi 👋, Tanvi here.
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Market summary: 📊
India slammed the brakes on Wednesday, ending flat after a couple straight days of gains. US had a mixed day too, ending slightly up.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.22%
Nasdaq - up 0.073%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.06%
Sensex - down 0.03%
What’s brewing hot ☕
✅ Out through the gates — India’s biggest renewables player, ReNew Power, made its Nasdaq debut yesterday, listing under the ticker $RNW at a $4.4 billion valuation, the highest ever for an Indian entity taking the SPAC route. Renew operates about 5.4GW of live wind and solar projects across the country, with another ~5GW committed, and just got $700 million as part of the listing to take its capacity to 18.5GW by 2025. As good as they come!
Cloud Kitchens & Robotics day in Venture City 💸
What’s poppin’ — Cure-fit’s cloud kitchen platform, Curefoods, picked up a $13 million Series A check from Iron Pillar, Nordstar and a few angel investors.
Curefoods is basically bringing the brand roll-up playbook to the food category, acquiring and scaling promising digital food companies operating on Zomato and Swiggy, and taking them under its own umbrella. Currently, the brand operates 25 kitchens across 4 cities.
A $10 million follow-on debt-round is in the making too, with an agenda to expand to 100+ kitchens and $20M in annual revenues by the end of this year.
Bottomline — integrating a food-biz into a health-tech service offering is an odd, messy, and bold plan from the Cult.fit camp.
Meanwhile, turning heads to a Robotics-raise 🤖
TartanSense, an agritech robotics startup, closed a $5 million Series A round from FMC Ventures, Omnivore, and Blume.
The company makes these small robots (like a line follower, but much advanced) that help farmers with sowing, spraying and weeding, improving efficiency and reducing costs of employing manual labor.
TikTok and Shopify welcome the age of Social Commerce 🤝
TikTok jumped on the social commerce bandwagon with “TikTok Shopping” — a feature where creators can pitch you products from their Shopify stores, brands can work with creators to build videos-content around products, and obviously users can indulge with 1-click shopping.
The deets:
Easily link your Shopify store with TikTok account
Import your product list, build mini store fronts on TikTok
Early adopters include billion dollar brands like Kylie Cosmetics
Why care so much — old ecommerce platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, are the supermarket equivalent of retail. You have to know what you want before going in.
With embedded discovery, and frictionless checkout, and a “glitzy” feel, Instagram, TikTok, could be digital equivalents of a “mall”, where you meet friends, shop with them, splurge, or just “window shop”.
Big picture — social commerce is still under 10% of US ecommerce sales, unlike China or other East Asian countries where the number is much higher, but will drive the majority of growth over the next 5-10 years. So if you’re stock picking, time to adjust sails?
While we’re on social commerce,
Instagram is combining shoppable posts with ads. Brands will be able to buy ads to pitch products directly into your feed, instead of FB “recommending” you things.
User experience be damned, but it's gold if you’re an $FB stockholder — if Amazon could build a $25B annual business, as an extension to ecommerce, imagine what Facebook could do by flipping that equation!
Good guys security conference 👀
Nadella, Tim Cook, and Andy Jassy, 3 of the 4 major cloud and consumer services providers in the WORLD, met with Joe Biden to discuss the rising nuisance of cybersecurity and what the US and its allies can do about it.
Global IT workloads increasingly moving to the cloud (along with consumer data, photos, money info) has had global governments extremely scared about the rising menace, and some mega commitments were made.
Meanwhile, quick look at a cybersecurity IPO, ☝️
Who dat — ForgeRock, an identity management provider filed IPO docs with the SEC, looking to list on the Nasdaq at a $4 billion valuation.
The company basically sells a suite of products to help companies manage unique logins and authentications, with a $155M revenue base.
Closing out — Indian traders are feeling the Taliban pinch 🤔
For the year before the pandemic, India’s trade volumes with Afghanistan were hovering around $1.5 billion, and most of that business is now hanging in a limbo as trade routes get closed.
Sugar (8% of all of India’s sugar exports), apparel, and pharma being some of the largest categories facing blowback. Also, with imports frozen, Raisins and Figs are the worst hit, with prices shooting through the roof.
Also, two key social issues you should follow:
Taliban leadership has asked women to stay home because “fighters have not been trained to respect them”. Meanwhile, whoever expected climate change to be a priority for the insurgents?
Lastly, India cancelled all visas issued in the past for Afghan nationals, and has mandated new e-Visas for entry in the country. The move is designed to help any passport-lost cases to get in, while also stopping misuse and bad actors.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🚚 Delivery time - Walmart is slowly beefing up its third-party commerce business (like Amazon) and will start deliveries for 3rd party retailers by end of the year.
👴 Heavy weights - Sachin Bansal’s fintech play Navi added ex-RBI Deputy Governor Anand Sinha to its board, adding some serious weight.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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