Glamorous moves 💄
Some more IPOs, Amazon's fake review problems, and Web3 jobs heating up.
Market summary: 📊
The decline continues! While Indian investors are taking it a bit slow, US is showing no mercy in flogging equities, as oil and other commodities spike.
US:
S&P 500 - down 1.84%
Nasdaq - down 2.60%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.17%
Sensex - down 0.12%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
🙄 Uncle Andy is angry — in one of its strongest retaliations ever, Amazon is suing two platforms for running a formal business of fake reviews across its platform. AppSally and Rebatest, would apparently find people to place fake orders, get them to leave a rosy review, and then ask people to return the product, refunding their money via PayPal — all at the behest of sellers! The fugazi reviews obviously helped boost seller rankings, while jamming up Amazon’s AI lol.
💸 Nerds are running — CNBC says top talent from large companies, from execs to devs, is jumping ship in record numbers to join Web3 startups. On the losing end are companies like Google, Amazon, FB, who are gaining an increasingly notorious reputation for bureaucracy and growth maturity. On the winning side are new age giants from Polygon to Circle. The record $25B+ in VC funding Web3 has pulled in 2021 is helping keep salaries equally competitive!
Good Glamm is trying to buy Bulbul 🔥
What’s poppin’ — the Good Glamm Group, which is building a content-led digital commerce empire, is reportedly buying out another content play — this time, influencer-commerce network Bulbul, in an all cash and stock deal.
Bulbul, founded in 2018 and part of the Sequoia Surge program, is backed by giants like Info Edge. Their app basically allows influencers to sell products via live-streaming, while pairing influencers with merchants looking to get their products marketed online. Bulbul powers 100K+ monthly transactions, and majority of the audience comes from Tier II and III cities.
Grand ambitions — FWIW, this would be the 8th acquisition in the last 12 months for the The Good Glamm Group, which is building a dense network of owned-media properties and influencer programs, to push its own D2C products in categories like cosmetics, baby products, apparel and other.
Anyway, Bulbul’s influencer base fits very well with another influencer marketing platform they own called Pixxo. Fyi, GG also owns media properties like Miss Malini and the controversy laden Scoop Whoop.
Who got the dough? 💰
It’s been a busy week for fundraising! Last night, Vymo, a sales enablement platform, closed a $22 million Series C round from Sequoia and a few others.
BLR based Vymo’s SaaS platform basically helps sales teams of large financial institutions record and manage their customer interactions, building some sort of an intelligence on where customers are in the pipeline and what their likelihood to convert might be. There’s a host of other features too.
The company operates across US, India, and Japan, serving some major players like Berkshire, SunTrust, BNP Paribas — across banking, insurance, and wealth management.
Then hopping over to logistics for a bit, 🚚
Shipsy, a logistics software vendor, picked up $25 million from A91 Partners, Info Edge and Sequoia.
Shipsy’s tool basically helps large enterprises (think Burger King, Tata Steel) manage everything related to their logistics operations in a single unified view — including planning, mapping, tracking shipments, finding best rates from vendors, you get it! They handle $100 million+ of freight volume per month!
New bids are keeping the street busy 🧐
What’s poppin’ — the private lending arm of Federal Bank, called FedFina, filed its documents earlier this week with SEBI to raise about $120 million from the markets.
FedFina offers loans against gold, home, proprietary businesses, and other types of owned property. Their offline-heavy operation manages assets worth over ₹5,000 crores — with over 450 branches, mainly in Southern and Western regions of India.
Despite being a brick and mortar heavy business, recovery from COVID’s assault has been strong, with interest income growing 50% in FY21 to ₹345 crores, and profits of ~₹62 crores following top-line in growth.
Bottomline — with the high flying growth names fizzling on the street, returning to the comforts of cash-heavy old-school businesses is a thought on many minds.
Closing out — on an old school acquisition 💰
Crompton Greaves made a splashy deal last night — buying a 55% stake in Indian kitchen appliance maker, Butterfly Appliances, for about ₹1,403 crores.
Butterfly, which actually trades publicly and had one hell of a year btw, is one of the top 3 sellers of kitchen appliances nationwide (mixer grinders, pressure cookers, electric rice cookers, chimneys, that kinda stuff), with annual revenues of about ~₹800 crores.
Crompton meanwhile, which mostly deals in electrical appliances, is hoping the acquisition helps it enter new categories beyond its bread and butter verticals, and will start pushing Butterfly products through its extensive distribution network nationwide!
Bottomline — Crompton stock jumped 5%+ , while Butterfly broke through 52-week highs when the deal was announced! 🚀
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
🥽 VR getting hot - Sony released its second VR headset called PlayStation VR2, amidst rising competition from rivals. Apple, Samsung are expected to follow.
🤷 Need growth - Meta is launching Reels on Facebook in over 150 countries, hoping to curb TikTok’s growth and save its stock from further embarrassment. Brace for junk!
👏 Getting better - Maruti says chip problems are slowly easing out, and its sales volumes should slowly start accelerating as the year goes by.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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