Growing like a weed 🌱
Massive cricket-NFT raise, and stuff from the week before.
Market summary: 📊
Markets are nuts. After a brutal pull back on Thursday, India bounced back strong on Friday to add more than a couple points. US had a similar day, even as oil and other commodity prices rose.
US:
S&P 500 - up 2.24%
Nasdaq - up 1.53%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 2.53%
Sensex - up 2.44%
Weekend caffeine shot ☕
🧐 SEC goes after Musk — US regulators are launching a fresh investigation into stock sales made by Elon and his brother Kimbal Musk. SEC says Kimbal, who sits on Tesla’s board, knew beforehand about Elon’s plans to offload 10% of his stake prior to the infamous Twitter poll Elon took. Kimbal front-ran the trade and sold 88,500 of his own shares worth $108 million. File that alongside a million other similar accusations!
🔫 Raising funds for guns — Patreon is taking some heat for blocking an online fundraiser that had managed to raise over $650K to buy guns for Ukrainians to fight against the Russian aggression. Called ‘Come Back Alive’, the campaign was literally publishing “membership” tiers (by weapons you could support the purchase of) and inviting submissions from supporters, which Patreon said violated policies. Fyi, the Russians spend $70 billion+ on annual military upkeep while the Ukrainians spend about $3 billion. Can’t plug those gaps online.
Coinbase is growing like wildfire 🔥
Bitcoin is down 17% in the last 12 months. Rest of the crypto market is sulking too. But the gatekeepers are making bank — onboarding new users into the world at record pace.
Coinbase particularly, knocked it out of the park for the last quarter of 2021, accelerating revenue growth, profitability, and reporting record engagement and trading volumes.
Quick look at key stats: 👀
Made revenue of $2.5 billion, up over 320% YoY for the quarter!
Profits of nearly $880 million, up a whopping 370%+ YoY — move along money losing fintechs
11.4 million monthly transacting users, up from 7.4 million in the last quarter
Total retail trading volume jumped up 67% QoQ, to $547 billion
Some more crazy stats in the company’s annual shareholder letter.
Despite the kick-ass performance, management said momentum was slowing a bit for Q1 (the ongoing quarter), and stock lost 3% because of that.
FWIW, $COIN is down nearly 50% from its IPO price, and trades at a PE ratio of just 18x, while growing 200-300% at the topline!
Why care — getting average users to taste crypto (on-ramp, off-ramp as they call it) remains one of the brightest opportunities still. Coinbase has so far led innovation here, with an exchange, debit cards, lending crypto spend at merchants, institutional ownership… on and on. When does it become a steal in plain sight?
Dream 11 got crazy dreams 💰
What’s poppin’ — Dream Capital, the venture arm of Dream 11 (India’s leading fantasy gaming platform), is apparently close to leading a $100 million round in cricket NFT platform, Rario.
Rario, barely a year old, allows users to mint, trade, own virtual cards of cricketing moments and players, along with building and managing virtual cricket teams. So far, the company has obtained rights to 5 international leagues and 600 cricketers, with about 50K NFTs sold on its platform.
Anyway, that’d be the biggest round of funding in the Indian-NFT space so far. Rario also competes with another homegrown platform, Faze Tech, which is backed by Tiger and Sequoia.
While we’re on venture news, 👇
Insight Partners, a New-York based well reputed VC firm, raised some eyebrows after picking up $20 billion for its newest fund!
Since its founding in 1995, Insight has written checks to 600+ companies, deploying $90 billion+ into giants like Twitter, FTX, and Shopify. That’ll be the 11th major VC fund of over a billion dollars raised in 2022 alone, all chasing post-COVID tailwinds.
And that’s a wrap for today folks! Here’s a real quick look at major stuff that went down this week…
☹️ Russia invades Ukraine — After weeks of posturing, negotiating, and noisy press conferences, Putin finally pulled the trigger and launched a “special military operation” in Ukraine, rolling tanks and flying jets through the neighboring sovereign nation. 200+ people are dead. Lakhs of civilians displaced. The West responded with damning economic sections, but nothing has deterred Russia so far.
💰 Challenger bank Niyo raised big — Bengaluru-based fintech player Niyo, who is also one of the top contenders in Indian challenger banking races, wrapped up a $100 million Series C. Their most basic product right now, a digital savings account, reaches 4M+ users, reporting $3 billion+ in total transaction volume to date. Competition between the top 3, Jupiter, EpiFi, and Niyo is kicking off heavily.
🦄 10th Unicorn of 2022 lands — getting a bit boring at this point. Hasura, an enterprise software startup that builds tools to make data management easier for developers, raised a $100 million Series C round at a $1 billion valuation, becoming the 10th unicorn for 2022. Although stats are limited, the company's estimated revenue is in the $25-$30 million range, with more than 400 million downloads for its open source software tools.
👊 Billionaires fight for IPL rights — Reliance and Amazon are now taking their rivalry from the courtroom to the stadium, looking to buy digital broadcasting rights of the IPL for a record $6.7 billion. IPL pulls 350-400 million eyeballs globally each year and its deal with Disney is set to expire in 2022. Winning these rights could be game changing for OTT businesses of all contenders in India.
💻 Opensea faced an embarrassing hack — OpenSea, the top marketplace for NFTs, fell prey to a phishing attack that led to about 32 users losing NFTs worth upwards of $1.7 million. The attackers exploited a vulnerability in the underlying protocol and tricked users into signing off on an open-ended partial transaction. Attackers then filled in the blanks in the partial transaction to clean out users’ holdings on the platform.
📋 Lastly, a busy IPO roster for India — first, Federal Bank's private lending arm, called FedFina, filed its docs with SEBI this week, to raise about $120 million from the markets at an $8-9 billion valuation. Then Bikaji Foods, India's local snack-king, announced its own plans of raising over ₹1,000 crores at a $1 billion valuation. Lastly, in major global raises, Volkswagen is planning to take Porsche public, at a $96 billion valuation, as it struggles to find cash for its ongoing electric-vehicle shift.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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