Hello, dis Dr. Bezos
Year of IPOs, Slack gets new features, and no stopping for edtech.
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✅ Divesting Air India—GOI is looking to wrap up the sale of Air India by as early as June 2021. Two major bids are in, one from Tata Sons, who already run a bunch of airlines including Vistara and look to widen their portfolio, while the other from a joint venture led by SpiceJet director Ajay Singh, who has a solid reputation for turning SpiceJet around. Previous attempts to get rid of Air India had been unsuccessful for GOI, but this time the state is counting on the sale to fix budget shortfalls coming from surprises related to the pandemic.
✅ So many IPOs, but none for ya—nearly ₹31,000 crores in fresh money was raised from the public markets over the last year, making this a record year for IPOs, mostly caused by a unique economic freeze mid-2020 that gave a kick in the butt to many businesses, forcing them to greet public investors just to keep the lights on. Most bids were breakout successes, which sets a positive tone for the flurry of digital businesses about to go live in the next 1-2 years. Fingers crossed!
Calling Dr. Bezos 💉
US FDA just green-lit Amazon’s self-branded at-home COVID 19 test kit, certifying another legitimate foray for the company into healthcare. First batch of the product is going to help the company’s 1.3 million-strong workforce regularly test, as they slowly begin to return to work.
Testing kits are probably a commodity by now, but for a tech company, putting the time and resources into getting approved is a big deal. For Amazon, this marks another credible milestone for its grand ambitions to build out health services for its employees, and then slowly for its customers.
Are we witnessing an AWS-like moment for Healthcare? 🤔
FYI, a couple years ago, Amazon forayed into rolling out its own clinics for medical care, combining the services with its own insurance product and pitching ambitions of rolling out this service globally for its employees. Earlier this year, Amazon rolled out the same services for other companies too, who could ditch their expensive insurers and programs, to use “Amazon Care”.
Bottomline: healthcare is a $9 trillion industry globally, with nearly 25%+ of spending wasted to inefficiencies. There’s plenty for tech companies to disrupt and control, especially those that are worried about growth maturing and on the lookout for exciting new businesses.
While we’re on big tech,
Bunch of hackers have found a vulnerability in Apple devices which is actively being exploited, while a red-faced Apple is releasing back to back security patches for all its devices. True to its brand, the company gives little information about the attack, but apparently it has something to do with Apple’s WebKit API which integrates with its Safari browser.
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Slack becoming all sexy 😎
When Salesforce, the grumpy old uncle of software, purchased Slack last year, everybody expected the user experience and the product roadmap to go down the drain. But surprisingly, Slack’s showing a LOT of ambition, most visible through the slew of features announced.
Chat with anyone—a feature called “Connect”, that lets users message anyone in any company using Slack. That’s a godsend if you work in Sales, but the idea of Slack becoming another LinkedIn and pushback over harassment dawned on people, so the company made the feature opt-in only.
Audio, Audio everywhere— Slack decided to follow in the footsteps of all the bigshots and make a shift to audio, bringing Clubhouse-like rooms to the platform, allowing anyone from your company to drop in for a quick rendezvous.
This is probably the first known real-time audio communication attempt made in the enterprise space, if you ignore planned and well scheduled conference calls of course. The serendipitous nature of drop-in audio chat rooms make them ideal to fix some of the shortcomings of remote work, particularly after work “socializing”.
Key takeaway: Slack pioneered consumerization of IT, and the company’s wide reach and popularity puts it in an ideal position to attack some of the shortcomings emerging for remote work, particularly around socializing. Could easily add a multi-billion dollar market to Salesforce's disposal if pursued with purpose.
Hot stuff from Venture Street? 🔥
Cash-machine Byju’s raising dough is not even news at this point.
The company is apparently courting investors for another $700 million, revising its valuation to $15 billion, and already has interest from FB co-founder Eduardo Saverin as well as some big money buyers from the Middle East.
Edtech is probably the most competitive space in India, so naturally a high-cash burn situation is unavoidable. In this case, turns out the splashy acquisitions of Akash and then Toppr have dried up Byju’s wallet, with little left to fuel growth and global expansion.
In any case, the market at their disposal is a limitless goldmine, and long as they have the metrics to please investors, it's all cool. Since COVID alone, 20 million new users have joined across the company’s services, with revenues topping ₹2,800 crores for the year, with expectations set for 200%+ growth next year.
While we’re on raisies,
DotPe, a restaurant software provider, raised $27.5 million for its Series A round at a $90 million valuation from PayU, with Google and a few others joining in.
The company basically sells a suite of tools that help restaurants and walk-in stores digitize their menu, making the product catalogue accessible via a QR code, making it easy for customers to order something and pay for it before walking in. The company that opened barely a year ago has managed to scale to 5 million+ merchants, thanks to strong digital commerce tailwinds driving demand for merchant-tech services.
Closing out—how could the bots resist? 🤖
Crypto game just discovered a wider addressable base.
Y’all remember Sophia the walking talking humanoid? Well, digital art made by the robot sold for $700K in an NFT auction over the weekend, in one of the first pieces of “art” ever NFT’d by a bot.
The bot basically processed several portraits by artist Andrea Bonaceto through her eyes, and then using her fancy neural nets produced her own version of the art, coming up with a self-portrait of herself, and then a 12 second video showing her progress recreating the artist’s collection. The entire collection of artwork netted the bot $1.7 million in total, and this pitch of the show is… well surreal to say the least.
Escalated too fast!
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
💪 Doing their part- Cars24 joins Swiggy in covering the cost of covid-19 vaccination for its employees and two immediate family members. The move follows GOI’s decision to allow private hospitals to vaccinate citizens who are eligible. Expect many more to follow.
💉 SII to the rescue, again- Serum Institute of India has begun the phase 2 and 3 clinical trial for Covovax and is hoping to launch the vaccine by September this year. Covovax is Serum Institute’s version of the covid-19 vaccine developed by US-based Novavax, and is believed to have an efficacy of 96% against the original strain determined in a phase 3 trial conducted in the UK.
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