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Market summary: 📊
Decent Wednesday session in India as well as in the US, but with earnings season just a few weeks out, investors don’t seem in a rush for big moves.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.15%
Nasdaq 100 - up 0.28%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.92%
Sensex - up 0.94%
Shot of espresso ☕
✅ Kim K gets in—influencers reign supreme, ask Elon. Kim Kardashian is now part of the three comma club, after Forbes revised her net worth from $780 million to just over a billion in less than 6 months. Large chunk of Kim’s wealth comes from her KKW beauty line, which recently sold 20% stake to global cosmetics behemoth COTY for $200 million. Remainder of the $$ is made up for by endorsement deals, as well as her famous show Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Haters hate, players play!
✅ This game is legit—global crypto market has zoomed past $2 trillion in market capitalization thanks to a record surge in retail as well as institutional demand. Bitcoin alone makes up about a trillion of the pie, while the ethers and the tethers are increasingly picking up more load. Still a long way to go—the global gold market cap for example, stands at $11 trillion, while the global stock market value stands at a long shot $95 trillion. Breachable?
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Instadapp is a smart crypto wallet and API service that allows developers to seamlessly move their crypto holdings across protocols to earn maximum interest on their assets.
One of their most disruptive features is the Debt Bridge which allows users to easily migrate debts across protocols, specifically between Maker Vaults and Compound Finance.
Instadapp aims to be the default single-window to multiple DeFi services, offering a service well optimized for heavy-developers as well as everyday users, and recently raised a promising round from Silicon Valley biggies including Naval Ravikant and Balaji Srinivasan.
What giants are made of... 📈
The soon-to-go-public crypto trading app Coinbase gave investors a sneak peek into its monstrous growth engine—leaving stonkers drooling in awe.
Thanks to an epic tear in the crypto markets, the company’s revenues exploded 9x in the fourth quarter, with profits swelling, and user engagement peaking to all time highs.
Quick stats:
Revenues of $1.8 billion in Q1 2021. For comparison, Coinbase made $1.1 billion for the entirety of 2020
Crazy margins, with the business making $800 million in profits for the quarter
56 million crypto buyers using the service
Processes $335 billion of quarterly crypto volume
The platform is all set for its public debut on April 14, opting for a direct listing on the Nasdaq instead of an IPO under the ticker of $COIN.
And we’re already hearing shares are trading at a significantly higher valuation than the $100 billion price tag the company was targeting for opening its bid.
Q2 off to a feisty start for growth ventures 💰
COVID infections and crypto prices ain’t the only thing rising.
The counter on global unicorns won’t show any signs of slowdown either, as COVID influenced digitization continues to bless the prospects of market leaders.
Quick look at some big checks written:
In India:
Online pharmacy and healthtech platform Pharmeasy saw valuation set to $1.5 billion post a $350 million raise from Prosus Ventures and TPG Growth. India, forced by lockdowns to order its meds online, can’t seem to find a way back to the neighborhood pharmacy, with the total epharma space expected to top $5 billion by 2025.
Then mutual fund distributor Groww closed its $83 million Series D round at a $1 billion valuation. Tiger Global led the bid, making this Tiger’s 4th unicorn of the year in India. The platform has so far scaled to 15 million users, and with investment penetration rates of well below 3% in India, has ample opportunity for continued disruption.
Meanwhile, globally:
Tiger Global plowed another $155 million into creator monetization platform Patreon, overnight tripling the company’s valuation to $4 billion. Patreon offers the most basic platform for creators to get paid online, and has scaled to 200,000 creators, winning big on the post-pandemic boom in solopreneurship.
In Australia, digital design platform Canva tripled its valuation to $15 billion, closing on a $71 million raise from T. Rowe Price and Dragoneer. Canva reports profitability, has a jaw dropping 55 million monthly active users, and saw its revenues grow 130% last year. Watch out Adobe!
Lastly, banking data portability and authentication API platform Plaid, raised $425 million from Altimeter Capital at a $13.4 billion valuation. Remember Visa was tryna buy them out for under $5 billion last year? Lol.
In all, 2021 has kicked off on a high, and most importantly, growth markets like India surprisingly seem on par with western venture markets in terms of the size, momentum, and scale of these recent raises.
Also, this is probably the first time we’ve had two unicorns on the same day in India, and if that doesn’t signal changing tides, we don’t know what will.
Houston, we need dolla 💉
Rising cases are becoming a problem, and the Serum Institute is requesting GOI for a $400 million grant to build out facilities and ramp up production of its AstraZeneca vaccine shot.
Currently, SII produces about 60 to 70 million monthly doses, which obviously isn’t enough for a country demanding a billion and more shots on war footing. With the grant, SII hopes to ramp up production to 100 million+ vials each month.
So far, SII has delivered nearly 90% of all the doses India has supplied to its citizens, in addition to playing a critical role in India’s benevolence to its allies and friends. GOI has little option but to give the proposal an agreeable consideration.
Closing out—Google snatches a quick win 🏛️
Google just won a 10-year-long historic legal battle against Oracle, booking a landmark judgement for the software industry around the use of open source software.
Basically, Oracle claims Google owes it some money for using a bunch of Java code (Oracle owns Java) in building the open-source Android mobile operating system, which then Google obviously went on to commercialize and make billions on, via software and hardware.
Bunch of local US courts had originally sided with Oracle, only for the Supreme Court to finally seal the verdict in Google’s favor. Had it gone the other way, the judgement would have jeopardized how tech companies generally are incentivized to invest in open-source software research, and then build on each other’s software progress to keep the innovation wheel spinning.
Oracle was hoping to mint $9 billion from Google as charges, but alas, now they’ll have to make up for that in other ways—like actually building software that sells.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
📱 Commerce is the way- FB just added tiny new features to Whatsapp to make it friendlier as a shopping tool, including better support for WhatsApp Catalogs on desktops, and the ability to hide items that are out of stock which will help small and well established merchants easily scale.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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