Hustlers win
Future relief, big no-code day, and stuff from the week before.
Hi 👋, Tanvi here.
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Market summary: 📊
Weekend vibes crept in, as the markets ended upside down on Friday ending the entire week lower. US markets oddly had an equally consistent decline too.
US:
S&P 500 - down 0.72%
Nasdaq 100 - down 0.73%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 1.11%
Sensex - down 1.11%
Heeding to calls ✋
Paying attention to recent calls put out by Kishore Biyani, Amazon has now requested SEBI to stop the full review of the pending Reliance-Future acquisition.
To remind you, Amazon was claiming it held rights to invest in Future, and was vehemently seeking to block Reliance’s Future acquisition, approaching literally every regulators’ doorstep it could find.
The soap opera has been going on forever now but the back-tracking by Amazon gives us some hints that maybe the egos are calming down a bit, and chances are both companies will go back to the drawing board and look to work out an arrangement.
Hard to keep our hopes too high with third partner Reliance in the picture, but an arrangement where Amazon ends up with some stake in RIL via Future seems plausible. We’ll see.
Node code had a ball 💰
First up, we had Webflow raising over $140 million yesterday in a blockbuster Series A round from Accel and a few others. An absolutely phenomenal company that went from near bankruptcy to building a class-leading product that users can’t stop raving about.
For those new to the game, Webflow basically allows anyone on the internet to put up a gorgeous, smooth, sophisticated website without writing a single line of code. Iss the shizz right now, and all the fancy startups you see and the cute ecommerce stores you come across most likely build their look using Webflow’s services.
Vlad Magdalin founded the company in his bedroom, ended up with $60K in credit card debt at one point, risking everything he had, and finally made it out at the top. Serious Andy Dufresne feels.
Anyway, you should check this out over the weekend.
The platform now claims over 2 million users, with over 100K paid customers, and post deal valuation of $2.1 billion. What a run!
Then in another outstanding raise,
Zapier which allows no-code developers and builders to connect web apps and seamlessly share data, trigger actions, and get shit done without begging developers for some attention, sold some shares to Sequoia apparently at a $4 billion valuation.
Zapier founders aren’t fans of outside capital, and have mostly avoided it. The only outside dollar the company ever raised was back in 2012, a $1.2 million check from Bessemer Venture Partners.
Since then they’ve built this company into a 300 employee giant, all 100% remote, scaling up to $50M+ in revenue, and 3 million users. Such stories of bootstrapping blow our minds away, and go to highlight the limitless possibilities and diversity in outcomes for digital businesses.
Bottomline: these two raises should convince you that no-code revolution has arrived, and that its driving real dollars and meaningful outcomes for users, and the VCs will be increasingly keen on sniffing out unique players in the game. Estimates say over the market for low-code tools will swell to over $50B by 2025, growing nearly 30% rates each year. If you’re a builder, now is yo time to go shooting.
Finally, a quick look at the stuff that went down last week
👀 Musk eyes India—Tesla has formally incorporated an Indian entity, fueling speculations of an imminent India launch. Musk fans are cheering, and the eventual move could offer a big boost to the Indian EV arena which has been humming really nicely for the past 12 months. However, we think the current entity is in place to scope up the possibility of an eventual launch—initiate vendor talks, hire consultants, figure out government regulations etc. with an official play still years away. So hold on to yo horses for now.
💉 We kicked off mass vaccination—Serum Institute packed the vials and loaded them onto planes in Pune, private carriers then took off to various cities across the nation, and PMO has committed to a Jan 16 deadline for widespread vaccination to finally kick off. The task at hand is obviously humongous, and uniquely challenging, but we have a good record of executing logistically intensive challenges like this in the past. Fingers crossed.
🛒 Jumbotail raised $14.2 million—the digital commerce boom ignited in the wake of the pandemic continues to enthuse big money investors. B2B commerce giant Jumbotail became the latest here to raise capital. The company runs a fresh-produce focused marketplace, allowing merchants to procure their goods at a fair price via an app. So far some 30,000 kirana stores have been onboarded on the service, and logistics investments are a priority for the team.
💳 Regulators killed a fintech marriage—Visa’s decision to acquire Plaid for $5.3B was a “we have arrived” moment for the fintech world, until regulators spoiled the party. Lawmen say the deal would kill competition and make Visa unstoppable in the payment processing game. Meanwhile boys over at Plaid understood that they’re underselling themselves, and ended up walking away from the table. Rumours are, Plaid was asking for a lot more money because COVID considerably elevated their business prospects.
💻 ROKU bought Quibi’s bag—bite sized streaming platform Quibi, which met an unfortunate end last year despite raising billions of dollars, had been looking for a buyer for their content library for quite a while. Hopes were that the content could fetch some dollas and help them appease sour investors on the way out. Everyone rejected the offer though, until hardware streaming platform Roku, which is emerging as a credible competitor to Netflix agreed to buy it off. Reports say Roku paid pennies for it.
📈 Affirm killed it—stock of the buy-now-pay-later company doubled on IPO day, and went on even higher to book $25 billion in market cap. Founded by ex-PayPal mafia Max Levchin, the company pioneered the credit at POS model for digital businesses, becoming one of the default financiers for anything people buy on Shopify enabled stores. Affirm has 4M+ users, and is growing at ~100% levels—really crazy how fast these companies are being built, and credibly scaled.
👏 Earnings are looking good—Indian IT giants (Wipro, TCS) showed good business momentum coming out of the last quarter of 2020, putting them on a good growth trajectory for the new year. Overall, revenues expanded nicely, profits improved, and margins looked good. Markets warmed up to the numbers well, and Sensex is gearing up to take on 50K.
😎 VCs make a killing—despite being a recession year, Venture capitalists had a field day in 2020 deploying record amounts of capital in tech businesses. 2020 investments were up 4% compared to 2019, but deal count was lower, and seed and early stage investments fell short big time, as most capital went to established ventures pressing hard on the growth pedal.
🏛️ Finally they got to Don, again—the US house has again impeached Donald Trump, this time for inciting violence and an attack on the US Capitol building. Several Trump-loyalists from his side of the party voted in favor of impeaching the boss, literally signing the death warrant on his term. Tech platforms shunning their political independence, and unequivocally banning Trump flat out was the real show stopper of the week. Consequences for those actions will likely follow.
Aight, that’s it for now. Enjoy the weekend and see you next week! 👋
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