Inflated maxxx 🖖
Getty going public, and stuff from the week before.
Market summary: 📊
India ended flat on Friday, finishing the week overall in the green. US had a solid week as well, with inflation concerns helping asset prices rise.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.95%
Nasdaq - up 1.13%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.035%
Sensex - down 0.035%
Weekend shot of espresso ☕
1️⃣ Santa brings inflation — Americans are engulfed with persistent, painfully high inflation. For the month of November, retail prices jumped 6.8% on average, the highest levels for over 39 years, thanks to unchecked money printing, excessive cash doles during COVID, coupled with prolonged lockdowns screwing up supply-demand dynamics. Tough mood going into the holidays. 🎅
2️⃣ Better be careful — the mass firing of 900 people on Zoom returned to bite Better.com CEO Vishal Garg in the butt. Better’s board stepped in and apparently emailed all employees that the CEO will be “taking time off immediately”, or in other words “walked out the door by security”. Khatam, Bye Bye, Tata. CFO is being elevated to the top role, while the board promises a comprehensive review of leadership to determine fitness to lead. Ouch.
Lousy news Friday. Let’s look at a couple things real quick 🤙
Getty goin’ public 📈
What’s poppin’ — online image-library, Getty Images, which provides licensable media (pictures and videos) to some of world’s top internet media companies, is going public in a $4.8 billion SPAC deal.
Founded in 1995, the business expanded through a pretty aggressive acquisition strategy, buying out collections, archives, libraries, and other smaller agencies that made up the stock photography industry.
Today, they own an archive of about 350 million images, making a billion dollars in revenues annually — serving the New York Times, to Facebook, to Morning Brew.
While we’re on IPOs, ☝️
Star Health, the leading insurer in India, opened to a lukewarm reception on the street — with stock barely showing a beat, finishing 0.76% up. Wide options in IPOs these days, coupled with a modestly fizzling out IPO-frenzy as well as valuation debate is making folks too picky.
Quick look down Venture Street 💰
3one4 Capital and 9Unicorn Ventures led a splashy $3.2 million seed round into an upcoming, pseudonymous social-media platform called Zorro.
Zorro is looking to replace the litany of options we have today, all fronting growth hacks, paid-shouts, and disingenuous content with a more pseudonymously created “brash truth” prioritizing experience, where users can freely be themselves. Sounds like a lot of hot air rn, but the product is being tested, and a waitlist is currently active.
Fun fact — OG Twitter-India memer, Gabbbar Singh, is a cofounder.
Then, onto a fintech deal real quick, 👀
LenDenClub, a P2P lender, raised a $10 million Series A round from Tuscan Ventures, and a few others, including Kunal Shah and cricketer Hardik Pandya.
LenDenClub runs a class P2P lending network, connecting wealthy investors looking for better returns, with eligible borrowers. 2.5 million users borrow money there today, with a loan book of ₹2,500 crores. LDC was valued at over $51 million during the raise.
That’s all we have for today peeps! Here’s a quick look at major stuff that went down this week…
🤔 Alibaba making some changes — the Chinese e-commerce giant is trying to keep regulators happy. Firstly, a new CFO is being hired. Then Alibaba will form 2 new business units within, one running all its domestic ecommerce businesses, and a separate one managing all international operations. Despite being a much larger ecommerce operation than Amazon, $BABA has lost 65%+ of its value in the past year, after China started screwing with Jack Ma.
💰 OpenSea to IPO — the No.1 NFT trading marketplace has hired Lyft-executive Brain Roberts as its new CFO, hinting at an imminent IPO. Roberts played a key role in taking Lyft public, convincing skeptical Wall Street investors to buy in, despite the ride-hailer losing cash by the boatloads. Although OpenSea is already profitable, it battles extreme crypto volatility, which is still a huge hurdle to jump.
🦄 Them unicorns keep comin' — First, Healthcare venture Pristyn Care raised $100 million for its Series E from Sequoia and Tiger, at a $1B+ valuation. Pristyn runs specialty surgery centers nationwide, specifically for elective procedures, offering patients a digitally savvy experience. Then Entrackr reported that Zepto, the hottest new 10-minute grocery delivery service on the block, is in talks to raise a $250 million round, at a $1B+ valuation, becoming unicorn just 6 months.
💲 Whatsapp launched crypto payments — FB will start rolling out USDP (stable-coin) backed peer-to-peer payments on Whatsapp in the US this week. Folks can just enter their bank info, and send out $$ while texting on the app, with the backend rails built on the stable coin infra. With $2 billion+ Whatsapp users worldwide, FB could instantly scale to hundreds of billions in volumes if the thing works — diversifying away from a ad-heavy biz model.
⚠️ China’s Evergrande Group is in default — the Chinese real-estate firm on the verge of a collapse finally ended up missing a major debt payment. Evergrande was due to pay ~$83M on some bonds a couple days ago, but lenders haven’t heard a word from the team since. Non-payment could trigger a default on ALL of Evergrande’s other loans too. Ticking time bomb for the Chinese consumer class right now.
🤑 Ending with a couple major acquisitions over the week —
UpGrad acquired Talentedge, a professional upskilling platform, for ₹350-₹400 crores — its 6th major acquisition in the last 12 months. Talentedge offers certificate courses in tech-heavy verticals, with about ₹130 crores in revenues.
Twitter captain Agrawal made his first move, buying a B2B messaging tool and Slack-rival Quill. The new team will work on improving the Twitter DMs experiences — a much requested feature.
Byju’s, the serial edtek acquirer bought out Austria-based GeoGebra, in a ~$100 million deal. GeoGebra sells an interactive digital tool that helps with graphing, geometry, and general collaborative whiteboarding, reaching 100M students across 195 countries.
Lastly, Delhivery acquired California based Transition Robotics, a maker of unmanned drones and aerial monitoring systems, to beef up its drone-delivery capabilities in R&D.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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