Intuit is chasing Mailchimp 🏃

NFTs to movies, Fastest Unicorn, and Supply glitches

Sep 02, 2021

Hi 👋, Tanvi here.

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Market summary: 📊

Investors stepped off the gas for a moment, taking India back a notch from all-time highs. US had a meh session, with tech gaining as earnings season gets wrapped up.

US:

S&P 500 - up 0.031%
Nasdaq - up 0.19%

India:

Nifty 50 - down 0.33%
Sensex - down 0.31%

What’s brewing hot?

✅ NFTs go to movies —Larva Labs, the guys behind the famous CryptoPunk set of NFTs signed a deal with Hollywood agents United Talent Agency to represent the punks across film, TV, and video games content. Hate on the hype all you like, but when you consider the possibilities of bringing some of these “unique” digital characters into the animation world, producing tent-pole content franchises around them, the hype suddenly starts to feel worth it. FWIW, UTA represents several of the No.1 A-listers in Hollywood.

✅ The expansion begins — Zerodha got a nod from the regulators to pursue an asset-management business, which qualifies the brokerage to kick off its own mutual funds. In simple terms, creating your own fund and distributing it to the existing ~6M user base allows the company to keep more control on quality of products, experiment widely, and retain more margins than earning tiny $ as a distributor of somebody else’s fund.

Happy Birthday Reaction GIF by The Office

SMB software is a goldmine 💪

What’s happening — Intuit, which provides back office and accounting software to small businesses, is apparently in close talks to acquire online-marketing player MailChimp for $10 billion!

Post-COVID, every single small business out there is struggling to “adapt” to a new era, where glitzy landing pages, sleek email marketing, and social ads — some of the staples that Mailchimp offers, become irreplaceable. So, Intuit naturally sees opportunities to buyout a leading service provider and bring those offerings to its 100M+ existing SMB customers.

Acquisition machine — in fact, $INTU has quietly been gobbling up boring small business software products like QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Credit Karma ($7.1B most recently) for sometime now, all of which have helped stock blast 500%+ growth in the past 5 years.

Regardless, a solid exit for the 20 year old MailChimp which operates in an otherwise cutthroat competitive space.

What’s poppin’ on Venture Street? 🦄

Apna.co is on its way to become the fastest unicorn ever in India — with rumors that Tiger Global may be leading a $100M round, doubling valuation to a billion.

The company runs a LinkedIn-like professional network for blue-collar workers in India, serving users content, access to job listings, training and upskilling material, and receives more than 10 million users a month. Tiger had co-led a $70M Series B for ‘em barely months ago.

Then, a big balls early-raise, ☝️

Micro savings and investing app Jar closed a $4.5 million pre-Series A round from Arkam Ventures, Tribe Capital, and a few other major silicon valley houses.

Jar basically lets users round off their spare change from everyday expenses and invest it into gold starting with as little as ₹1. Monthly growth rates have apparently been 350% since launch in April, and fresh funds will go towards hiring and adding more products.

COVID induced problems 😷

Worst of the healthcare scare is past us, but global supply chains are yet to see COVID’s impact easing out…

Firstly, India’s auto companies are in a hard bind. Holiday season is coming up, but production can barely keep up with expected demand, as several key electronics parts are still hard to find. Maruti was forced to drastically slash production in some facilities for August and sales have tanked 20% for the month. Mahindra saw an even worse 24% decline in volumes for passenger cars. Total shitshow!
In tech, Apple, otherwise a master of its supply chain, is struggling to get its newest Watch product up and ready to be made. Watch 7 may not be ready to launch before the holiday season comes up, which could eat 3-5% into total revenues.