IPO buffet 💸
Blockchain fund, Growth-tech carnage, and EV races.
Morning fellas! 👋
17 new Omicron cases in India. Markets worldwide continue to remain volatile. Crypto took a massive dump over the weekend. It’s a mess going into this week, but hopefully calmer senses prevail.
Let’s run through a few nuggets for today and leave you to more important things!
Quick shot of espresso ☕
1️⃣ No refunds in Web3 — crypto exchange Bitmart got hacked, with $150 million worth of Ethereum and some other smart-contract token assets stolen. Details on the how, the when, the who are still scant, but a bunch of small withdrawals from the exchange triggered security researchers to look deeper and sniff out the breach. $15B in crypto assets have possibly been stolen over the past decade — which presents the biggest hurdle for wider institutional adoption of the technology.
2️⃣ Navi for Blockchain — Navi Finance, the financial services biz run by Flipkart-king Sachin Bansal, is seeking permission to roll out a Blockchain Fund — that’ll offer exposure to companies winning from the core-technology (not crypto tokens). Structured as a fund-of-funds, Navi will invest in global ETFs and other funds which hold companies like Nvidia, AMD, and Salesforce. Fyi, SEBI had recently greenlit Invesco for a similar fund, but Invesco wet its pants and docked plans due to regulatory uncertainty.
Busy week for India’s IPO markets 💸
December is buzzing on the street, with a flurry of listings + bids, of all shapes and sizes. This week alone, we have 4.
2 Hot guys on the block ☝️
👠 shoe-retailer Metro Brands will open its bid towards the end of this week, looking to muster capital to fund expansion of more stores.
Metro opened its first store in the 1950s in Mumbai, and since has expanded to almost 600 locations nationwide running stores of self-owned brands Metro, Mochi, Walkway, and a few others, as well as stores for western brands like Crocs and Clarks — focusing on the mid to premium segment. The business topped out at ₹1,200 crores in revenues and ₹160 crores in profits for the year before COVID, before lockdowns weighed things down a bit.
☁️ Then we have RateGain Software, which sells software to the travel industry, and will be a rare SaaS IPO for India (we wrote about them last week). With the travel biz seeing some solid post-pandemic tailwinds forming (Airbnb, Booking, Expedia, MakeMyTrip are blasting 60%+ growth rates), prospects look good.
🌍 The company that runs MapMyIndia — selling data, geo-intelligence, and proprietary mapping solutions covering 98.50% of India's road network, to enterprises like Amazon, Flipkart, as well as travel companies, car makers, will raise ₹1,200 crores. The business barely makes about ₹150 crores in revenues, with ₹60 crores in profits. Bids open Dec 9th.
🏚️ Lastly, there’s a south-Indian residential real estate developer, Shriram Properties, who will raise ₹600 crores to pay off debt.
Have yo pick!
Pulse check on Venture Street 🕵️♂️
Lousy fundraising flow over the weekend, with a couple early stage deals:
Fintech: PayGlocal, a payments-tech platform, raised a $4.9 million Series A from Sequoia Cap India. PayGlocal’s white-labeled payments platform lets Indian merchants serving global customers easily collect credit/debit payments from foreign cards. There’s a host of risk management and anti-fraud tools that operate in the backend as well.
Grocery: Meanwhile, Satvacart, a regional online grocery player operating out of Gurgaon, raised a Pre-Series A. Deal value wasn’t known, but the startup was in the process of closing another, much larger $50M round soon — leveraging a rapidly heating quick-commerce arena. At least half-a-dozen upstarts and big-players are battling for a piece of the $3B online-grocery market in India, which is expected to grow 35%+ through the decade.
Mondays are usually when the deals are announced, so hopefully we see some more coming up today!
DocuSign hammered into pulp 🤒
DocuSign, the hyper-growth $50 billion cloud-software company that pioneered paperless digital signatures, was one of the hottest companies on Wall Street for a few years.
On Friday, $DOCU stock was shredded 42% in a single day, after the company reported decent earnings, but offered weak guidance for the next quarter — signaling that demand for its software was rapidly falling off.
Wall Street read it as another sign of a broad software slowdown — stocks which were pandemic favorites (productivity, communications, project management, security, monitoring, financial tools etc.), with lofty narratives around them have all been taken to the woodshed as investors rotate out of mid-pandemic opportunities into a post-pandemic reality.
Zoom (down 67% from highs), Peloton (down 73%), Fastly (down 71%), are some visible casualties. Cloud, Ecommerce, Payments ETFs and broad Growth-tech indices are are all trading at considerable discounts from peaks.
Big picture — a bottom is nowhere in sight. Meanwhile, VIX, a volatility index which basically tracks anticipated big price movements (increase/decrease) in stocks, is up 75% over the past month.
Closing out — new horse in the Electric Bike races 🐎
Bounce Share, which runs a fleet of self-driven 2-wheelers across major Indian cities, threw its hat into the Electric 2 wheeler arena — with the official launch of its Bounce Infinity bikes last week.
Regular model is priced at ~₹69K. Bounce is also pushing a 50% cheaper model — which allows swappable batteries, letting you exchange your drained batts for a fresh set at a nearby location, for a monthly fee.
FYI, last week Bounce had signed a deal with Park+ to build out a battery network with 3,500+ locations, starting with major cities. Here’s a thorough profile from Overdrive.
Big picture — EV bike field lookin’ crowded with a long list of disruptors including Ather, Ola, Revolt, Simple Energy, and now Bounce, as well as cash rich lateral entrants like Bajaj, TVS, Hero.
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
🤝 Making moves - PayTM will work with investment advisory startup, PMS Bazaar, to offer custom investment strategies to individuals on its platform.
📉 Bought the dip - Bitcoin tanked, now down ~25% in a month. Shit coins followed. El Salvador meanwhile continues to buy the dip, adding ~150 BTC again over the weekend.
💉 Omicron stats - 17 more cases of the new virus-variant were detected in India, taking the total tally to 21.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
You can forward this email or share FC on social media by clicking the button below. Thanks and Ciao! 😀