JioMart faces resistance 🧐

Venture raises, Salesforce's quarter, and Crypto Rajan.

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Market summary: 📊

After some pretty decent runs over the past few days, global markets tread slow in anticipation of the US Fed’s meeting on Monday offering color on interest rates. India ended flat, while US sharply turned. 

US:

• S&P 500 - down 0.58%

• Nasdaq - down 0.59%

India:

• Nifty 50 - up 0.01% 

• Sensex - up 0.01%

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What’s brewing hot ☕

✅ Indian startups kicking ass — for the first time in 8 years, total venture funding in India apparently overtook China for a single month of July, as Indian venture activity lights up, while China’s anti-tech crusade starts to weigh things down. So far in 2021, Indian ventures have raised over $17 billion in VC $$, up 42% YoY, across more than 540 deals, churning 25 unicorns year-to-date.

✅ IPO roster gets longer — Bloomberg is reporting that Delhivery will submit its docs for an IPO as early as October 2021, looking to raise $1B from the public. While B2C internet platforms struggle with high-CAC, customer churn, and all the unpredictability of consumer internet businesses, the sleepy infra businesses in the backend have been quietly becoming indispensable to the India growth narrative, and traditional investors’ reaction may be much kinder to these IPOs.

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RIL’s digital ambitions hit a wall 🙄

What happened — JioMart’s plans of becoming a B2B vendor is facing resistance from major consumer goods distributors nationwide, who are threatening to cut off brands that sell their product on the platform.

Some hand holding — JioMart’s hyperlocal store basically helps Kirana stores and other SMEs procure goods digitally, without working with a local distributor. Recently, HUL, one of the largest consumer goods players in India, got into a partnership with JioMart too, pushing its products to kiranas, hotels, restaurants, caterers, via Jio.

Now HUL otherwise used to distribute its merch via a network of 3,500 distributors nationwide. Seeing the arrangement with Reliance, the distributors were quick to read the ominous writing on the wall.

What’s coming — the distributors’ association has written to both HUL and GOI, and will be protesting with a strike for a day or two, with threats just short of cutting off HUL’s supply chain entirely. Other brands should get the message.

Bottomline — 90% of India’s $850B+ household retail comes from a distributor led network. Eliminating these massively under digitized, inefficient middleman networks was B2B platforms’ gameplan to build robust, predictable, high-margin revenue streams, circumventing poor economics of traditional ecommerce. Well, good luck now!

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What’s poppin’ in Startupland 💸

Couple quick raises, and a big time VC raise...

📚 Representing edtech is Camp K12, which closed a $12 million Series A round from Matrix Partners and Elevation Cap. Camp K12 runs an online school for 5-18 year olds, offering hands-on coding and other STEM coaching sessions, with operations in the US and the Middle East. Customer base has been growing 2-3x in key markets like the US and UAE over the last 12 months!

🤝 Then, Advantage Club, an early stage HR-tech venture, that wrapped a $1.7 million raise from Y Combinator, Broom Ventures, and Liquid.vc. The startup sells an employee engagement platform that helps Indian enterprises track employee career progression, incentivize staff better, while managing their catalog of corporate perks. 

💰 Lastly, domestic VC firm A91 Partners, which mostly invests in Series A rounds, raised a massive $525 million second fund. A91 has backed some promising names like Digit, Sugar, with 11 investments from its $250M fund before.

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Salesforce blasts a sexy quarter🔥

Old, large software companies like Salesforce (no matter how much you hate using their tools) continue to grow like a weed, as laggard old-school enterprises continue to bomb billions on modernizing their IT post-COVID. 

Quick look at Salesforce’s recent quarter:

• Revenues of $6.3 billion, up 23% YoY

• Salesforce's new businesses — like MuleSoft and Tableau formed 30% of all sales

• CEO revised full year revenue outlook 

Strategy paying off — Safesforce has been acquiring a plethora of smaller businesses, like Mulesoft ($6.5B, 2018), Tableau ($16B, 2019), Slack ($20B, 2020) integrating them into its core CRM business, which is helping drive growth.

Bottomline —Marc Benioff is keen on adopting the Microsoft playbook of operation, and turning the $250B company into a sticky web of interconnected services that no living enterprise can escape.

So far working well!

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Closing out — Crypto finds some support in India💪

2021 is full of surprises! Ex-RBI governor Raghuram Rajan is the newest supporter of crypto — claiming he believes the technology/currency has a “potential future” if the tech becomes “well regulated”. Not sure how the crypto-maximalists feel about government intervention but we’ll take what we get...

Meanwhile, we made another stride when SEBI asked depository institutions (NSDL, CDSL, basically entities that hold your stonks for ya) to look into the possible use of blockchain technology for creating and monitoring security agreements, specifically non-convertible securities. 

Still exploring, but while GOIs stand to the tech is still cold, the ice is clearly thawing a bit from the sides!

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What else are we snackin’ 🍿

💉Try us - RIL is seeking regulatory approval for the clinical trials of its protein-based COVID vaccine. 

❤️️ India loves FDs - Google Pay is bringing fixed deposits to its app, offering upto ~7% interest rates. Boomer equivalent of crypto!

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