Love for software 🤝
Crypto problems, LIC drops its docs, and Rahul Bajaj passes.
Morning coffee fam! 💪
It’s *that* day. Unlike your lovelife, which we dearly hope is going somewhere, markets are stuck in a weird rut. Upward moves are met with serious pullback, despite a pretty solid earnings season so far.
Meanwhile, Putin is dragging the global economy into another mess with this Ukraine business. Otherwise, the roster for this week is easy. Let’s get it! 🤙
Kicking off the week ☕
🌟 Losing an icon — industrialist and billionaire Rahul Bajaj, who was the boss for the longest time and now chairman emeritus of the Bajaj Group, passed away at the age of 83. He’d shepherded the Bajaj empire for over 5 decades — scaling it from almost nothing to billions in revenues, through autos, financial services and other. There’s a million other achievements to his name, but the success of the iconic Chetak scooter under his stewardship remains unmatched.
💀 Crypto clean up — crypto firm BlockFi will pay $100 million in fines to US regulators for false marketing that misled customers into signing up and using its high-yield crypto savings accounts. BlockFi promised customers a 9% interest yield on their money, but regulators were torn on whether these accounts should actually be regulated as banking accounts or instead as securities. Lack of clear regulation and then the following poor judgment by crypto firms is broadly hampering widespread trust and adoption of newer generation of products.
There is no stopping for software acquisitions 🧐
With growth-stocks beaten down 40-50% from their peaks from barely 2 months ago, software companies over the $10 billion mark are becoming easy acquisition targets for sharks on Wall Street and Tech industry titans.
Two more splashy deals were announced this week: ✌️
Low-balled: First, Zendesk, the $15 billion seller of cloud-based customer chat tools, got an unsolicited takeout offer from a consortium of private equity firms — including Hellman & Friedman, Permira and Advent.
The trio gave Zendesk a $17 billion price, but Zen management thinks that’s too low — and ended up outright rejecting the bid.
Fyi, Zendesk is right in the middle of its $5 billion take out of data intelligence and surveying firm, SurveyMonkey. Anyway, rumors are a few more private equity firms are thinking of making a run for the company.
Worth noting — 41% of all the money invested by private equity firms in 2021, went into software companies. Proofpoint, Cloudera, RealPage, McAfee were some hot takeouts. 2022 won’t be all that different.
Then looking at a half baked deal, ☝️
Rumors are old-school networking giant Cisco is making a $20 billion offer to buyout monitoring analytics company Splunk.
Splunk basically helps large IT divisions collect data to understand if there are any outages, security incidents, and such. As newer simpler solutions come to the market, Splunk was having some growth issues for a while now, with its stock being a dog through COVID. Cisco is trying to make the most of the opportunity to boost its own security and analytics offerings.
Big picture — the global cloud software market is expected to grow 15-20% in 2022 to $475 billion+, making it one of the hottest investing (and news) themes for this year!
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Keeping track of spending has never been easier 🤩
It’s Valentine’s Day. And love, among other things, is in the air! ❤️
Can’t help but think how love is such a good excuse to push some good ol’ capitalism in your face. 🤷♀️ That means endless shopping, eating out, gifts, you know the works... But ever stop to think about seeing how all that spending looks?
Fi is a neobank that helps you look at your statements, your spending habits, in a clean and clutter free way. It takes all of 5 minutes to open a savings account on Fi and start taking control of your finances. Ah, the things we do for love!
Quick walk down venture lane 💰
Early stage fintech venture, Swipe, raised a $2 million seed-round led by Y combinator, Kunal Shah, GFC, and a few other investors.
Swipe is building a dead simple billing and invoicing solution for small businesses, letting merchants issue bills and collect payments on Whatsapp. Users can create an invoice in under 10 seconds, and have payment processed through a range of options.
Since a year after its launch the platform has managed to scale to 25,000 businesses, doing about $30 million in transactions to date!
Meanwhile D2C keeps pulling cash ☝️
An art and design-focused personal accessory maker, DailyObjects, raised $2 million from Roots Ventures and a couple other investors, says Entrackr.
DailyObjects makes accessories like bags, wallets, cases, sleeves, working with 500+ craftsmen to make merch, which it then sells on leading ecommerce platforms. They’ve served more than 2 million customers so far!
Otherwise, been a soft fundraising day!
Closing out — get ready for the big daddy 🥳
What’s poppin’ — LIC gave analysts and passionate investors some weekend homework, finally filing its DRHP docs with SEBI for the much anticipated IPO.
This would be the LARGEST bid coming down the line in India to date!
And it's a company like none other — They manage just short of ₹40 lakh crores in assets for people, dominating the life insurance game with 65%+ market share in premiums written, or 75%+ share of the number of individual policies sold. Bids are expected to open in March of 2022. Here’s a link to the DRHP if you plan on nerding out.
Worth mentioning — 10% of the IPO will be reserved for some 29 million LIC policy holders and 1.3 odd million LIC agents.
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
📋 More stock – Ruchi Soya, which was acquired by Patanjali a few years ago, will be liquidating ₹4,300 crores worth of stock to public investors, to stay compliant with SEBI’s regulations.
🍗 Food loans - Zomato is bringing the buy-now-pay-later option to consumers shopping on its platform soon. Gone too far?
🗼 Coming up in May - India’s telco department is hinting that it’ll kick off 5G auctions as soon as May this year. How these allocations go will decide the strategic and competitive positioning of players for the next decade atleast.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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