Meta gets down to business 🤝
Policybazaar goes live, Weekend raises, and Udemy went public.
Happy Monday folks 👋
Hope Halloween weekend was fun, or if you aint into that, atleast you caught a cool Netflix show! Quite a lousy business weekend otherwise, lets do a quick rundown of all that matters…
Quick shot of espresso ☕
✅ Comin’ in hot — Policybazaar’s anchor round got oversubscribed nearly 40x, with 155+ investors pooling in to put together ₹2,500 crores into the company. Investor list also included some of India’s top insurance players such as HDFC Life, Bajaj Allianz Life, and others. IPO bids open up today, with PB seeking a $6.5 billion valuation. Shoot yo shot!
✅ Robo coding ain’t far — Github says nearly 30% of the code being written to its platform for certain programming languages today is actually written by it’s AI programming tool. GitHib’s Copilot, built to help developers, basically looks at code written by human devs, and then suggests logic improvements and next steps by predicting functionality. We’re far from seeing such tools be fully functional, but you get a hint of an inevitable future.
Meta went shopping 🥽
What happened — Zuckerberg’s newly rechristened baby, Meta, made its first purchase — buying out a VR studio called Within, well-known for developing the fitness app Supernatural.
Fitness on VR gear is a hot niche, and Supernatural lets people burn them cals via interactive workout sessions like boxing, meditating, cardio and stretching, delivered by professional trainers, all with your VR headsets on.
Needless to say, FB’s betting that folks spending a lot of time inside their virtual metaverse, would also be keen on moving their fitness goals into this new world.
Worth mentioning — in the last 3 years, Facebook’s made 11+ acquisitions in the VR and AR space, more than 80% of all their purchases. The company’s been planting the seeds with key tech in streaming, networks, computer vision, for a long time.
Big picture — for the metaverse to succeed, FB will need a robust developer ecosystem building apps and services for its virtual world. Almost like Smartphone 2.0 for devs looking to get started on the ground floor of a looming platform shift.
Marico outperforms rivals 💪
FMCG stocks have been kneecapped by inflation and rising input costs. But Marico, the maker of brands like Parachute, Saffola, managed to break away from the pack — reporting a nice jump in revenues and profits, and steady margins.
Quick look at the numbers:
Total sales of ₹1,989 crores, grew 22% YoY
Net Profit jumped 16% YoY, to ₹316 crores
Saffola foods brand grew an impressive 70%
Margin stood at 17.5%, in line with expectations
Management sounded pretty bullish on consumer spending growing, but warned of persistent inflation and supply challenges. Standard speech!
Bottomline — FMCG is looking tricky, and investors will have to hang tight for a couple extremely boring and dull quarters, to understand the whole picture.
Quick look at a couple major weekend raises 💰
Purplle, the cosmetics marketplace, is raising $75 million at a $630 million valuation in a round led by Kedaara capital. Nykaa’s kick-ass IPO may have been a major tailwind.
Purplle serves 7 million monthly active shoppers on its platform, selling 50,000+ products from nearly a 1,000 leading and emerging brands.
Post COVID, the cosmetics game has been on fire — young consumers are ditching offline channels, thanks to better selection and pricing online, and marketplaces facilitating this shift of $$ are making bank. Still lotssaaaa runway!
Then onto a quick ed-tech raise, ☝️
Our friends at Stoa School raised a $1.5 million round from Better Capital, as well as Nithin Kamath, Kunal Shah and other Angels. Stoa’s 6 month cohort-based general management programme puts folks on an accelerated path to a business career within startups — plugging an increasingly widening talent gap, as India’s venture ecosystem explodes. 300+ students have graduated so far.
Closing Out — Udemy is now a public company 🙌
King of ₹999 courses and savior of countless late-career switches, Udemy, went public on the Nasdaq on Friday, raising $420M+ from the markets at a $4B valuation.
Despite the perennial discounting, the business makes about $500 million or so in revenues, expanding a respectable 25% YoY, serving 45 million users. There’s a B2B vertical too, where the platform sells certain popular niche courses as corporate training material.
Market reaction — COVID’s tailwinds to ed-tech has helped with growth, but markets are a bit concerned about Udemy’s pricing power and standing (relative to free tools like YouTube), which sapped most enthusiasm from the listing.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
📉 Progress — India’s active COVID cases declined to 159K, the lowest in the last 247 days.
📱Diwali launch - Jio and Googles’ $84 smartphone will launch in India on November 4th. There’s even a buy-now-pay-later option, to get it for $27 down lol. Winner!
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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