Monstrous march
Big VC raise, and stuff from the week before.
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Market summary: 📊
Despite a choppy start, markets closed the week on a high in India as well as globally. Vaccinations look strong, and back-to-routine narrative has taken control.
US:
S&P 500 - up 1.18%
Nasdaq 100 - up 1.82%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 1.20%
Sensex - up 1.05%
What’s brewing hot?
✅ Big dog raise—celebrity engagement platform Cameo, which lets fans request personalized videos from their favorite celebs raised a $100 million Series C round at a billion dollar valuation. The service got a huge boost from the pandemic, when birthday parties and anniversaries got cancelled, and the only way to get your aunt to smile was to send her a video of Snoop Dogg wavin hello. Cameo will be expanding into virtual events, custom merch, and other services, letting creator celebrities monetize even further. Meanwhile guesses for the highest earning celeb on the service? Kevin Malone from The Office, printing a million bucks in 2020.
UPI blows the doors off 🤯
Month of March was HUGE in UPI-land, with nearly ₹5 lakh crores worth of volumes processed on the payment rails during the month, up nearly 100%, and up 18% compared to last month.
If UPI was a startup (like Plaid) it’d probably be valued at a gazillion dollars already. 2.73 billion transactions were processed, with PhonePe again leading the race with 43% share of the volumes—booking an annual payment of nearly $400 billion.
FYI, global giants like PayPal do $250 billion in a quarter, while commerce giants like Shopify do barely 20% of the volumes of PhonePe.
RBI isn’t too happy—combined with Google Pay at number 2 spot, the top 2 platforms own 80% of the total volumes processed in India, and that consolidation of power and market control unnerves the RBI. Moves are being made to cap volumes processed by each of these leaders at under 30% of the total.
Tiger extends its claws 🐯
Global investment giant Tiger Global just made history raising an absurd $6.65 billion for its latest fund.
Love for India—Tiger invests across the market, from Series A to large-scale buyouts, from the US to Asia, and they've had a remarkable streak in India since their entry in 2014-15. $3.43 billion has gone into 83 Indian companies since then, right from Flipkarts and the Olas to most recently minted unicorns Innovaccer, Infra.Market, Cred etc.
Bottomline: over the last 12 months alone Tiger has deployed $189 million across 6 companies, churning out 3 unicorns in 2021 itself. Likely going to see a LOT more dough from the new fund coming to chase more opportunities around here.
Aight, that’s it in fresh brain food for today.
Quick look at the hottest stuff from last week...
📚 Edtech doing Edtech shizz—Byju’s raised another $460 million, revising its valuation to a little over $13 billion. Turns out the splashy acquisitions of Akash and then Toppr had dried up Byju’s wallet, with little left to fuel growth and global expansion. Since COVID alone, 20 million new users have joined across the company’s services, with revenues topping ₹2,800 crores for the year, with expectations set for 200%+ growth next year, and with numbers like that, wooing investors is like running a hot knife through butter.
Meanwhile in western edtech, Coursera had a grand IPO this week, raising nearly $519 million at a relatively modest $4.3 billion valuation. The company’s SaaS offering for universities to run 100% remote operations is gaining a lot of traction.
🎧 Everybody wants a Clubhouse—Salesforce-owned Slack announced some intriguing features including “Connect”, which lets users message anyone in any other company that’s using Slack. The company is also bringing Clubhouse-like audio rooms to the platform, with a focus of post-work socializing, which is a huge pain in the days of remote work. This is probably the first known real-time audio communication attempt made within the enterprise space, but probably the 17th time a popular platform has tried copying Clubhouse.
🩺 Healthcare is AMZN’s new battleground—Amazon’s self-branded at-home COVID 19 test kit got the green light from the US FDA, certifying another legitimate foray for the company into healthcare. The company has for the longest time harbored grand ambitions to venture into the broader $9 trillion healthcare space globally, recently making moves to design its own insurance plans and even its own primary care clinics, which it first plans on rolling out for employees and then the general public. Still Day 0 in the game, but expect a lot more.
💪 China’s time to be self-reliant—China is offering massive tax breaks to its semiconductor companies till 2030 to invest in building domestic manufacturing setups, as means of cutting reliance on foreign imports. The US often accuses Chinese companies of spying and data theft, imposing serious sanctions on them, virtually crippling progress in critical technology for China, which imports over $300 billion worth of semiconductors chips each year. Literally every big software as well as hardware tech giant in China has now aggressively committed to making their own chips or atleast firing up R&D.
💳 Visa made history—the card processing network settled its first ever payment transaction on the blockchain, specifically using a stable coin USDC. Basically, instead of reconciling its transaction on its own infra, Visa confirmed it on the Ethereum blockchain, while transferring and capturing the $$ in USDC. The progress opens a huge gate on further opportunities for Visa, including eventually even bypassing banks and settling transactions in split seconds entirely on its own infra, powered by the public blockchain, saving lots of money on fees Visa usually splits with banks. Investors are loving it!
🤦🏽♀️ Security chahiye, IPO nahi—MobiKwik made a mess when news broke that the company’s main database had been compromised. Personal information (email ids, names, loans procured, card numbers) of nearly 10 crore+ customers is on sale for pennies on the dark web. A hacker named Jordan Daven is believed to be the culprit, but what made the entire mess even worse is the company’s blatant denial of the breach and a weird response pushing blame onto users.
👀 Where em chips at—a global shortage in semiconductor components stemming from COVID related supply chain disruptions is hurting production of electronics stuff from laptops to headphones to $50,000 cars, causing losses worth tens of billions of dollars. As a result, electronics products across the board are getting expensive. Reports suggest that it's probably going to take nearly a year or so for the disruptions to be ironed out completely, and stocks of companies from Apple to Amazon are feeling the pressure.
⌚ Finally, Microsoft quietly dominating AR—Microsoft signed an unprecedented $22 billion, 10 year contract to supply the US Army with over 120,000 AR Hololens headsets, helping soldiers train, improve decision-making, awareness, and data capture, making the first large scale commercial AR-glasses order for any organization globally. Meanwhile, Microsoft investors cheer the company’s solid footing in selling to the government. Just a year ago had they secured a $10 billion contract to help migrate a large portion of the US defense forces’ systems to MSFT Azure cloud.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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