Order me some TikTok 🍔
No Whatsapp for work, RazorPay's monster raise, and SBI funds' IPO.
Morning folks! 👋
Last official business-week of the year… it’s Christmas sweets, last minute Goa trips, ugly sweaters, and boring holiday parties from here. News-wise, the biz world has already calmed down a bit. Stock market volatility continues to persist though. Let’s do this! 🤙
Quick Monday shot of Espresso ☕
1️⃣ Spidey shows hope — the latest Spiderman release made over $121 million on its opening day at the box office — the best opening so far in the pandemic, and the 2nd best in history of movies. Multiplex owners, devastated by COVID, are reading this as a sign of brighter times ahead — however analysts caution that theaters will continue to slim down, with just a handful mega releases doing extremely well at the box office, while most other subpar content gets relegated to the comforts of streaming from the couch!
2️⃣ Fined for WhatsApp — JP Morgan’s wall street bankers will be fined a record $200 million+ by a bunch of regulators for *drumroll* using Whatsapp to conduct business. Regulators require that all comms from major financial services players be available for inspection at any point, hence no 3rd party communication apps. But JPM bois, between 2018 to 2020, ran shop using personal WhatsApp + emails violating everything in between. Try telling this to folks running businesses in India.
Who want ‘em TikTok burgers 🍔
What’s happening — TikTok is entering the food delivery business, launching ghost kitchens in the US, as part of its agenda to monetize deeply beyond ads — kicking off with not 1, but a thousand locations!
Millions share bite-sized content linking food vlogs, recipes, or just emerging crazy food trends on the platform anyway, so why not leverage that top of the funnel better?
The deets — TikTok will curate top food content and create a TikTok Kitchen Menu. They’re then working with Virtual Dining Concepts, a shadow operator or restaurants, to get the food “designed” and placed in these strategic locations across the US.
As a user, if you see something on your feed you like, you can 1 click order it, and a restaurant near you will deliver it. Safe to assume, some of the items will be with longer shelf life, and refrigerable. Fyi, Virtual Dining is the same company that manages food chains for YouTube stars like Mr.Beast.
Post COVID trends — Food delivery has surprisingly sustained momentum post COVID. After 200-300%+ growths in 2020, Doordash, Uber Eats continue to post 30-50%+ growths in 2021 consistently — with millennials happily burning half their paycheck on sushi-rolls and ramen.
But there is a whole “culture” + “discovery” + “social” element to food that these fee-optimizing platforms fail to capture — where social platforms could work magic.
Bottomline — definitely innovating, and more audacious then what the Social Media 1.0 platforms have tried so far. What metaverse!
Quick look at some Weekend raises 💰
Hevo Data, a no-code data management platform, closed a $30 million Series B round from Sequoia Capital, Qualgro and a few others.
Hevo’s platforms helps enterprises easily build data pipelines to collect, aggregate, and make sense of all the data their internal apps generate — with Zapier-like simple integrations, without writing a single line of code.
1K+ enterprise customers use the service from over 40 countries. ARR has apparently grown 500% for the last 12 months. 👏
Meanwhile in fintech, ☝️
Payments-API king RazorPay raised a mammoth $375 million round, revising its valuation to $7.5 billion! That’s more dough in a round than all of RP’s past financing’s put together. Lone Pine, Alkeon and TCV led the bid.
Business has obviously been 🔥🔥 — transaction volumes jumped to $60 billion annually this year, from barely $5 billion in 2019, thanks COVID, with over 8 million business processing payments on the platform.
There’s a host of other ambitious fintech products too — from lending, to accounting, to neobanking.
Quick look at SBI’s Mutual Fund IPO 🔥
What’s poppin — SBI’s mutual funds business, started by the company in a joint venture with French asset manager called Amundi’s, will look to IPO soon, raising a billion dollars from the markets.
SBI Mutual Funds is actually the biggest asset manager in India — with over $79 billion in assets under management, and 15%+ market share. State Bank owns a 63% stake in the company, while Amundi controls the rest. Both will offload about 10% to the public.
The business makes most of its money via management fees issued on funds, and advisory services. Quick link to the annual report if you’re scouting. Little noise, max impact, battle tested kinda biz.
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
💰 Web3 pays - Adidas wrapped up its first NFT drop netting over $23.5 million!
🎧 Audio deal - Spotify acquired an Australian podcast-tech company, Whooshkaa, which lets creators make, create, distribute shows.
👀 Shut those torrents - Malaysia is going guns blazing on piracy, imprisoning illegal streamers with upto 20 years in jail.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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