Protests kill Bitcoin 👎

Tiger's aggression, and stuff from the week before.

Market summary: 📊

India wrapped up the first week on a high, adding a few percent despite some mid-week choppiness. US dragged its markets down, beating expensive growth stocks, with the Nasdaq finishing the week almost 5% down.

US:

• S&P 500 - down 0.41%

• Nasdaq  - down 1.10%

India:

• Nifty 50 - up 0.38%

• Sensex - up 0.24%

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Quick shot of weekend espresso ☕

👊 Trump remembers — almost year after the Don got himself banned from Twitter, vengeance may be in sight. Trump’s own social platform, Truth Social (a word-to-word Twitter clone, with the retweet called the re-truth 🤣) will make its iOS debut on 21st February. Truth is one of the prime assets in the Trump Media and Technology Group’s kitty, which had recently disclosed its going public via a SPAC-deal, trading at a $2 billion market cap already.

🤷‍♀️ Hold your horses — GOI says it expects India’s GDP to grow about 9.2% YoY for this fiscal year ending March, a tad softer than the ~9.5% RBI was projecting and the markets were otherwise looking for. Perhaps the softness indicates some accommodation for late-Omicron impact on the economy. Fyi, given India had contracted a painful ~7.3% last year, so plenty is riding on a robust expansion this year.

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Tiger keeps sending them bags 💸

A B2B focused buy-now-pay-later platform, Rupifi, raised $25 million from Tiger Global and Bessemer Venture Partners — kicking off fintech raises for 2022.

Rupifi integrates as a payment option on B2B marketplaces (like Stripe), and allows these platforms to offer its vendors the option to split payments into multiple installments. For example, buying a load of 100 t-shirts? Split your invoice into 4 parts!

Marketplaces like Walmart, Flipkart and Jumbotail use their services — which reaches 50K+ end sellers, across categories like FMCG, pharma, fashion, electronics, agriculture and food.

Then turning to another one of Tiger’s raises ☝

Avataar.me, an SF and BLR-based computer vision and AI venture, picked up a $45 million check for its series B from Tiger, Sequoia, and existing investors. 

Avataar takes 2D-product images from ecommerce websites and turns them into nice, smooth 3D-renditions — allowing shoppers to see bulky products better, and even project images using their phone cameras. The startup currently works with a couple furniture marketplaces and large appliance vendors. 

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Closing out — Bitcoin takes a dump 💩

What’s poppin’ — Bitcoin took a dump and pulled other crypto down with it over the past couple days, after internet in Kazakhstan was shut down due to major violence.

Kazaks were protesting sharp price-increases in fuel and other essentials, which has resulted in major clashes with the police and the army. State responded by killing the internet to stop the crowd from organizing.

But… ever since China recently banned Bitcoin mining, a lot of that capacity had moved to neighboring Kazakhstan (which fyi is also a major energy producer).

Stats suggest after USA, Kazak-land runs the 2nd largest global BTC mining operation — powering almost 18% of global BTC mining. Decentralized what?

Anyway, about 15% of mining capacity went down, driving out all paper hands. Several major miners are already working to move their rigs into the US.

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And that’s a wrap for Week 1! Here’s a quick look at major stuff that went down this week…

🤝 Reliance made a big bet on Dunzo — RIL’s Retail arm led a massive $240 million round into rapid delivery platform Dunzo for a 25.8% stake. Reliance is looking to secure itself a play in the rapidly heating quick-commerce arena which has seen hundreds of millions pouring in from old and new ventures.

💰 OpenSea is a $13B business — the NFT marketplace at the center of the boom cycle, raised a mammoth $300 million round at a $13.3 billion valuation. OpenSea processed $15 billion+ in total volumes for 2021, a 600x jump from 2020, and is on its way to do more than $30 billion for 2022 if the hype persists. IF.

🤯 Apple hits $3 trillion in market cap — Tim Cook stewarded Jobs’ baby to a $3 trillion market cap finally — thanks to huge demand for iPhones, iPads, and Macs, through COVID’s WFH and Ed-tech boom, helping seal the final lap of the run. Apple now forms 7% of the S&P 500 index, beating IBM’s record from 1984. How romantic!

🚨 Elizabeth Holmes is found guilty — Elizabeth Holmes, the once-billionaire founder of Theranos, was found guilty on Tuesday for 4 of the 11 criminal fraud charges levied against her, ending a 4-month long trial. Holmes had managed to raise close to a billion, burn through it all, while repeatedly lying to investors, media, and partners about the progress Theranos made. She’s now eyeing 20 years.

🌱 BPCL going green — Bharat Petroleum Corp is allocating ₹25,000 crores to build a green-energy portfolio of 10GW capacity, and a promise to go carbon neutral by 2040. Pressure is mounting from all sides — primarily from investors, young shareholders, as well as GOI’s clean energy policies. BPCL will spend almost ₹2,000 crores over the next 3 years to get to 1GW in capacity.

🦄 New year, New Unicorns — 2022 started with a bang. Mamaearth, the natural products-based D2C brand, raised $52 million at a $1.15 billion valuation becoming the first unicorn of the year. Fractal AI, the data analytics consultant, then announced a $360 million raise from TPG Capital, booking the 2nd slot.

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