RIL abandons Aramco 🙄
Nike's metaverse, Bitcoin city, and AMZN's weed troubles.
Morning folks 👋
It’s Thanksgiving week in the West, which means a family dinner laced with crypto banter, and black Friday shopping — stats from which should alert Wall Street to the mood of the consumer going into a very unique Christmas season (COVID, revenge spending and all that)!
Anyway, easy Monday today news-wise, let’s do a quick rundown!
Kicking off the week hot ☕
1️⃣ Everyone wants a piece — Nike is working with Roblox to secure its future into the Metaverse, building a virtual space called Nikeland, featuring buildings and arenas modelled after the company’s real life HQ — to allow users to play games, try latest products, and design their own merch. Quite expected and intriguing, and indicative of how brands will likely participate and be more involved in the virtual world, than just randomly-spraying ads at us on Insta like in Web2..
2️⃣ Record year — 2021 is going down an EPIC year for IPOs, with more than $600 billion raised from the public markets worldwide. Crazy valuations, no revenues, 100% jumps — we’ve seen it all, which is also making old-school folks nervous, but with interest rates ticking up in 2022, and liquidity drying up, a much less frenzied environment is expected next year. Fun fact, before this, 2007 held the previous record for most $$ raised — and we all know how that party ended. 🤞
Reliance leaves Aramco hanging 💔
What Happened — after couple years of dancing around with Saudi’s state-oil company Aramco, Reliance called off the deal for Aramco to invest for a 20% stake in Reliance’s oil business, citing a change in priorities to renewables.
The deal had been cooking for sometime now, with Reliance trying to woo Aramco to invest upto $15 billion into the company. Then came COVID-man, tanking oil prices, hurting both companies in more than one way.
Anyway, the decision to move on seems amicable, and in June this year, RIL had appointed Aramco’s chairman to its board — which we’re guessing is an appeasement move meant to repair hurt egos.
Meanwhile, Reliance is steadfastly focusing on solidifying its position in the evolving domestic energy market by embracing renewables.
Big plans — Reliance has set an audacious target for itself of hitting 100GW in clean energy production capacity by 2030. In the next 3 years alone, the company will spend over $10B in acquiring assets to get there.
Big picture — the Saudi’s were also eyeing a piece of Reliance’s digital empire and Ambani’s baby — Jio, which may have broken the negotiations possibly.
Quick look at some weekend raises 💰
Cosmetics keeps pulling $$. Purplle closed its Series D round, raising $60 million from Premji Invest — at a $630 million valuation.
Purplle’s marketplace, selling thousands of brands, reaches some 7 million monthly active users in India — making about ₹1,200 crore in annual revenue. Obviously the online-makeup game has been on fire since COVID, with a permanent shift in consumer behavior, and also, Nykaa’s success is offering some strong tailwinds.
Purplle is putting fresh funds towards acquisitions and establishing a wider retail footprint. FYI, barely weeks ago, Kedaara Cap had infused $75M into the business!
Meanwhile, a seed round in the wellness space 🧘♀️
Gurgaon-based Mindhouse raised $6 million in a seed round from Binny Bansal and a few other angel investors. Mindhouse offers live or self-led, yoga and meditation sessions along with nutrition consultancy, with a focus on tackling mental and chronic health problems. Zomato co-founder Pankaj Chaddah is leading the ship.
El Salvador is building a Bitcoin City 🤠
What happened — El Salvador doubled down on its love for Bitcoin, announcing plans to build a Bitcoin City, backed with a billion-dollars in Bitcoin bonds. Gone too far?
The deets — ES will raise a billion dollars in debt on Bitcoin bond (basically money raised in BTC, paying out some interest each year), and use that to fund malls, entertainment centers, hospitals, and all other staples of a well-designed town. Money will also be spent on mining rigs, designed to work using a volcano’s geo-thermal energy.
Payments, shopping, salary, and everything else will be designed on the Blockchain, with citizens charged only VAT as taxes. Here’s BBC.
Earlier this year, El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender, gave every citizen $30 — which has been a modestly successful experiment.
Bottomline — nobody knows if it's revolutionary or just batshit crazy, but there’ll be lessons for everyone with time. 🤷♀️
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
🍁 Weed troubles - Madhya Pradesh police is suing Amazon India execs for helping smuggle marijuana into the state via its platform.
🧐 FB investigated - prosecutors of several states of the US joined hands to launch an investigation into Instagram’s effect on teenagers.
👎 Cisco struggling - all workloads are moving to the cloud and nobody is buying Cisco’s networking gear. Profits are tanking and stock was hammered.
🐦 Finally for Android- Twitter is rolling out its tipping feature for creators using Android — 2 months after releasing it for iOS users.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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