SaaS party LIT yo 🔥
Venture raises, TCS killin' it, and TWTR caves.
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Let’s go ahead and get started:
Market summary: 📊
After a couple good sessions, Indian markets slammed the brakes hard on Thursday. Wall Street had a pretty boring day as well for no apparent reason.
US:
S&P 500 - down 0.86%
Nasdaq - down 0.60%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.96%
Sensex - down 0.92%
What’s brewing hot ?☕
✅ COVID’lympics — Japan declared a state of emergency amidst rising wave of new COVID infections, and will now conduct the Olympics starting July 23rd without spectators. Fans are livid and the country is already tens of billions in the hole after multiple reschedulings, refunds, and sanitization expenses keep extending the bill. Meanwhile, global media companies who sold multi-million dollar ad-spots hoping fans will draw serious eyeballs are eyeing big losses. Total shitshow!
✅ French being themselves — Cairn Energy sought an approval from a French court to force liquidate and sell off assets of the Indian state, on French soil. 20 GOI owned houses and residential properties around Central Paris, used for diplomatic missions and overstays, are on the hook. Shit suddenly got real over here, but it's hard to believe these theatrics are anything more than mere intimidation tactics. GOI so far has been mum.
Aaaeeyyooo this SaaS party LIT yo 🥳
What happened — a joint report by SAAS Bhoomi and McKinsey cites the local SaaS market is capable of generating $1 trillion in market value, employing 500K+ skilled labor by 2030, offering India’s fledging SaaS market its staunchest vote of confidence.
The report estimates about $40 to $50 billion in revenues by 2030, with India owning a respectable 4-5% of the global cloud software market. Here’s a link for the SaaS-nerds out here.
Some notes on how things stand today:
Currently we have ~1000 companies, 10 unicorns, hiring 40K people
150+ companies with >$1M in revs
Indian SaaS making ~$2.6 billion in annual revenue, with ~30% growth
With some of the world’s sexiest category leading SaaS businesses popping up here (BrowserStack, Zenoti, Postman, MindTickle, Druva, Innovaccer) India’s ongoing transition from an IT services market to a product-based software market has so far been excellent!
Some realism? — annually, global companies spend $4 trillion on IT. SaaS companies servicing it today are worth about $2 trillion. Trillion for India, in 10 years, isn’t unimaginable.
Big picture — shift of IT from old school systems to the cloud is a gigantic opportunity to build wealth for everyone. List those goddamn SaaS IPOs locally and share the pot, pls!
What’s poppin’ on Venture Avenue? 💰
Tiger is bacc — with a $144 million check into the Series D round of social commerce platform Dealshare, at a $455 million valuation.
Dealshare began as a Whatsapp-based ecommerce store, then pivoting to a “shop with friends and save money” social shopping website, to finally now a full-blown marketplace for everyday essentials, with major presence in Tier 2-3 cities.
Services about 3 million customers, generating 20 million+ orders, and fresh funds will go to chase a billion dollars in GMV for 2021.
Turning heads to another Blockbuster raise, ☝️
Shiprocket, an e-commerce fulfillment platform, raised $41.3 million for its Series D, from PayPal, InfoEdge and a few other angel investors.
Shiprocket offers a managed shipping and fulfillment solution — working with independent D2C brands to make sure deliveries, returns, and everything logistics gets sorted for a tiny fee. Processes over 5 million monthly shipments, and is apparently on path to break $100 million in ARR in 2021.
Big picture — e-commerce unit economics may be horrible in India today, but the underlying infra is sure making bank, and investors won’t stop chasing it!
Plenty of HOT names going public 🔥
Besides Zomato, Duolingo, TransferWise, there’s a whole bunch of other MAJORLY hyped startups coming of age that you should know about.
Move along FB, Snap, the social network for millennial daddies and mommies, Nextdoor — a geo-location based platform connecting you with people who live in your neighborhood will hit a SPAC deal valuing the business at $4.3 billion. 30% of US Households use it — to plan weekend cookouts, and figure out who’s dog it is that barks all night, which makes $$ through ads, with $123 million in sales last year. Still horribly unprofitable though.
Then, its self-driving startup Argo AI, looking to raise a war chest to keep funding the ever-prolonging and expensive autonomous driving quest, seeking a valuation of $7 billion. Argo is backed by Ford, and is the old-school giant’s only and best shot at taking on disruptive competition.
And oh BTW, one we missed from 2 weeks ago, but you should know about — Doximity, a Linkedin for Physicians, had a RECORD open, with stock doubling through the gates! The company connects physicians with each other for subject matter discussions, and has leveraged its wide distribution to roll out “productivity” tools — including a telehealth product. Here’s financials:
Closing out — TCS blasts an impressive quarter 🙌
TCS kicked off this quarter's earnings season on Dalal Street — and unsurprisingly the IT giant put up a great show.
Quick numbers:
Revenues jumped a massive 18.5% YoY to ₹45K crore+
Profits jumped 28.5% YoY to ₹9K crores
It's kinda a bummer the company missed analysts' projections on both profits and revenue, which soured mood a bit, but operating in the twisted operating conditions of April to June, it's all forgivable.
Big picture — growth in revenues and profits shows businesses have trumped COVID to come out stronger. Dirt cheap valuation, a looming shift to cloud, awesome margins… I mean…
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
👻 It’s happenin - Visa working with over 50 crypto startups to allow end users to spend their assets via Visa’s card network. Quite consequential.
🐦 About time - Twitter caved and finally appointed an interim compliance officer to comply with GOI’s new IT rules. Was it worth it?
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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