“Screw Amazon” - HBO 💔

EV keeps heating up, and stuff from the week before.

Sep 18, 2021

Hi 👋, Tanvi here.

Filter Coffee hits your inbox every morning with notable tech and business news scoops to jump start your day.

Let’s go ahead and get started:

Market summary: 📊

India turned around at the end of the week after leading us pretty close to 60K on the Sensex. US ended Friday in the red too, with growth tech given a serious beating.

US:

S&P 500 - down 0.91%
Nasdaq - down 1.18%

India:

Nifty 50 - down 0.25%
Sensex - down 0.21%

What’s brewing hot? ☕

✅ 2 good months — Indian startups managed to raise nearly $10.8 billions during July and August this year, across a record 256 deals, which tops all money raised in the 4 months before that. Plenty of liquidity after some blockbuster IPOs, along with China's attack on its edtech companies pushing global investors to look at India were 2 major catalysts.

✅ EV demand is solid — Ola saw booking volumes for its EV bike spike to almost 5.5 lakh units on day 2, with total order volume doubling to ₹1,100 crores on Day 2. If anything, the data indicates strong market interest from consumers despite looming concerns over charging infra and other limitations, and the validation should further catalyze more $$ into EV ventures.

HBO is dumping Amazon 💔

What happened — HBO is terminating a service that allowed people to easily subscribe to its streaming platform via a simple click in the Amazon Prime app.

In the process, HBO is dumping nearly 5 million subscribers, a gut-punch in the cut-throat competitive streaming business. But… HBO’s willingness to take the loss should tell you just how pissed and frustrated old media has become with their over reliance on tech platforms for distribution.

What next — HBO is keen on pushing its own HBO Max streaming service instead, which slowly climbed up to about 70 million subscribers as of today. Besides, HBO has quite a content lineup ready coming up, including Succession (we highly recommend fyi), Dune, Scenes from a Marriage, and others, which HBO is counting on to drive growth in the absence of these partnerships..

Quick look down Venture Street 💸

Bright Money, a US and BLR based fintech platform, raised $31 million from Sequoia, Falcon Edge and a bunch of big name angel investors.

Bright Money sells a trademarked algorithm called MoneyScience, that builds custom financial plans for end users, helping with elimination of debt, building a good credit score, slowly pushing consumers towards savings. The startup operated under stealth mode for the last 2 years, building a base of 30K users.

Yet another example of building from India, for the world.

Meanwhile, Pine Labs got pre-IPO honey 🍯

After bringing on Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs as advisors to its looming IPO, the folks at Pine Labs picked up $100 million from US based fund manager Invesco, as western giants can’t keep their hands off of the South Asian payments market.

Barely a month ago Pine had raised $600 million in a round co-led by BlackRock and Fidelity.

Aight, that’s it for today, here’s a quick look at what went down this week…

🙌 IPO season resumes — Domestic consumer electronics brand boAt joined the IPO roster, looking to raise $500 million from the public, at a $1.4 billion valuation. Last year, boAt became the 5th largest wearable brand worldwide, sitting right next to Fitbit, churning over ₹700 crores in revenues at 300%+ growth rates. And with a 46% market share in India, a profitable business model, shouldn’t be too hard convincing the street.

🤷🏽‍♀️China, oh China — China’s next antitrust agenda item is to split up Ant Group's AliPay, China’s no.1 payment superapp that has over 1 billion users. Ant’s lending businesses will be broken into a separate entity from the rest of the fintech operation. On top of that, the Chinese state demands 24x7 access to “credit data” powering all Alipay’s lending decisions in some old-school government spying shit.

🥱Zee's inside drama — 2 major shareholders at Zee Entertainment who own 17.88% of the company led a coup to replace Zee’s CEO Punit Goenka, and a few other directors over mismanagement concerns, declining revenues, and lagging moves into streaming. Zee’s stock promptly jumped 40% on the news, signaling market’s approval, and apparently folks from Bank of America to Big Bull Rakesh JhunJhunwala became buyers.

🔥 Canva is killing it — Canva raised another $200 million, doubling valuation to $40 billion in under 6 months, making it one of Australia’s most valued companies. Millions of creators, small merchants, agencies, and makers count on Canva routinely for all design needs, which is expected to help double revenues to $1B by the end of 2021. What's even cooler is that the founders are pledging to give away a considerable portion of their $16B+ fortune.

🦄 India, land of the unicorn — We got two new unicorns over the week. First, fantasy gaming platform Mobile Premier League raised an undisclosed amount at a $2.3B valuation from Legatum. MPL has over 80 million monthly users, with 10 million spending $ on games on the platform. Then, Apna.co, the Linkedin for blue collar workers, closed a $100 million Series C round from Tiger Global, Sequoia and a few others, doubling valuation to $1.1 billion, making it the nation's fastest unicorn to date.

🚘 Future is EV — GOI passed a ₹26,000 crore production linked incentive scheme for the auto sector in India, offering automobile makers and component manufacturers, some tax incentives, subsidies and other doles if they invest in building facilities making parts for EVs. The scheme is expected to drive investments of upto ₹45K crores, and downstream production of over ₹2.3 lakh crore in goods, while creating 7.5 lakh new jobs.

🙄C’mon Nate — some folks on Twitter discovered that Head of Product of Opensea, the popular marketplace to purchase NFTs, was involved in insider trading of NFTs. Nate would buy NFT art he knew would be listed on Opensea using his own secret Ethereum wallet, and then would relist them for higher bids, pumping prices up and keeping the $$ for himself. Opensea apologized, fired Nate, and now hired a Head of Compliance. Sucks ass.

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