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Market summary: 📊
Indian investors took a momentary pause yesterday, digesting straight gains made over past couple of days. US had a flat day, absent any major headlines.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.018%
Nasdaq - up 0.058%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.073%
Sensex - down 0.10%
Shot of espresso ☕
✅ Fastly takes a dump—failure in CDN service provider Fastly led to a damning global service outage last night, with services like Reddit, CNN, Bloomberg, Twitch, NYT, all taken down for more than a couple hours. Fastly, which basically ensures “heavy media” files are stored closer to where majority of users are located, was actually one of the hottest stocks worldwide in 2020, but since then has been reduced down to a joke after management’s repeated debacles. However, this is a new low.
✅ Frenchmen angry—France President Emmanuel Macron was quite embarrassingly landed a tight slap while greeting a crowd of citizens... like quite literally. No excuses for unruly behavior, but poor economic conditions combined with early COVID mismanagement and extended lockdowns have killed the French economy, which is making citizens quite restless.
Venture street is buzzing, once again 💰
First up, cloud software vendor Zenoti raised a solid $80 million from PE giant TPG, revising its valuation to $1.5 billion.
Zenoti sells a SaaS suite that helps beauty and wellness centers run daily operations—basically simplifying digital appointments, bookings, customer support, and payments, along with building a simple online storefront. Zenoti has grown to serve nearly 12K businesses across 50 countries, making 60% of its revenues mostly in North America.
Big picture—the “shopify-for-X'' model has been gaining tremendous traction for niche verticals whose needs for far long have been ignored by full service and expensive software services. For example, the global spa market alone is a $150 billion gambit, with plenty room for disruption.
Then turning heads to Softbank’s feast, 🎉
Whatfix, an integrable digital assistant platform, raised $90 million from Softbank’s Vision Fund 2.
Whatfix lets other large software vendors build onboarding workflows and guides into their products. For example, when new users are on boarded on complex software products, many times they are lost on how to make the best of the tool, which leads to lost productivity and high training costs. Whatfix’s bots take users through step-by-step guides and accelerates adoption.
The tool has seen solid traction on the back of the broad boom in the cloud software market, with revenues growing 100%+ for the past couple quarters.
Franklin Templeton roasted by SEBI 🙄
What happened—mutual fund issuer Franklin Templeton was asked to refund more than ₹500 crores to customers by SEBI for abruptly shutting down a few mutual fund schemes, without giving customers a notice.
The problem—last year, Franklin suddenly withdrew 6 debt schemes from the market after the investing company got scared of potential defaults and illiquidity from COVID induced economic fall out.
This led to a flurry of withdrawals and chaos in the company’s other schemes. Investors lost money, court cases followed, and the regulators had to step in, who eventually ruled that FT had failed to provide investors exit options, while intentionally piling onto “heavy risk” asset classes without restraint.
SEBI’s tone was pretty damning, and FT has also been barred from issuing any more debt mutual funds for 2 years. Besides, a former director and his wife were personally fined ₹7 crores. Message loud and clear for the rest of the legacy money management industry.
Amazon is “bridging” your neighborhood Wifi network 📶
What happened—Amazon’s super ambitious neighborhood network project called Sidewalk goes live today, which will build localized mesh networks to offer Wifi-enabled internet connections out on the streets.
How it works—imagine a residential neighborhood with every house running its own Wifi with an Amazon Echo or some Alexa equipped device connected to it. Amazon will work with these Echo devices to “pool” together your internet connection, combine it with your neighbors’ and create a mesh-network that is capable of offering internet connectivity out on the streets to anyone.
Amazon has ambitiously kept the project “opt-in” by default, meaning unless you tell your Echo you’re out, you’re going to be in. Privacy is a big issue here, with local networks open to new risks of hacking, but team BOZOS promises three-layered encryption that’s impossible to break.
Big picture—with drone deliveries and road side bots being the future of local infra, Amazon is securing itself a networking infrastructure layer that other “delivery” partners as well as last-mile service providers inevitably depend upon, if at all, to fill connectivity gaps. It’s ambitious, and even borderline bat shit crazy!
Closing out—fintech going mainstream 👋
Nubank, one of the world’s LARGEST neobanking startups, just raised $500 million from Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, as part of its $700 million fundraise.
The deal’s significant on so many levels. Nubank, a $60 billion behemoth, is THE most successful neobank in the world, making it a case study for other challengers worldwide—40 million+ users, $600 million+ in revenues, growing like a weed after 2020’s boost to all things fintech.
Berkshire otherwise typically invests in certified boring cash-cow slam dunks, and their interest here is indicative of changing tides, which should make legacy financial services players really worried.
Big picture—on very few occasions has old-man Buffett looked at high flying tech as a credible investment option. Apple in 2018, which made him 80%+. Snowflake in 2020, which again popped 100%+ on IPO. And now Nubank. Staunchest vote the neobanking ecosystem has gotten from the mainstream markets by far.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🖖 Twitter bends - Twitter India finally realized it ain’t worth the hassle, and complied with GOI’s requests of blocking a few accounts. Too many problems for management to deal with rn.
🤝Sealing the deal - Tata will invest $75 million into CureFit, instead of acquiring the whole business, but founder Mukesh Bansal is joining Tata Digital as president... weird arrangement.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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