Smallcase 🤝 Amazon
HOOD’s earnings, Walmart’s ad biz, and new platforms.
Hi 👋, Tanvi here.
Filter Coffee hits your inbox every morning with notable tech and business news scoops to jump start your day.
Sign up below for free. 👇
Let’s go ahead and get started:
Market summary: 📊
India hit the brakes after a couple straight days of gains. US markets are running like a headless chicken, taking a beating today over concerns of new cases.
US:
S&P 500 - down 1.07%
Nasdaq - down 0.97%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.28%
Sensex - down 0.29%
Smallcase brings home a big one 🤝
Thematic investing platform Smallcase, which lets folks invest in baskets of stocks based on simple ideas, raised a $40 million Series C from Amazon, as well as Faering Capital and other existing investors.
Amazon’s play into investment management raised more than a few eyebrows, but we’re guessing it has something to do with Smallcase’s audacious foray into becoming an infrastructure service provider for investment advisors and other financial services platforms, building an AWS-like service for Indian investing services.
Regardless, the stats look brilliant — with 3 million+ end customers, buying stonks of over $2.5 billion yearly!
Meanwhile, a blockbuster cloud raise, ☝️
Developer tools player Postman raised a mammoth $225 million at a $5.6 billion valuation, a 180% bump in 12 months which makes the startup India’s most valued cloud software company.
Postman basically sells a testing platform that helps developers test out APIs (basically end-nodes that open up to third parties), to make sure things work as planned, and unnecessary data isn’t shared.
Platform is used by 17M+ developers, and 500K+ enterprises.
Couple things to munch on 🧐
✅ Two old dudes fighting — Ford and GM are lost in a legal tussle over who gets to use the word “Cruise”. 🙄 Ford recently released a smart-driving system with some autonomous features and called it BlueCruise, but GM which owns the self-driving startup Cruise ($25 billion baby inside of GM) says consumers won’t be able to tell the difference. Both are running to the courts, while a shift to EVs is threatening their cushy fortresses.
✅ Facebook coming out clean — there’s no chance a tech company would open its belly unless its accused of the worst. To prove that it's not a political hellhole, Facebook gave a rare glimpse into its most-widely viewed and shared content, from funny cat videos to moving gofundmes. Stats show “viral” content is under 1% of what’s shared, and most of the top links are either YouTube vids, or scammers with their Amazon referrals lol
SPONSORED
Breaking borders of traditional investing, literally 💪
Global diversification can be a great addition to any portfolio, but until now has mostly been reserved for the wealthy.
Stockal is out to change that — the platform helps thousands of folks in India, as well as Indians in the Middle East and SouthEast Asia, break boundaries, “globalize” their savings, and seamlessly invest in global markets.
Folks can open and operate an investing account without onerous charges, invest in global stocks, ETFs, as well as low-cost thematic baskets.
Walmart mashing new with old 🛒
Walmart, the king of offline commerce, brought home $141 billion revenue for last quarter, up 5% YoY. These numbers are usually a good proxy for consumer health (5% bump in US revenues) — a sign that wallets are heavy even as doles and stimulus dry up.
But, all of that was overshadowed by Walmart’s emerging businesses showing great promise:
Ecommerce revenues grew 6% YoY
Advertising sales nearly doubled — Walmart shows ads on its online portal and on its mobile app
Ads are big money — literally every marketplace is starting to find gold in advertising revenues. Amazon already makes tens of billions showing ads to you, MORE than Twitter or Snapchat. Recently grocery shopping platform Instacart was seen to bring in $1B+ in ad revenues.
So what — these successes offer some clues into the potential monetization levers at Indian marketplaces including Zomato, Swiggy, and the others scrambling to profitability.
Working out, the new entertainment? 💪
What happened — Peloton shook hands with Disney and Spotify over a unique partnership — where Disney’s hit songs, streaming on Spotify, will be directly brought to Peloton’s workout bikes.
Peloton will create a bunch of workout classes solely based on the playlist Disney Hits, across running, yoga, biking, strength training.
Why care — traditionalists look at Peloton as an expensive stationary workout bike with an iPad. Bulls however think the company is scaling a “new hardware platform” inside people’s homes (like the gaming console, smartphone, or a laptop) capable of adding more services over time.
Closing out — $HOOD suits up for a meeting on the street 🕴️
Robinhood had to report its first quarterly earnings as a public company today — and it turned out to be a flop show.
Revenues grew nicely, doubling from last year to $560 million, but Vlad and the team tried to pull in expectations, saying they expect trading volumes to drop in 3Q if a market winter comes, and investors nailed the stock 7%.
Other facts — RH has 22 million users, up 100% YoY, and they earned $230M in crypto revenue.
Meanwhile, semiconductor king Nvidia rode the $CRYPTO boom to grow its revenues by 68% YoY. For those unaware, Nvidia’s GPUs are excellent at numerical calculations which make them suitable to solve computational problems that mine Ethereum and a bunch of other coins.
Ballsiest HODLERS had their legs in both ships.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
😹 BNPL, whatever it takes - PayPal apparently won’t charge users any fees even if they missed BNPL payments. Why? Too much competition. Not risking it.
🎯 Keeps getting ugly - T-Mobile says more than 40 million of its users have been affected by the data breach. Ouch!
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
You can forward this email or share FC on social media by clicking the button below. Thanks and Ciao! 😀