Smart glares 🕶️

Marketplaces are hot, Budget rally, and from the week before.

Feb 06, 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: 📊

Indian markets ended the week with 5 straight days of gains, after a promising budget bolstered investor confidence. US markets had a decent week too, with the reddit mania finally cooling off.

US:

S&P 500 - up 0.39%
Nasdaq 100 - up 0.32%

India:

Nifty 50 - up 0.19%
Sensex - up 0.23%

B2B marketplaces continue to appeal to investors 💰

Zetwerk, a B2B marketplace for manufactured parts, picked up a $120 million Series D check from Greenoaks Capital and Lightspeed Ventures, at a valuation of $600-$700 million, nearly 2.5x premium from their last raise.

Zertwerk’s model is kinda fascinating—they allow small and medium equipment manufacturers to get custom fabrication contracts from large industrial and manufacturing enterprises. Basically, want a complex part casted for a specific machine? Zetwerk will connect you with a small firm that will do a custom job for you. The end to end experience is tightly controlled.

And, progress so far looks quite promising. The platform supplies to over 15 countries, to 250+ big customers across 25 industries. Annual revenues stand at over ₹322 crores , with growth of nearly 20x last year, which even adjusting for COVID, is super impressive.

Key takeaway: India’s extremely fragmented manufacturing market needs all the innovation and technology disruption it can access. As we eye a massive bull run on the back of China’s geo-political problems and global mandate to diversify supply chains, the timing to build for this space couldn’t be any better.

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Apple Car is not the only new thing cooking 🕶️

After dangling the self-driving carrot over the past week, turns out Apple has yet another magic trick up its sleeve. The bois at camp Cupertino are secretly developing a wearable virtual & augmented reality headset, believed to be “the next big computing platform” that is likely to hit the shelves in a couple years with a price tag of around $3,000. Classic Apple!

Honestly, a lot more believable than the Apple Car noise. Condensing unimaginable sensing, processing, and software power in a sleek looking light-weight hardware device is Apple’s forte, and they could very quickly build a new cash cow here.

Moreover, as smartphones kinda mature, people are skeptical of Apple’s “differentiation” sort of waning over time, and a new hardware platform could fix all those issues.

Anyway, here’s what we know about the device so far:

Kinda looks like an Oculus, but hopefully will be much less daunting and transparent so you can see through it
Will incorporate a lot of features with Apple Watch-style custom headbands, HomePod’s mesh fabric etc.
Will be controllable using eye-tracking as well as hand-tracking
Will use Apple’s M1 processing chip

Anyway, let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. Considering the perfectionists they are, nothing hits the stores until it's 100% ready to blow customers away, so the 2022 deadline that’s being reported in the press will likely be stretched.

The UPI wildfires know no stopping 📱

India is just coming off of an EPIC holiday spending season that saw digital spending spike like never before. Ripples of that adoption continue unabated as shown by another month of record UPI transactions.

2.3 billion UPI transactions were initiated for Jan 2021—a 3% growth vs. December which was already a blowout month in itself BTW
₹4 lakh crores were processed on the channel
Compared to last year that’s a 76.5% surge in transactions and 100% in transaction value—just goes to show how COVID completely altered the game

Long way to go, but GOI definitely deserves a pat on the back for pioneering rails for this uniform infrastructure, and so do India’s fintech ventures that relentlessly innovated to bring the mass distribution and consumer buy-in.

Aight, that’s it for today, and a quick look at the hottest stuff this week…

😓 Crypto got a shocker—GOI made some chatter of introducing a crypto regulatory bill to build a framework to create a national official digital currency, and while at it, ban all private crypto currencies. Ramblings from a few politicians in the following days further added to the confusion. Without clarity of the matter, the nascent crypto ecosystem continues to be discouraged, and India could end up losing a generational advantage in how this tech transforms the world if we don’t take it seriously soon enough.

🛢️ GOI to settle Cairn with some oil fields—GOI ruled that Cairn owed them some $1.4 billion in back taxes for operating oil fields in India. Cairn refused obviously, so GOI went after their assets. Cairn quickly ran to an international arbitration court, who ruled in Cairn’s favor and asked India to return Cairn’s money immediately. Now in 2021—with a pandemic battered economy on our hands, and no cash to play around with, GOI is looking to give away an oilfield to Cairn Energy, as it's the only easy way to cut through this mess and move ahead.

☁️ Cloud-native analytics is HOT—Databricks raised a massive $1 billion Series G round led by Franklin Templeton, with AMZN, MSFT, and GOOGL pitching in. Post raise, the company’s valuation will be set at $28 billion—not a surprise considering high benchmarks set for the industry by blockbuster public market listings of companies like Snowflake. Databricks basically provides an end to end analytics studio for data scientists to assimilate data from multiple sources, clean it, conduct analysis, and make pretty charts. An IPO is looming.

🙌 Bezos steps aside—by the end of this year, Jeff Bezos, one of the shrewdest capitalists of our times, will be vacating his role as the CEO of Amazon, handing over the baton to to Andy Jassy, a 25-year Amazon veteran, who ran the AWS cloud business inside Amazon. And BTW, Amazon reported an outstanding December quarter. Revenues were up 44%, profits up 86%, and Amazon sold nearly $600 billion worth of stuff in 2020.

👏 Cash wouldn’t stop pouring in for Robinhood—Robinhood raised billions of dollars within the span of a few days. First, a $1 billion emergency cash to help stabilize its financials. Barely days after, another $2.4 billion in green cash is on its way to the company’s coffers to fix back office operations and keep the growth wheel moving. The two rounds were led by staunch supporter Ribbit Capital, with most major existing investors (Sequoia, Andressen etc.) piling on as well. Definitely a huge sign of confidence for the platform that’s mired in a brand killing controversy.

🥂 Uber gets into booze delivery—Uber will acquire Drizly, an alcoholic delivery startup in a cash & stock deal. Drizly ties up with local merchants to deliver booze for them and takes a tiny commission for facilitating a transaction. In less than 8 years and with just 85 employees, they’ve scaled to over 1,400 cities in the US, and are growing at 300%+ rates each year. Uber is basically trying to chase some profits while its ride hailing business stands paralyzed, while also trying to ensure its food delivery business (Uber Eats) doesn’t lose any more market share to DoorDash and others in the West.

🤖 Low-code had a moment—UiPath, a robotic process automation company, raised $750 million in its latest round at a massive $35 billion price tag, with all the big boys Alkeon, Coatue Altimeter, Dragoneer, Sequoia, Tiger Global pitching in. The 16 year old company basically helps enterprises streamline and automate tedious & repetitive functions through rule based process automation. Last year they made over $360 million in revenues, and the raise and an eventual IPO could bring much deserving attention to the low-code, RPA space.

👊 Google makes an admirable comeback—thanks to a robust digital advertising market recovery during the holiday quarter, Google made $57 billion in total revenues, up 23% YoY. YouTube was the star of the year, bringing in about $20 billion annual business, with growth for the Dec quarter peaking at an outstanding 46%. Google Cloud is gaining market share, slowly starting to move the needle, while Google’s “other bets” which include all its moonshot projects such as Autonomy, Healthcare AI, Banking were the only loss makers.

🎮 Gamestop’s crash landing—the redditors were too soon to call it a victory. With Robinhood and other major platforms halting and limiting buying of speculative stocks, the prices came down crashing and as of the end of the week Gamestop was down like 70% from its peak. WallStreetBets’s momentary focus on Silver also ended up being a dud. Rumors are, the hedge funds have breached the forums and are adding mixed commentary to the conversations to confuse investors. Irrespective, the retail investors are the ones holding the bag, once again.

😎 Budget knocks it out of the park—against high expectations, GOI delivered a promising budget that’s friendly to everyone from corporations to professionals to gig workers. Some key highlights included:

Senior citizens don't have to file their tax returns.
Startups get tax extension for another year
Gig workers are promised social security and a minimum wage.
₹20,000 crores to be infused in public banks to strengthen their balance sheet.
Stake worth nearly ₹1.75 lakh crores to be divested in public sector companies

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