Tiger reloads its cannon 🐯
Big tech earnings, Venture deals, and Robinhood is over.
Market summary: 📊
India pulled back a notch after a great start to the week. US had a mixed day, with tech stocks adding on strong earnings, while rest of the market pulled back.
US:
S&P 500 - down 0.51%
Nasdaq - up 0.25%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.31%
Sensex - down 0.34%
What’s brewing hot ☕
✅ Ouch Maruti — it’s festive season, buyers are lining up outside showrooms, but chip shortages are ruining the party for Indian automakers. Maruti’s profits dropped nearly 65% for the last 3 months, further weighed down by rising input costs of commodities like Steel and Aluminum. If you remember, Maruti was forced to run some plants in August and September at low capacity, cutting back on shifts — that’s catching up to the company now. Not exactly the recovery investors were hoping for!
✅ Plenty of demand — PayTM is sensing strong demand for its bid, and will revise its IPO valuation to about $20B — in all raising as much as $2.5B from the markets. Retail subscriptions will be open from Nov 8-11. Meanwhile, the company’s insurance arm just raised ~$120M from global insurance firm, Swiss Re, in exchange for a 23.5% stake.
Tiger loads up its cannon with more firepower 🔫
What happened — investing powerhouse Tiger Global raised a $8.8 billion mega-fund this week, it’s largest ever — to focus solely on early stage investments in China, India, and the US.
Tiger's superfast deal-making has attracted a lot of attention, and criticism too, for firing up the broad market, propping up valuation, and forcing other investors to play catch up. Founders picking checks certainly aren’t complaining though.
To put things into perspective, the firm had raised a $6.6B pot barely 6 months ago, and has mostly committed it all.
Tiger also loves India — the firm has deployed money across 38 companies, in 45+ deals in India, with Flipkart, Zomato, ShareChat, Unacademy getting some of the biggest checks invested here.
What next — mo money, mo fun! Serious VCs playing at the late/growth stage gonna have to amp up a notch, or get muscled out of deals.
Big tech is printing cash 🔥
Some nuggets from earnings of the valley kings 🤙
Alphabet is unstoppable. $2T company already, yet Google manages to report revenue growth of 41% YoY. YouTube is now ~$30 billion annual business, on its way to mint more $$ than even Netflix. Google Cloud, despite getting a late start against AWS, is pulling in $20 billion a year. Pichai took his sweet time (almost 7 years now) to pull the ship together, but eventually delivered big!
Satya never misses. All software is moving to the cloud, and Microsoft is leading a band of old school, laggard enterprises and their outdated IT divisions, to the promised land. Microsoft’s total revenues grew 23% YoY, bringing in the company’s 15th or so straight quarter of double digit growth.
Lastly, Twitter is buzzing too. Folks expected the company to be hurt by Apple’s ad-policy changes, but plenty of knowledge workers use Twitter on the PC in the office (we see ya) so the damage was contained. 211 million people use the platform everyday — which helps revenues grow a nice 37% YoY to $1.3B.
Couple of quick raises in Venture Town 🔥
Agri-tech platform DeHaat raised a $115 million series D round from Sofina, Lightrock, and a few others — in the largest fundraise in the agri-tech space for India ever.
DeHaat runs an full-stack agriculture services platform helping farmers with seed selection, connections with wholesale buyers, bankers for loans, last mile delivery solutions, the entire menu — in anticipation of digitizing and bringing efficiency in the widely fragmented, broken farming value chain.
650K+ farmers are currently using the service.
Then, onto a deal in Fintech, 👇
Cross-border neo-banking platform Zolve, which offers Indian expats bank accounts and a credit card, raised $40 million from DST Global, Tiger, and others — at a $210 million valuation.
Since its launch in Feb, Zolve has grown to 70,000+ customers, working with regional banks in Aus, US, and the UK, scaling up to $2M in deposits.
Closing Out — Robinhood out of fizz 🤷♀️
Stimulus checks are drying up, the meme stonk frenzy is fading — and all of which is most visible in Robinhood’s declining growth numbers. Revenues for the last 3 months dropped to $267M, from over $500M barely a quarter ago.
Robinhood’s crypto business just vanished — with $51M on crypto sales last quarter, vs. $230M+ for the quarter before that. Users dropped too — down 10% from last quarter to 19 million monthly active traders. Markets obviously hammered $HOOD stock.
Big picture — in the long run, the casino always wins. Dropping engagement and lower average-revenue-per-user could be a sign of more trouble in the store, and likely the beginning of the end of the retail-led stock-market frenzy?
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
👑 King of China - Zhong Shanshan, the owner of bottled water company, Nongfu Spring, dethrones Jack Ma to become the richest Chinese. We’d done a thread on the man a while ago.
💰 Put them bids - Nykaa will start accepting bids for its IPO starting today. Gonna be a fist fight for some allocation!
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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