Tiger’s in love
FB’s audacity, Tesla getting ready, and TWTR investors happy.
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Market summary: 📊
Turning out to be a good week so far in India, with 4 straight green days. US had a positive day too, with investors loading up on “on sale” tech stocks.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.42%
Nasdaq 100 - up 1.04%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.37%
Sensex - up 0.17%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
✅ Fortune made on future—26 year old Austin Russell, the founder of LiDAR maker Luminar, is the youngest self-made billionaire to enter the Forbes list this year, making the rest of us feel lazy. Austin had kicked off his company at 17, got Peter Theil to back him through the Thiel Fellowship, and then SPAC’ed the business last year in a blockbuster $10 billion+ deal. Luminar basically makes laser-emitting radars that go into self-driving cars and help build the vehicle a real-time 3D map of its surroundings.
✅ Ain’t our problem bruh—as if the data breach wasn’t enough to annoy users, Facebook is now reluctant to let users know if they’re affected by the incident. The dataset apparently holds a lot of information that you might not want out in the open, including birthdays, locations, full names, and phone numbers. Facebook’s reasons? The breach has been fixed, and nothing can be done anymore about a free floating file on the internet.
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Tiger can’t control its love ❤️️
India’s unicorn minting spree going strong for yet another day.
Latest to join the party is Sharechat, invited to the club by veteran host Tiger Global with a $502 million check that propels the company’s valuation to 2.1 billion. Existing backers Twitter and LightSpeed pitched in too, while Snapchat made a debut on the cap table.
Sharechat’s bid had actually been cooking for a while now, ever since Google took deep interest in the business back in December 2020.
Regardless, the platform single handedly lit up the regional social and vernacular content space for India. In less than 6 years, they managed to scale to 160 million users across 15 languages, extending popularity to adjacent services and formats including short video app Moj, which itself reports 120 million+ users. Twitter and Snapchat seem particularly interested in that.
Fresh funds will go to keep competition at bay, improve content on Moj, as well as double down on Sharechat’s fantasy sports service called Jeet, which is riding hot on the MPL driven craze. Talk about diversification!
What matters: India’s internet population is expected to top 900 million by 2025. Demand for regional offerings will likely explode—and the leading platforms will be sitting in an ideal vantage point to offer more services around streaming, entertainment, and even commerce or payments.
Meanwhile in software-land,
Messaging based communications platform Gupshup raised $100 million in its Series F again from Tiger Global at a $1.4 billion valuation.
Gupshup basically sells an enterprise grade messaging platform that lets companies communicate with customers, users, and employees en masse, building out support, marketing, and other commerce applications on top of it. The business has been around for 15 years, today processing 6B+ messages each month for 100,000 clients.
With that, India 2021 unicorn counter = +10
Getting things in place 👀
Tesla is apparently already busy scouting for showrooms as well as hiring key executives to lobby the government for its impending entry into the Indian market.
The business had registered an India entity in Jan, and is expected to start selling its low-cost Model 3 EVs in India as early as mid-2021. Albeit, the vehicles will be imported and hence crazy expensive given the heavy duties we run on automobiles shipped in.
However, once demand has been tested, and few thousands cars delivered and monitored, the business should have sufficient beachhead data to break ground on its plans of building out that mega production facility in BLR.
Bottomline: Tesla won’t have it as easy as in India as it has had elsewhere globally. Sure India has an affinity for luxury brands, but a robust emerging local EV market coupled with Indian consumers’ priority for “value for money” could be a tough nut to crack for Musk.
Consumer businesses show positive signs 👏
While venture street is busy revising valuations, Dalal street is busy unpacking actual revenues and profits, trying to get a pulse on how the average consumer is faring, and how that bag of stonks will hold up over the next few months.
Godrej’s Consumer business had some clues. The company that sells everything from soaps to hair oils to mosquito repellants, told investors it expects revenues in the domestic as well as international markets to show strong rebound and grow at 30%+ in the latest quarter, confirming expectations of a healthy recovery in broad consumer sentiment.
Godrej also says consumers are responding better than expected to recent price increases, which may be a function of pent up savings amidst lockdowns.
Meanwhile, just yesterday we had Marico guide for a similar boom in revenues but weaker margins, asking investors to reign in hopes for profits for the next quarter as well because unstabilized supply chains and high cost of raw materials was still causing a nuisance.
Why care about this: earnings season is almost here and guidance like this helps investors balance expectations going in. Companies with better than expected numbers will be rewarded, while the laggards will be taken to the woodshed.
Closing out—Clubhouse is $4 bills because… Jack Dorsey 🐦
Two certified ways to quadruple your valuation in less than 3 months—you’ve discovered keys to a gazillion Bitcoins lying around on one of your basement computers… or, a maverick billionaire and his hot-stuff company calls you up with a $4 billion check!
You probably heard it already. Clubhouse apparently got a call from Twitter to check if the business would be willing to sell for 4x their last valuation round. The deal never materialized—our bet is a16z wasn’t too keen on walking away with just a 4x outcome for their ballsy bet, but then Twitter promptly pushed out its clone of Spaces and the talks fizzled out.
Markets got no clue how to react to the news. On one hand, people seem relieved with Dorsey and Twitter’s newfound aggression that has given the company renewed direction, and a sexy pipeline of features being built for the creator economy. On the other hand, splurging $4 billion for a rookie audio platform, all because it ran an invite only model so well? Loyal investors of Twitter were clearly not amused.
Far as Clubhouse goes, the pressure to deliver amidst all this noise has never been higher.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
💪 Edtech takeover- Having filled its coffers with big raises, Byju’s is now planning to expand into international markets in the second half of next month, with The US, UK, Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia lined up as primary targets.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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