We got a badass 😎
Reliance picks another one, Dispo makes waves, and Apple back with more.
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Let’s go ahead and get started:
Market summary: 📊
Investors seem to be warming up to the red days more than the greens, taking comfort in reining in expectations. Both India and the US markets saw mild withdrawals.
US:
S&P 500 - down 0.44%
Nasdaq 100 - down 0.45%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.59%
Sensex - down 0.73%
What’s hot bruh ☕
✅ Kitty out the bag—Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty, aka DeepFuckingValue, the reddit day-trader and leader of the retail attack on Wall Street testified before regulators yesterday. Keith was asked why he shouldn’t be held responsible for stoking market chaos, and his stand was clear as water—he saw true potential in GameStop, and took considerable personal risk in going all in with the stock, and then shared his analysis widely to get people to pick holes in it, if any. Kitty also makes an interesting argument pushing for “social investing” as a critical lever to leveling the playing field for retail investors, who are up against hedge fund managers and wall street bois who have ample freedom to discuss ideas and share their research and fix problems. Why should the retail investor not do the same? Here’s Keith’s statement if you’re into it.
✅ Apple loved the taste of benefits—after securing incentives for iPhone manufacturing in the government’s $3.5 billion production linked incentive scheme, Apple is now back lobbying for more doles to kick off iPad manufacturing in India. As part of GOI’s latest package, some $965 million in cashback to device makers who will then export those devices aboard are on the table. The folks at Cupertino were already quite keen on slowly shifting production from China to Vietnam and India, and now if they’re gonna get paid to do so, why not?
Google sees big money in edtech SaaS 💰
Google’s showing quite a lot of aggression in supplying the education space with best of breed software. In a rebranded offering called the Google Workspace for Education, the company is rolling out a fresh suite of SaaS tools that combines Google Meet, Google Classroom with 50+ new features to launch a thorough learning management system.
The service will be designed for both educators and students, and will be a core part of Google Cloud’s push in capturing maximum avenues of growth in education. As of today, Google Classroom is used by over 150 million students, teachers and school admins, up from just 40 million last year.
Why do we care—global EdTech IT spending is estimated to cross over $200 billion by 2025, growing 15%+ rates—a gargantuan opportunity which will be one of the new frontiers of competition for big cloud vendors (Google, Azure, AWS).
If Google plays it right, it could be a big leg up in competing against the other two leaders, keeping that growth wheel spinning, as investors would like to see it.
Add some milk to the basket 🛒
This is quickly turning out to be the week of pending acquisitions—after Tata’s moves on Big Basket, and a bunch of edtech deals through, RIL’s JioMart is finally closing on MilkBasket, offering between $40-43 million for the hyperlocal delivery service, to beef up its arsenal in digital commerce.
MilkBasket, which runs a subscription based service for everyday dairy and grocery items, operating mostly in the northern region of India, saw its revenues jump nearly 4x to ₹322 crores last year, as the pandemic and lockdowns accelerated demand. Some 130K customers are regulars on the service.
Apparently talks with Reliance were on for over a year, then an impatient investor jumped ship and sold its stake without the board’s permission, kicking off a painful legal battle. That justifies what may seem like a steal of price at $40 million to many.
MB co-founders will exit, while the CEO and the rest of the team head on over to camp Ambani.
While we’re talking about big tech ventures, 💻
Zomentum, a platform that simplifies software reselling, raised a promising $13 million Series A round led by Elevation Cap, Accel and a bunch of other investors.
The startup basically sells a platform that helps IT resellers (or managed service providers) manage their entire sales process of offering custom IT services to restaurants, merchants, and other small businesses.
Growth so far has been phenomenal with revenues expanding at 30%+ monthly rates, and IT transaction volumes of over $100 million disbursed over the platform. Fresh funds will go to customer base expansion, and to fuel product development.
Who’s the real daddy here? 🛑
Facebook has banned all news on its platform in Australia, sticking it hard to the local government, over a proposed law that requires social platforms to pay news companies for their content.
Some context—Australian regulators passed a bill that demanded news publishers get paid by FB and Google, because the tech companies were using news content to drive engagement on their platforms. Now it would make ample sense if the law demanded the tech companies pay up for any kind of “reprocessing” of the content, or building dedicated use cases like a newsfeed around it. But in a bizarre interpretation of rules, the government thinks FB owes news companies money even if a random user shares a link to a news article on their platform.
Now Google after threatening Australia that it’ll exit the country eventually softened up a bit, and had already begun cutting deals with news media companies. FB on the other hand flat out refused to comply.
What now—for starters, instead of complying with the order, Facebook has blocked all news coming from Australian publishers on its platform, including locking out Australian news channels and publishers from accessing or sharing content from their own FB pages.
Moreover, random users will not be able to share any link from a recognized Australian news publisher either. If the ban stays for a while, the news companies are likely to lose hundreds of millions in views and engagement.
Now the ball is in the court of the Australian government to respond. Slap Facebook with a fine? Make an exception? Or scrap the plan altogether? It's gonna be embarrassing either way.
Closing out—big money coming for Dispo 📸
Just yesterday, we wrote about how Dispo is replacing Clubhouse as the newest “request-access” fad in town.
Turns out the FOMO is spreading far beyond just regular users—and founder David Dobrik is actively juggling calls from VC giants Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Benchmark, all interested in leading Dispo’s Series A, with a rumoured valuation of over $100 million!
This is absolutely revolutionary on so many levels—the founder of the company is a YouTube entertainer with a cult-like following, with no tech skills whatsoever, attracting big money from mainstream investors for a consumer technology product he’s single handedly making popular by leveraging his personal distribution. If this isn’t the “creator and influencer economy has arrived” moment, then we don’t know what is.
Tweet of day 🐦
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
👏 Grofers refueling - just a week after rumors of a Softbank led SPAC IPO broke out, delivery startup Grofers is raising a $70-100 million in their Series F round from Euler Fund. This would be the Chicago based Euler’s second ever check in India.
💉Vacc campaigns showing progress - India has successfully managed to vaccinate 3.42 lakh health workers post second dosage, and the pace of vaccinations is gradually picking up. But only 43% of the 800K or so people who had received the first shot ever showed up to get the second dose, which is throwing authorities fresh logistical challenges to balance for.
Aight, that’s it for today. Ya’lls have an easy day…
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