Strategic acquisitions
The week of Oct 14-22 saw both funding and some significant strategic acquisitions involving unicorns. Largest was of course Cred raising 1882cr in Series E pushing its valuation even higher to 30750cr. Cred also made news with its plan to enter the wallet space with the acquisition of Hipbar. Pharmeasy raised 1536cr from Amansa Capital, Janus Henderson, OrbiMed, Steadview Capital among others, pushing its valuation to 42168cr. Two sizeable acquisitions this week were brand buys of (1) IPO bound Nykaa, which acquired Dot&Key for its skincare products that are toxic-chemicals free and (2) Reliance retail buying designer a Ritu Kumar brand that spans categories.
Cloudkitchen Curefoods acquired a bunch of food brands this week as well.
Fintech deals
In the fin-tech space, Credable raised a 225cr Series B round led by Plutus Wealth and Oaks. While Stripe made news this week with its 2 India investments including the acquisition of Recko that provides ai-based reconciliation of digital transactions and is already servicing several retail unicorns. As we wrote this summary, Stripe also confirmed participating in the $75 million funding round into ClearTax led by Kora capital.
There were clear digital actions this week starting with Good Glamm acquiring ScoopWhoop for its large hindi speaking demographic coverage with lifestyle video content. Lokal raised 90cr in Series A from Tencent and other to further its digital-marketing efforts in Tier-2/3 towns in India. Programmatic ad was the need and focus with which Wondrlab raised a 52cr round from Pi Ventures, Tanas Capital and others.
EV Deals
EV specific action happened in pockets, with Greaves fully acquiring the e-rickshaw company Bestway and EV financing startup RevFin bagging a 30cr debt+equity round led by Dheeraj Jain and others for going full throttle on the EV-auto loans segment in Tier 3 and Tier 4 towns.
Other deals
3D printing houses is not too distant into the future with more startups getting into the space. This week Tvasta raised 3cr from Shelter Venture fund and others to build the tech out as “Made in India”.
At the sub-sector level learning platforms and lending platforms clocked 3 deals each. Early stage deals dominated this week with more than 30 deals reported as against late-stage deals numbered less than 20.
Venture debt funding is becoming fairly regular in our weekly tracking, this week Trifecta disclosed large venture debt needs of late-stage companies with more than 400cr pumped into Ixigo, Good Glamm, PharmEasy, and Meesho from its new fund. This credit need in late-stage companies is not showing signs of any slowdown and this makes us expect more funds to cater to this need especially in the 7 large venture-debt investors.
That is folks for the week (Oct 14-22 2021), see you next week.