Tiger deals this week
The unicorn stories for 2021 is not yet over, this week we saw 3 more joining in the party. First is Upstox raising 185cr from Tiger at a valuation of 25330cr joining the likes of Zerodha in the year of unprecedented new investors coming into the market. Second was Spinny with a 1846cr raise from Tiger and Abu Dhabi Growth Fund at a valuation of 11767cr, joining Cars24 in playing the used car market. NoBroker for me was a surprise addition this week into the unicorn club, raising 1563cr from Tiger (again) along with General Atlantic and Moore Strategic ventures.
Among the existing unicorns Dream11, raised 6523cr at a valuation of 59560cr, with alcon Edge, DST Global, D1 Capital, Redbird Capital, and Tiger Global participating.
Mega deals
Thoughtspot raised 744cr at a valuation of 31269cr to fuel its modern analytics cloud, competing with several marquee players in the space. The funding was from March, Lightspeed, Khosla, Fidelity and others.
Beyond the unicorns, the week saw some InfoEdge action, as it invested 374cr into several subsidiaries. Info Edge also pumped in a smaller amount into Univariety this week, playing to its core business. Our readers may recall InfoEdge’s Zomato investment, and Zomato itself is emulating some of Info Edge style with its own investment strategy.
Strategic investment of note we want to share is the investment by FedEx into Delhivery, with a 744cr commit. Delhivery will in turn commit to sell FedEx’s international services.
Other deals
Amrish Rau and Kunal Shah are investing together (again), with a 3cr commit into Drona Pay, in their ever expanding portfolio. That said the lending business in the country, that banks have left open, seems to picked by several players. In this week alone we saw lending marketplace Indifi raising 340cr from CX Partners, CDC Group, Omidyar Network, Flourish Ventures, Elevar Equity, and Accel Partners, while Annapurna raised 150cr from German Development Finance and True Balance raising 223cr in debt from Korean investors.
EV space is now getting luxurious with eBikeGo acquiring rights to manufacture ‘Velocipedo’ from Spanish maker, Torrot. While Euler motors raised a 74cr, from QRG Holdings, ADB Ventures, Inventus Capital, and Blume Ventures, for its lastmile play.
The other sub-sector we noted being hyperactive is the D2C brands space. First story here is GlobalBees invested in 3 more brands targeting nutritional supplements, hair care, and hi-tech skin care products portfolio. While the bigger story is of ITC committing its investment into Mother Sparsh looking at the natural and ayurveda category, with mother/baby care segment focus. Being a coffee lover, I will end this PC Wires’ edition by noting that D2C coffee player Sleepy Owl raised 48cr from Rukam and DSG.
Good times…as we had a week with 75 deals and 17 of them with more than a 100cr commit, internet/tech/fintech was dominating the volume. Deals were evenly split by location (primarily NCR, Mumbai and Bangalore) and company stages (early or late stages) and a couple of IPOs.