Published: 4/8/2021
Good afternoon, it's Thursday and gosh this has been a very buzzy week for growth stages companies. It is almost as if they all planned and coordinated to drop their announcements this week 🤔. In the last couple of days, Meesho, Swiggy, CRED, Pharmeasy, Groww and ShareChat have collectively raised over $2B, and today we're gonna talk a bit about Groww and ShareChat's latest rounds.
➡️ The popular investment app, Groww, announced today that it has raised $83M in a new financing round that would value the company upwards of $1B. The round was led (and probably pre-empted) by Tiger Global, and also saw the participation of existing backers in the likes of Sequoia Capital India, Ribbit Capital, YC Continuity and Propel Venture Partner.
➡️ The pandemic and the resurgence of the capital markets in the US and India have seen the fortunes of investment apps skyrocket in both countries. At the start of 2021, we also saw the $GME and WallStreetBets saga driving even more retail participation and was one of the factors that led to Tiger pre-empting a similar round for Public (a Robinhood competitor).
➡️ And given those tailwinds, I am not terribly surprised Groww raised this round. The company lets users invest through several different means including mutual funds, gold, and equities (both listed in the US and India).
➡️ The company has already amassed 15M users, out of which 10M are first time investors. For some context, Zerodha has about 4M users and is the largest online stock broker in India. The company plans to use the capital to hire, and groww even faster.
➡️ Post the announcement, Zerodha's founder took to twitter to discuss why the company has not and will not raise capital in the ways a lot of startups do. Zerodha themselves have built a hugely successful platform but I do wonder if not raising a capital poses a huge risk for them.
➡️ With the amount of capital Groww has, they can afford to drive up CAC costs to cannibalize Zerodha's growth for the coming years (it is another matter if this is what they actually would do), and longer term I can see how Groww outperforms and beats out Zerodha. But I will be waiting and watching for that.
2. https://bit.ly/31Tm06b: ShareChat has raised a $500M round
➡️ The long teased and "leaked" ShareChat is finally here- over the last couple of months literally every American tech giant was linked to participating in ShareChat's next round and we now know the company has raised $502M in a round led by Tiger Global, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Snapchat, Twitter and others.
➡️ The company is now valued at $2.1B and it is also seed-firm IndiaQuotient's first investment that been valued at over $1B (ShareChat partnered with IndiaQuotient at a very early stage). This also seems to be Snapchat's first investment in the country (it has partnered with ShareChat for a couple of months now) and I can see both Twitter and Snapchat acquiring ShareChat down the line as well.
➡️ The social platform has grown the 160M MAUs and the company's newly (a year old) launched short-video platform has also crossed 100M MAUs- which has been pretty interesting to see. The company wants to expand their ecosystem of products (which might hint at more apps in the product roadmap) to 1B Monthly Active Users cumulatively and ShareChat would certainly be a beast if it gets to that point.
Feedback & ❤️ always appreciated BONUS (Tweet of the day): https://twitter.com/Nithin0dha/status/1379822282969817091
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