Published: 12/11/2020
Good morning, it's Friday and we had another mega IPO today with Airbnb's huge pop once it started trading. We've got some large funding stories today in a B2B marketplace and an online-pharmacy.
➡️ Infra Market has raised $20M in a Series B round, with the round being led by Evolvence India Fund, Sistema Asia Fund and Foundamental, while existing investors Accel, Tiger Global and Nexus also participated. This brings the Mumbai-based company's total capital raised $50M.
➡️ Infra Market is a B2B marketplace and helps small businesses (like manufacturers of paints and cements) improve the quality of their production and meet various compliances. The company essentially serves as a service layer for these small manufacturers, enabling them to grow their business.
➡️ The company isn't a tech or tech-enabled business like most of the companies I cover so I don't have great context on them, but it seems like they work with these small businesses and major construction and real estate builders (eg- Larsen & Toubro, Tata Projects and Ashoka Buildcon)
➡️ The company sells to over 400 large clients and 3000 small retailers and was on pace to hit $100M in Annual Recurring Revenue before the pandemic cut their business in half. But the company seems to have bounced back strong as the company is on track to do $180M in ARR.
➡️ The company also plans to grow this to $300M by March next year and plans to expand its international business (which currently accounts for 10% of the business) and deepen its its penetration in smaller Indian cities and towns.
2. https://bit.ly/2W3e2nZ: TPG looks to acquire minority stake in Pharmeasy's parent
➡️ There's been so much investment and M&A activity in the online pharmacy space and now we have more- API Holdings, the combined entity of Pharmeasy & Medlife, is raising some capital from the TPG which would give the PE group 7% of the entity.
➡️ Other deals in the space include Reliance acquiring a 60% stake in Netmeds for 620 Cr and Amazon potentially investing $100M in Apollo Pharmacy. Economics Times had also reported TPG and Naspers were looking to invest $100M in Pharmeasy which would value it at $1.2B so I would assume that post this investment API Holdings would likely be India's newest unicorn.
➡️ TPG has currently incorporated a SPV in Singapore for carrying out the investment and has sought permission from the Competition Commission of India (which had earlier granted its approval for the Pharmeasy - Medlife merger).
➡️ The other potential player in the space is the Tata group (which has been linked a bunch of M&A opportunities with large startups) as it is in talks with 1mg to acquire a majority stake in that company. I'm excited to see how this space further plays out in the next year as all the majority players in space now with an extended runway or under the ownership or a large conglomerate.
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