Published: 12/23/2020
Good morning, it's Wednesday and gosh was Google busy yesterday investing in content companies in India- we covered the Dailyhunt fundraise yesterday and today we have the InMobi's Glance. And an Indian Crypto exchange raises their third round of the year. Oh and also, tomorrow's newsletter will be the last one for 2020!
➡️ InMobi's Glance has likely become India's newest unicorn (I can't believe we have a new one every day/week/month now) after raising $145M from Google & Peter Thiel's Mithril Capital (who was the sole investor in Glance's first round where they raised $45M).
➡️ Glance is popular for being a lock-screen content & ads platform and comes bundled with a bunch of smartphones in the country as the company ties up with manufacturers (i.e Xiaomi). The company currently claims to have 115M Daily Active Users who consume 25 minutes of content every day.
➡️ Glance had also acquired a company called Roposo (which had gone through multiple pivots itself) and is now one of the short-video apps competing for the white-space that the TikTok ban left behind. It is also interesting to note that Google has now invested in products that compete quite directly and was also allegedly in talks with a third company (Sharechat).
➡️ Naveen Tewari, founder & CEO of the InMobi group, says that the company's focus is not on monetization currently but on increasing engagement & distribution and developing AI (probably for content reccomendation).
➡️ I assume the end game here is for Glance to tie up with more smartphone manufacturers (which they probably need capital for) to have Glance come pre-loaded with phones and then to show more and more Roposo content via Glance growing Roposo's user base.
➡️ And lastly, while I haven't read this anywhere I do know Sharechat had announced that it was moving to GCP as its cloud provider several months ago and do wonder if a part of Google's investment in both Glance and Dailyhunt is that they will too move over to GCP as their cloud providers (because I'm those would be massive contracts).
2. http://bit.ly/2WBycpz: Crypto exchange CoinDCX raises $13.9M in a Series B
➡️ The crypto world has been quite abuzz and wild recently, especially with Bitcoin reaching its ATH and with whatever is happening with Ripple and the SEC- I definitely don't know enough about the space so won't comment on it.
➡️ But CoinDCX announced that it was raising $13.9M (or Rs. 100 Cr) in a Series B round led by Block one. Several other investors including Coinbase Ventures and Polychain Capital also participated in the round. The company had raised $3M in a Series A round in March and raised $2M more 2 months after so clearly they've been on a fundraising tear!
➡️ The company has also been ramping up the team quite rapidly growing from 30 in March to 90 in December. They also claim to have grow 3x in overall volume traded and has also seen a 4x QoQ growth in daily active users.
➡️ CoinDCX's mission is to onboard 50M Indians into the cryptocurrency ecosystem and are going to use the capital to launch and scale their flagship product called CoinDCX Go.
Feedback & ❤️ always appreciated BONUS (Tweet of the day): https://twitter.com/refsrc/status/1341612973790412800
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