Published: 12/18/2020
Good morning, it's Friday and this will be the last Friday edition of the newsletter for 2020. Just want to give everyone a rundown that Vedica and I will be taking the week between Christmas and New Years (25th - 1st) off and will be back with a new and improved version of the newsletter in 2021 👀 (Yes we'll still be posting next week Mon - Thurs). Also Pagarbook just announced their Series A this week and raised $15M led by Sequoia India- I've already covered the company a couple of times in the past so don't really have anything new to say currently other than the fact that it makes sense that Sequoia is doubling down on the fastest growing companies from Surge.
➡️ Rebel Foods, the cloud kitchen company, has picked up an additional 14% of FoodyBuddy with an investment of 5 Cr in the home chef platform. With the investment Rebel Foods now owns 26% of the company, which also includes Prime Venture Partners on its cap table.
➡️ FoodyBuddy is a marketplace where consumers can get home cooked food delivered from chefs in their neighborhood. It isn't exactly a new model- a bunch of companies with similar models came up in the 2015 FoodTech wave and didn't survive but hopefully that isn't the case with FoodyBuddy.
➡️ The space is also heating up in the US again- a company called Shef raised an $8.8M Seed round this August and I'm a big fan. I think it is yet to be seen if someone can build out this model at scale in India, but this certainly gives Rebel Foods a sizeable ownership in the company and it can probably use its kitchen and logistics network to help these home chefs (either just through delivering their products or maybe even eventually setting them up with industrial kitchen space).
➡️ 2020 has certainly been a big year for Rebel Foods- especially with Coatue investing in the company and the Faasos to EatSure rebrand. I'm interested to see what 2021 holds for the company as it will likely become a unicorn.
2. http://bit.ly/3moOoVy: PointOne Capital announces the first close of their maiden fund
➡️ It seems like we have a brand new venture fund in India- PointOne Capital which is focussing on the Pre-seed and seed stages. The firm plans to raise a total of 50 Cr and will invest up to 1 Cr per company.
➡️ I don't think we've seen a terrible amount of new firms launching- especially with such a small corpus which is interesting. If a firm plans to deploy just ~$140k in pre-seed and seed rounds, it probably won't be leading rounds.
➡️ The firms counts entrepreneurs, PE and VC partners and seasoned corporate leaders as its LPs so this might also be a way for some firms to buy some optionality into earlier stages and get some of their deal flow through PointOne.
➡️ The firm has previously done a couple of investments through its angel syndicate and has a couple of cool companies in its portfolio already including a neobank (Finin) and a company called KahaniBox that looks very interesting.
Feedback & ❤️ always appreciated BONUS (Tweet of the day): https://twitter.com/JuroOsawa/status/1339401927465955329
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