Published: 4/2/2021
Good afternoon, it's Friday and I'm glad we're finally done with all the April Fools day nonsense. In global news, TechCrunch announced that Tiger Global has raised a $6.7B fund to invest in startups and Coinbase announced that it will start trading on the NASDAQ on Apr 14 under the symbol COIN. In news today, we'll be talking about Mobikwik's data breach and Chingari's new funding round.
➡️ Over the last week, a hacker claimed that they had access to 8.2 terabytes of MobiKwik's user data. And this included phone numbers, email addresses, hashed passwords, transactions logs and partial payment card numbers. The dark web site where this was posted also let users look if they had been included in the breach and several folks on Twitter verified this.
➡️ This is neither Mobikwik's first breach nor for a major Indian consumer company as of late, however it was handled quite differently that most data breaches that I've heard of. The company is still sticking to their claim that the data had not leaked from their end said in a statement "It is entirely possible that any user could have uploaded his/her information on multiple platforms".
➡️ And while I have seen a couple companies just deny data breaches, I have never seen one outright gaslight and blame their users. Data breaches certainly hurt users' trust in the company, but some of that is salvaged if the company is honest about the details about the breach.
➡️ About a year ago, the popular hyperlocal delivery company Dunzo also suffered a data breach but were quick to acknowledge it and were very transparent about the actual breach that occurred. Mobikwik is also allegedly prepping for an IPO this year, and this has certainly damaged their reputation.
2. https://bit.ly/2PSPE8B : Chingari raises $13M in a Pre-Series A round
➡️ The short video (and also social commerce?) platform Chingari announced that they had raised $13M in a new financing round led by OnMobile. The round also saw Bollywood star join the cap table of the company as he was allotted <$2M worth of shares for being the brand ambassador of the platform.
➡️ The space has certainly had a wild year with the TikTok ban, but the smaller players i.e Chingari and Mitron seem to have a hard time keeping up with TakaTak and Moj. A less talked about aspect here is also how Instagram and Snapchat users in the company (probably concentrated in the metros) has skyrocketed as well.
➡️ I also haven't heard too much about their investors, OnMobile, as they certainly aren't super active with investments. But as part of the deal OnMobile will integrate its gaming platform on the Chingari app, amongst other integrations.
➡️ It seems to me that Chingari might've realized that they can't really compete with the deep pockets of MX Player & ShareChat and are potentially looking into ways they can pivot Chingari to build a moat around the new platform. Social commerce and gaming are certainly two ways to do that, so let's see how that works out for them.
Feedback & ❤️ always appreciated BONUS (Tweet of the day): https://twitter.com/youngarjeezy/status/1377465996173189125
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