Published: 3/30/2021
Good morning, it's Tuesday and hope y'all enjoyed a socially distanced Holi. News from India has been a little quiet over the weekend and Monday, but there's been several mega rounds from the US and EU (Ramp and Gorillas namely). Coming to today's news, some of FirstCry's early investors exited the cap table & Dunzo raises a new tranche.
➡️ Several private equity investors (TPG, ChrysCapital and Premji Invest) have invested ~$315M in FirstCry, which now values the omnichannel at around $2B. A majority of this transaction ($300M) was secondary aka new investors bought out of the stakes of the early investors.
➡️ With the transaction, Elevation Capital, Vertex Partners and MegaDelta Capital Advisors have sold their entire stakes in the company as part of the transaction. Prior to the 2 mega SoftBank rounds ($150M in 2019 and $150M in 2020), Elevation Capital (prev SAIF) had invested in every single FirstCry round and had even lead the Series A back in 2011.
➡️ The transaction also had a small primary component ($13M), but the three PE investors all brought in roughly $100M each. The company is also planning an IPO in the next 18 - 24 months, and one of ET's sources said that the company was looking to consolidate its investor base prior to the IPO.
➡️ I really don't know know why an investor, especially Elevation, would exit the cap table if the company was really primed to IPO soon so would love to hear if any of you have thoughts (though I guess the time from the first investment → IPO would then exceed ~13 years)
2. https://bit.ly/39skVGr: Dunzo valuation crosses $300M
➡️ Hyperlocal delivery startup Dunzo has raised an additional $8M in an ongoing Series E. The company is now valued over $300M. The company has certainly had its ups and downs over the last couple of years but has now doubled it's annual active user base from 2019 to 2020.
➡️ The company is also in the midst of expanding to 25 cities (up from the current 8 where it operates). The company has also been continually growing it's merchant base from 600 in March 2019 to 11,000 in February 2021.
➡️ The way that Dunzo works is that it makes a commission on orders from it's partner merchants, and that number is up to 80% (out of every 10 orders on the app, 8 are from partner merchants where Dunzo makes a commission charge on top of delivery charges). And as someone who worked at Postmates, it took us significantly longer to reach that threshold.
➡️ The last 2 quarters have been really good globally for startups in the hyperlocal delivery space (food, groceries, daily essentials) and just in the last week we've had Gorillas (Germany) and Gopuff raise monster rounds, so I would not be surprised if Dunzo raises a large round in the next couple of months as well.
Feedback & ❤️ always appreciated BONUS (Tweet of the day): https://twitter.com/jackerhack/status/1376601029035192321
If you received this as a forward, consider subscribing here 👉🏽 keepingupwithindia.com/api/wa