Published: 6/5/2020
Big news in the US fintech world today, Galileo (a fintech infrastructure as a service co) was acquired by another fintech behemonth, SoFi, for $1.2B today (thought mostly in SoFi stock) and puts Accel’s Series A investment at a 3-4x return.
Couple of funding announcements in the Indian space today:
➡️ DeHaat, an AgricTech company, announced a $12M Series from Sequoia India, and existing investors like Omnivore also participated. The company is quite interesting actually and offers a bunch of services to farmers across the nation.
➡️ Firstly, they help farmers source (“input goods”) seeds, fertilizers & other inputs as well as data-driven suggestions on what they should grow. Secondly, they also connect farmers with both institutional loan providers to help farmers get access to working capital loans & to bulk buyers (Reliance Fresh, Zomato, Udaan) to sell their produce.
➡️ It also seems like they’re spending heavily on building out a bunch of services for farmers around tests & analytics to help them make better decisions and optimize their operations.
➡️ Moreover the company has built out an ecosystem of micro-entrepreneurs who sell input goods to farmers from regional hubs and then bring back the outputs (“crops”) to the same hubs. Almost a Meesho-esque reseller network but with far more value with the two-way interaction.
➡️ I think all sides see the value of the platform- farmers get a platform for advice, working capital loans, sourcing for input & buyers for finished products; seller of input goods get consumers, buyers of finished products & loan providers get to deploy capital; and most of all DeHaat is able to sit in between all the players and take a cut of all the transactions. Now (or probably post COVID), it’s time to scale, scale, scale!
➡️ BigBasket raised $60M from it’s previous backers including Alibaba and are probably simultaneously been having the best & worst of times.
➡️ It was a flat valuation, which is actually quite impressive when some of the later-stage deals (at least in the US) are taking valuation hits (Lime being one of the more popular ones).
➡️ So why are they have both the best & worst of times? So firstly demand for online groceries has shot up massively with people not wanting to go outside to buy groceries & essentials. Meanwhile with the country on lockdown, I’m sure their supply chain has been affected and they haven’t been able to keep up with the demand with lower delivery slots available- https://twitter.com/shalinisparmar/status/1246538846608568320
➡️ On the other hand, we might see a behavioral change in the Indian consumer who might want to purchase groceries online for often, which certainly bodes well for BigBasket. And with their daily essentials service, BB Daily, I am quite bullish on the future of online groceries + fresh goods.
Feedback & ❤️ always appreciated
More tomorrow :) BONUS (Tweet of the day): https://twitter.com/sowmyarao_/status/1247554180102770689