QED, Sequoia and Tiger circle Jupiter; Carlyle, others to dilute stakes in Delhivery IPO

0


India’s neobanks, like all other tech startups, have been on a roll in 2021. Jupiter, a neobank founded in 2019 that last raised funds just three months ago, is now in talks with QED Investors, Sequoia Capital India and Tiger Global for a fresh $100-million funding round that would value it at $700 million.

Also in this letter:

  • Carlyle, others to part-sell stakes in Delhivery IPO
  • Govt releases FAQs on IT rules, stands firm on traceability
  • Value of UPI transactions crosses $100 billion in October

Neobank Jupiter in talks with QED, Sequoia to co-lead $100 million funding

Jupiter, one of India’s neobanking startups, is in talks with US venture fund QED Investors and existing investor Sequoia Capital India to co-lead a new $100 million funding round, sources told us. New York’s Tiger Global is also in talks with the company to participate in the round, they said.

  • “QED and Sequoia are likely to lead the new round while the conversation with Tiger Global is underway. There is a lot of interest in the consumer-facing neobanks offering digital savings bank accounts and financial guidance on saving, loans etc,” a source said.

Valuation bump: If the deal goes through, Jupiter’s valuation will more than double to around $700 million. The company last raised funds just three months ago, when it closed a $45-million round from Brazilian neobank NuBank and others.

QED is a fintech-focussed investor that has backed leading fintech firms such as Nubank, SoFi and Klarna, among others. It recently announced the closing of two funds with a total of more than $1 billion to back startups in the US and around the world. In India, it has invested in Refyne, a salary app.

What’s a neobank? Neobanks are financial institutions that give customers a cheaper alternative to traditional banks. You could think of them as digital banks without any physical branches, offering services that traditional banks don’t, and doing so efficiently. They leverage technology and artificial intelligence to offer personalised services to customers while minimising operating costs.

In India, these firms don’t have bank licences of their own but rely on bank partners to offer licensed services. That’s because the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) doesn’t allow banks to be 100% digital yet.

Indian neobanks such as Jupiter thus have to tie up with traditional banks to be able to offer savings accounts. Jupiter, for example, has partnered with Federal Bank and Visa to issue zero-balance savings accounts and debit cards.

Read our full explainer on neobanks here.

Out of beta: After running them in beta for a few months, Jupiter is expanding its digital savings bank account and other offerings to all, though an invite is still required. When the beta was released in June, the company got more than 1.5 lakh requests for early access from users within the first two weeks. It is now aiming to onboard a million users by the end of the year.


Carlyle, others to part-sell stakes in Delhivery’s $1-billion IPO

Carlyle

Investors in Delhivery — such as Carlyle, Fosun, SoftBank Vision Fund and Times Internet — will sell shares worth Rs 2,000-2,500 crore in the offer for sale (OFS) component of the company’s IPO, sources with direct knowledge of the development told us. Times Internet is part of the Times Group, which also owns ETtech.

Carlyle holds 10.3% of Delhivery while SoftBank has a 22.2% stake as of September 29, according to data from Tracxn.

Details: Carlyle, which first backed Delhivery in 2017, will liquidate shares worth $100 million or Rs 750 crore.

  • Chinese investor Fosun will sell its entire stake, two sources told us.
  • SoftBank Vision Fund will sell shares worth $100 million and Times Internet will offload shares worth $50 million.

IPO timeline: Delhivery is expected to file its IPO papers in the next few days and aims to list by early next year. It is looking to raise about Rs 5,000 crore in primary capital, seeking a valuation of $6-6.5 billion for the IPO.

In filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Delhivery said it had issued around 39,99,400 stock options to 207 employees, data sourced from Tofler showed. It also appointed Kalpana Morparia, Romesh Sobti, and Saugata Gupta as independent directors on its board, as part of its IPO preparations.

Pre-IPO funding: Lee Fixel, a former partner at Tiger Global, had invested $125 million in Delhivery through his fund Addition in September, partly through a secondary purchase of shares from China’s Fosun. The Chinese fund sold 1.32% of its 3.8% stake, valuing Delhivery at $4 billion.

Financials: Sandeep Barasia, managing director and chief business officer, told us in June that the startup had clocked revenue of more than Rs 3,700 crore in FY21. It had reported a revenue of more than Rs 2,988 crore and a loss of around Rs 269 crore in FY20.

In an interview with ET in June, CEO Sahil Barua had for the first time defined a timeline for going public. He said the company had formed a board sub-committee for its IPO and M&As in January.

Also Read: ETtech IPO Watch: A decade of Delhivery

Tweet of the day


Govt releases FAQs on IT rules, stands firm on traceability

WhatsApp

The government has reiterated its stand that requiring end-to-end encrypted platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal to trace the “first originator” of messages would not need them to weaken or break their encryption protocols.

Driving the news: The ‘clarification’ was part of an FAQ that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology released on Monday, which sought to clarify various parts of the Information Technology Rules, 2021, which came into effect on May 26. The government said it created the FAQs in consultation with industry players and other stakeholders.

What’s the issue? The new IT rules require, among other things, that “significant social media intermediaries” — that is, social media and chat platforms with more than five million users in India — to be able to trace the “first originator” of any post or message, and hand over the person’s details to the government on request.

Chat platforms such as WhatsApp have said that this cannot be done without checking every single message sent on their platforms, which would require them to break their encryption protocols and compromise the privacy of all their users.

The government disagrees, and said so (again) yesterday.

Quote: “The Internet, for all of the good things that it represents…also represents significant growth in things that we refer to as user harm. So policymaking has to grow the good and address the bad in a manner that is very transparent, very effective,” Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and IT, said at an event announcing the release of the FAQs.

Yes, but: MeitY said that the document was not the standard operating procedure (SOP) that the industry has been waiting for. Stakeholders want the central government to guide companies on how to deal with content takedown requests from the union government and state governments.


Value of UPI transactions crosses $100 billion in October

UPI transaction

The value of transactions made using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) crossed $100 billion in a month for the first time in October, data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) showed. This further cements UPI’s position as India’s most popular digital payments system by far.

Why the jump? The spurt in October was largely due to increased demand for online shopping amid the festive season and the gradual reopening of the economy since the ebbing of the second wave.

UPI

The numbers: A whopping 4.2 billion UPI transactions amounting to Rs 7.71 lakh crore (about $103 billion) were conducted in the month, marking all-time highs on both counts for the five-year-old payments channel.

In September, UPI had registered 3.6 billion transactions worth Rs 6.5 lakh crore. This means the number of transactions jumped 15% and the value of transactions rose 18.5% in October.

The number and value of UPI transactions have more than doubled since this time last year.

Up, up and away: UPI has passed several significant milestones since its launch in 2016. It crossed a billion transactions for the first time in October 2019, and the next billion came in under a year.

  • Since the start of 2021, monthly transaction value has grown by close to 79% from Rs 4.31 lakh crore in January.
  • The number of transactions, meanwhile, have increased by more than 83% from 230 crore in January.

Other modes of digital payments also surged in October. The Immediate Payments Service (IMPS) touched an all-time high both in terms of number and value of transactions. It clocked 430.67 million transactions worth Rs 3.70 trillion in the month.

NPCI’s National Electronic Toll Collection (NETC) channel, which runs FASTag, recorded an all-time high of 214.23 million transactions worth Rs 3,356.74 crore in October, indicating the return of road traffic with most states easing Covid-19 travel protocols.


Apple’s India profit rises 32% as sales volumes surge

Apple India

Apple Inc’s net profit in India rose 32% to Rs 1,226 crore and revenue from operations grew 68% in the fiscal year that ended March 2021, according to the iPhone maker’s latest regulatory filings with the Registrar of Companies (RoC).

Details: Apple India posted revenue from operations, or actual sales, of Rs 22,845 crore, crossing the $3 billion mark for the year. The growth in fiscal 2021 was the fastest in five years, but analysts said the growth was faster in the first half of the fiscal — that is, from April to September 2020.

Quote: “All of Apple products right from iPhone 11, 12, 13, SE, Airpod, Apple Watch and iPad have reported strong growth. The just-concluded September quarter is the highest ever for Apple in India in terms of volume of sales. In the current quarter too, demand is strong due to festive sales, though supply is a critical challenge,” said Navkendar Singh, India research director at market tracker IDC.

Apple Inc chief executive Tim Cook said in an earnings call last week that the company had doubled sales in India during the global fiscal year which ended in September. IDC estimates Apple will see the best ever quarter for its iPhones in July-September, exceeding the 1.3 million units it sold in the December quarter of 2020.


Over half of tech staff likely to go to office thrice a week by Jan: Nasscom

IT story

More than 50% of India’s technology workforce is likely to travel to office three times a week from January 2022, according to a study by industry body Nasscom.

Both employers and employees are equally interested in returning to the workplace in a hybrid setup, with junior and senior management (under 25 and over 40 years) more eager to do so than those in middle management, the ‘Nasscom Return to Workplace Survey’ said.

By the numbers: More than 70% of organisations plan to opt for a hybrid work model, with IT services and global capability centres likely to be early adopters of a long-term hybrid work model.

  • About 81% of organisations said employee health and safety was a key consideration while reopening offices.
  • Around 72% said that they would look at operating at 50% capacity starting next year.

Other Top Stories By Our Reporters

Spacetech startup SatSure gets funding from Baring PE, others: SatSure, a space technology company that utilises satellite data to extract actionable insights for the banking and insurance sectors, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding led by Baring Private Equity India as it eyes expansion of its product portfolio and growing its global footprint.

Supply chain crisis could create new opportunities for LTTS: The ongoing global supply chain crisis — in semiconductor chips and electronic components — could open up new opportunities, as clients try to rework their current sourcing arrangements, L&T Technology Services has said.


Global Picks We Are Reading

  • SoftBank Vision Fund sells $2 billion of DoorDash shares (Bloomberg)
  • Metaverse pioneers unimpressed by Facebook rebrand (Reuters)
  • Gaming platform Roblox comes back online after three-day outage (CNBC)





Source link

Denial of responsibility! Planetconcerns is an automatic aggregator around the global media. All the content are available free on Internet. We have just arranged it in one platform for educational purpose only. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, all materials to their authors. If you are the owner of the content and do not want us to publish your materials on our website, please contact us by email – [email protected]. The content will be deleted within 24 hours.

Leave a comment