1947 Tech 🇮🇳: 132

Once a week newsletter: Insights on Tech, markets, startups, venture capital, and foreign investments in India

1. PharmEasy is buying back Esops worth $3 million

Another week, another round of ESPOS buybacks from another startup. 

Online pharmacy Pharmeasy is buying back employee stock ownership plans (Esops) worth $3 million, as it looks to instill confidence in staff amid the Covid-19 pandemic and at a time when the competition is heating up with the entry of Reliance Industries and Amazon.

PharmEasy is buying back Esops worth $3 million

2. Reliance Retail buys Urban Ladder for $24.4 million

Three waves of the Indian startup ecosystem

• 2010–2015: Found the product-market fit

• 2015–2020: Indian companies can scale

• 2020 onwards: Indian companies can scale globally and become profitable

The third way has just started and Corporate development would play a major role.

We will see a lot more strategic investments, M&A’s, consolidation, and the formation of corp dev funds moving forward.

Reliance Retail has acquired a majority stake in furniture and decor platform Urban Ladder, making a broader push into e-commerce as the largest retail chain in India gears up to fight Amazon and Flipkart.

In a filing to the local stock exchange, Reliance Retail said it had acquired a 96% stake in Urban Ladder for about $24.43 million.

Related:

• Tatas in talks to pick up majority stake in e-pharmacy firm 1mg Link

• BigBasket in talks to sell majority stake to Tata Group Link

A tweet:

Finshots @finshots

Reliance Retail acquired Urban Ladder yesterday. So, we thought we can take a look at Reliance's acquisitions over the years.

Worth your attention:

1. 25 years on, India tops 75 crore (750M)Internet connections; 50% of these came in last 4 years Link

2. Covid impact: Rural India beats urban in mobile data usage Link

3. Aggregators may give 1–2% of turnover or 5% of wages to social security fund Link

4. India dominates global downloads for gaming apps in October Link

5. ByteDance owned TikTok working on a comeback strategy for India Link

Funding:

1. SoftBank leads MindTickle’s $100 million round; valuation doubles to about $500M Link

2. Rupeek in talks to raise $100 Mn; Lee Fixel’s fund may invest Link

3. SoftBank, others may pump $55-$60 million into Grofers to help fight bigger rivals Link

4. Invoice management app FloBiz set to raise $10 Mn led by Greenoaks Link

Thank you for reading. Please share any feedback, questions or comments with me on Twitter :)