1947 Tech 🇮🇳: 161
It’s raining IPOs & more!
1. Dispatch from Bangalore
A startup founder, who hasn’t had much sleep all week, woke up on a recent Sunday to a phone call from his co-founder. A senior engineer was feeling burnt out and was contemplating leaving. For the founder, who had several calls scheduled with many high-profile Silicon Valley investors later in the day, talking this developer out of leaving the job quickly became the top agenda item for the rest of the weekend.
There’s a joke among many startup founders in Bangalore that hiring two to three engineers is currently more time-consuming and cumbersome than securing a fresh round of funding. Heavily-backed startups are paying big premiums to attract and retain talent, making it very challenging for their younger siblings to scale. And relying on recruiters is costly and still takes over a month to close a hire.
Indian startups have raised a record $10.46 billion in the first half of 2021, up from $4 billion during the same period last year, and $5.4 billion in the first half of 2019, data insight platform Tracxn told me. (In all of 2020, Indian startups had raised $11.6 billion.)
2. Flipkart raises $3.6 billion at $37.6 billion valuation
Flipkart raised $3.6 billion as part of a new funding round led by parent Walmart Inc. and returning investor SoftBank Group Corp., valuing the IPO-bound online retailer at $37.6 billion.
Several marquee investors, including Singapore’s GIC Pte, China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), Abu Dhabi’s DisruptAD, Qatar Investment Authority, Malaysia’s Khazanah Nasional Bhd, Willoughby Capital, Antara Capital, Franklin Templeton, and Tiger Global also participated in the round, Flipkart said on Monday.
Podcast 🎙
Raghav Chandra is the Co-Founder & CTO of Urban Company. Urban Company is the largest home services platform in India and UAE, with recent expansion to Australia and Singapore.
You can click here to listen in
Worth paying your attention
Two Indian Unicorns Plan Mega IPOs Link
Indian financial services firm MobiKwik looks to raise $255 million in IPO Link
Temasek, Warburg Pincus and Bhavish Aggarwal invest $500 million in Ola Link
Exclusive: Tiger Global leads $100 Mn Series D round in Spinny Link
Investors led by Tiger bet $144 million on DealShare Link
PayPal Ventures, Bertelsmann lead $41.3 million funding in Shiprocket Link
Zomato IPO to be first on Paytm Money’s new pre-booking of IPO feature Link
SoftBank in talks to invest in online pharmacy chain Pharmeasy Link
India’s SaaS space can create $1 trillion in value by 2030 Link
Trell raises $45 million from Mirae Asset, H&M Group, others Link