Go mechanic founder #AmitBhasin has confessed to financial fraud.

A lot is at stake for top VC funds 🧵

#gomechanic For Chiratae Ventures and Orios Venture Partners, GoMechanic was one of the top portfolio companies

Sequoia holds the maximum stake

As of May 2022 ⬇️

🚨Newsbreak: WhatsApp is getting down to business

After facing years of delays from the regulator & slow movement on the product side, Whatsapp is readying a massive war chest - $400 mn worth to enter payments in India

@thecaptableco WhatsApp India will have to slug it out with heavily against PhonePe, Google Pay & Paytm

@PratikBhakta_89 argues that while the odds appear to be stacked against Whatsapp— because of late entry, there is huge advantage on the customer base

Udaan is the latest unicorn to have begun layoffs

Tough liquidity conditions have pushed companies to focus on profitability, over growth

With staff costs being one of the highest fixed costs in the P&L, the impact on people is an unfortunate outcome 🧵 Udaan, last valued at over $3 bn, is in the process of sacking about 800 staffers across the board, including some top executives, @bytesofnews reports:

Staff-related costs form 11% (the biggest chunk of Udaan's expenses)

They stood at $120 mn in FY21

the-captable.com/2022/06/b2b-un…

Work from home is done

Startups have started to summon employees to office in phases ahead of the dreaded winter in India’s tech ecosystem.

We spent a month interviewing employees and reaching out to 16 tech companies to gauge the mood and understand plans 🧵 Who?

Of the 16 companies, 13 say they are actively encouraging their workforces to get back (making exceptions where needed)

Flipkart reopened its corporate office in phases and adopted a hybrid model beginning March 2022.

Entrepreneurs across India’s startup ecosystem are facing a sobering new reality

Board meetings called to discuss annual operating plans have been brutal 🧵 Amid global uncertainty, operators are forced to make hard choices like deferring fundraising and tweaking terms at the last minute

Measures being discussed to shield companies include slashing marketing spends, freezing hiring & shunning select high-burn new initiatives

Delhivery’s decade-long journey has seen a scrappy startup breaking into a tough, fragmented industry.

Some early investors remember calling it the “Blue Dart of online retail” 🧵 But Delhivery has nosed ahead of big names and is an industry-standard:

➡️Blue Dart closed FY21 with $443 mn in revenues, a 3% rise since FY19.

➡️Delhivery has gone past it with a topline of $493 mn, growing at 31% in FY21

💰 GoKwik has formally announced its $35 million raise from Think Investments.

Think Investments has backed the likes of Dream11 and Swiggy

You read it first on @thecaptableco in April. 🧵

the-captable.com/2022/04/deals-… GoKwik helps D2C platforms increase sales conversions with faster customer checkouts & reduce the number of order returns.

🤑WhatsApp made its ambitions to become India’s WeChat abundantly clear four years ago when it had over 200 mn daily active users in the country.

The figure has since soared to 412 mn, the highest for any app in India 🧵 Setting up financial services and commerce for such an enormous base, seemed too lucrative an opportunity to pass on...

But WhatsApp Payments, an in-chat feature, was introduced to a relatively small base of 1 mn in 2018.

the-captable.com/2022/03/whatsa…

Rebel Foods' move to foray into dine-in eateries is a reminder of how tough scaling the pure-play cloud kitchen business fundamentally is, not just in India but globally 🧵 One of the first cloud kitchens popped up in 2013 in New York by Green Summit Group.

Backed by Grubhub, the company shut down in 2017 after struggling to come up with a viable business model and failing to attract investors.
nytimes.com/2019/08/14/tec…

🚨 Bharatpe. Inframarket. Trell. Cracks in startup governance start to show

A year after massive funding rounds investors, early-stage investors admit losing the ability to rein in founders once the companies grew bigger.

the-captable.com/2022/03/ventur… 🔓 Boards are setting up & enforcing processes.

Outside investors are becoming wary of just taking the word of existing backers and doing independent ref checks

This escalated quickly. An eventful January timeline of BharatPe's saga:

Jan 5 - An audio clip was posted by an anonymous Twitter account where Ashneer Grover hurled expletives towards a Kotak employee for missing out on share allotment during Nykaa's IPO. Jan 6 - Grover claims that the clip is fake; on his Twitter account, he wrote, "Folks. Chill! It's FAKE audio by some scamster trying to extort funds.”

Jan 7 - Grover deletes his tweet and tells the media that he did it because the audio clip is no longer on social media.

💎🔥 It's been 3 months since we launched @thecaptableco , and one development we’ve closely tracked & deeply reported on is Zomato’s IPO.

Why? Because Zomato’s IPO goes beyond what it means for the company. It drives the sentiment for the India's tech ecosystem.
#Thread 🚨 🚨 Scoop: Zomato will increase the size of its public markets capital raise, after receiving a positive response from institutional investors for its roadshows. lnkd.in/gUFcctC

. @vijayshekhar shares @Paytm stats for 2019
Paytm is the most comprehensive payment app, he says
300 million wallets
100 million UPI handles
220 million saved cards
55 million bank accounts
150 million annual transactions
Half a million deployment of all-in-one QR code @vijayshekhar @Paytm In merchant payments - debit cards market share is being taken over by UPI, not wallet market share - @vijayshekhar says

@Zomato ’s H1 financial numbers 👇🏽
Says revenue up 225% to $205 million in the first six months of FY2020
Claims monthly burn rate down 60% in H1 compared to last year
Food delivery business GMV up 223% to $821 million

@ETtech @Zomato @ETtech Food delivery numbers @ZomatoIN