Meesho's makeover 🛍, OYO may shrink IPO size 📊, Alibaba's $25Bn buyback 😲
Meesho plans branded goods business, Oyo investors drop the plan to sell shares in IPO, Alibaba raises share buyback, What is DeFi?, Funding Deals & more.
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Meesho plans branded goods business, eyes brand makeover🛍
Social commerce platform Meesho is looking to enter the branded products category as it expands its direct-to-consumer (D2C) eCommerce business.
Meesho is looking to capture a larger share of people’s wallets by going after “affordable brands” in categories like beauty and electronics. The category is being called Meesho Brands and the company has already started hiring people for it on LinkedIn.
Affordable brands that Meesho could potentially tie up with include electronics company Boat and footwear firm Relaxo, where there is a degree of customer awareness and trust.
The company has also started work on a new logo and moving away from pink to appeal to more male users. Meanwhile, the Meta-backed firm said last week that it had entered into sponsorship deals with multiple Indian Premier League (IPL) teams and with Star Sports to advertise during the IPL season starting later this month.
SoftBank, other Oyo investors drop the plan to sell shares in IPO🏩
Oravel Stays Pvt. Ltd, which operates hospitality unicorn Oyo Hotels and Homes, plans to trim the size of its initial public offering after its investors dropped their plans to sell their holdings through an offer for sale, two people with knowledge of the development said.
In its draft share sale documents in October, Oyo had proposed an ₹8,340 crore IPO, which included an offer for sale (OFS) of ₹1,340 crores from shareholders SoftBank Group, Grab Holdings Inc., HuaZhu Hotels and the family office of Sunil Munjal of the Hero Group.
SoftBank Group, which owns 46% of Oyo, initially planned to sell around 2% of the company in the IPO. Southeast Asian taxi-hailing app Grab, which invested $100 million in Oyo in 2018, proposed to sell about ₹51.6 crores worth of shares. HuaZhu Hotels or China Lodging Holdings, which invested in 2017, proposed to sell ₹23.13 crore, while the family office of Sunil Munjal planned to sell shares worth ₹26.71 crores.
Hot Shorts⚡
Aquaconnect, a full-stack aquaculture input and outputs platform has raised $8 million (Rs 60 crore) in a venture debt funding round led by Trifecta Capital.
Enterprise software firm Locofy.ai has secured $3 million in a funding round from Accel, January Capital, Golden Gate Ventures and Boldcap.
Decentralised finance (DeFi) 💡 protocol firm Struct Finance has raised $3.9 million from Antler, Arcanum Capital, Assymetries Technologies and Avalaunch, among others.
Indian software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup Zocket has raised $3 million in a funding round led by Kalaari Capital.
Learn with R&S 💡
What is DeFi?
Decentralized finance (DeFi) is an emerging financial technology based on secure distributed ledgers similar to those used by cryptocurrencies. The system removes the control banks and institutions have on money, financial products, and financial services.
Alibaba raises share buyback from $15 billion to $25 billion😲
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. raised its share buyback program to $25 billion on Tuesday, its second increase in less than a year to prop up its stock, which has been battered by concerns over slowing growth.
The announcement marks an increase from its earlier plan to buy back shares worth $15 billion and marks the biggest share repurchase since it went public in 2014.
Alibaba said it had already re-purchased about $9.2 billion of its US-listed shares as of March 18 under its program, which was initially slated to last until the end of this year.
Its Hong Kong-listed shares have now lost nearly 57% of their value since the start of 2021.
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