Centre over WhatsApp outage📨; Money View may become unicorn🦄; Meta stock sinks 20%📉

Centre writes to Meta over WhatsApp outage, Money View may become the next unicorn, Meta stock sinks 20%, Funding Deals and more.

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Oct 27, 2022

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Centre writes to Meta over WhatsApp outage📨

The government has shot off a letter to Meta India asking it about the reasons behind the almost-two-hour outage of its instant messaging platform WhatsApp on Tuesday. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) wants to know if the outage was due to an internal glitch or a cyber attack.

The IT ministry asked WhatsApp to work with the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) to ascertain whether there was any untoward cyber incident on the company’s servers during the time the services of the instant messaging app were not available.

WhatsApp faced the longest global outage on Tuesday that prevented users from sending or receiving text and video messages for almost two hours.

Money View may become the next unicorn🦄

Online financial services provider Money View may become a unicorn soon. The startup is in discussions to rack up a fresh round of equity funding, which will be its second this year. The round is expected to value it at a little over $1 billion.

Private equity giant Apis Partners is expected to lead the round and join in as a new investor. Apis is expected to invest roughly $65 million, with the rest of the corpus coming from internal investors and private equity funds.

Founded in 2014, Money View provides personal loans, as well as buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) products worth up to Rs 5 lakh to individuals. It also offers personal financial management solutions to end consumers. For its credit offerings, the Bengaluru-based fintech has partnered with over 15 financial institutions.

Hot Shorts⚡

Customer and sales engagement tool WATI (WhatsApp Team Inbox) has raised $23 million in its Series B round led by Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital India.
D2C kitchenware startup The Indus Valley has raised Rs 15.33 crore or $1.87 million in a Seed 2 round led by existing investors DSG Consumer Partners and Rukam Capital.
Pet food brand LUVIN has raised Rs 2.4 crore or $300K in an angel round from M.V. Nair, a Gujarat-based family office of Possible Ventures and others.

Funding Deals

Investors punish Metaverse-obsessed Zuckerberg, Meta stock sinks 20%📉

Wall Street is losing patience over Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg's enormous and experimental bets on his metaverse project that helped drive up the company's overall costs by a fifth in the third quarter.

Investors rushed to dump Meta Platforms Inc's stock after hours, pushing it down 20% and wiping $67 billion off its market value after the company posted its fourth straight decline in quarterly profit.

The Facebook parent said its overall expenses could rise as much as 16% next year and anticipates that operating losses at Reality Labs - the unit responsible for bringing the metaverse to life - "will grow significantly" next year.

In the July-September quarter, losses at Reality Labs ballooned to a whopping $3.67 billion from $2.63 billion a year earlier. Revenue nearly halved.