Licious-India’s first non-veg unicorn🍗
What took down Facebook platforms, Ola acquires GeoSpoc, Funding Deals & more.
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Licious joins unicorn club with $52 million funding🍖
Fresh meat and seafood startup Licious has raised $52 million in its Series G round, led by Mumbai-based IIFL’s Late Stage Tech Fund and Avendus.
The round values the company at $1.05 billion, making it the 29th Indian startup unicorn of 2021 and the first homegrown direct-to-consumer (D2C) company to achieve the feat.
This is the company’s second funding round in three months. On July 2 Licious had raised $192 million at a valuation of $650 million as part of its Series F round.
Licious is present in 14 Indian cities. The company said it grew 500% in the past year and has delivered to more than two million unique customers so far. It said it serves more than a million orders every month, with over 90% repeat users across markets.
WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram recover after almost six-hour outage🚫
Facebook said a "faulty configuration change" was the reason its platforms were offline for six hours on Monday. The outage, which began just before 9 pm India time, prevented the company's 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger and Instagram until around 3 am IST.
Researchers have said Facebook’s downtime was due to issues with something called a border gateway protocol.
After the platforms were back online, CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologised on Facebook. "Sorry for the disruption today—I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about," he said.
Zuckerberg’s personal fortune fell about $6 billion in a matter of hours on a day. He slipped one place on the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, dropping below Bill Gates to the fifth spot.
Hot Shorts⚡
Tekion Corp, a cloud-native platform for the automotive retail industry, has raised $250 million in a Series D funding round led by Alkeon Capital and Durable Capital.
Chalo, an app that helps riders track buses across cities, announced that it has raised about $40 million in its Series C funding round led by Lightrock India and Filter Capital.
Sunstone Eduversity, a higher education startup, has raised $28 million in a Series B funding round headed by WestBridge Capital.
100ms, a live-video infrastructure platform, has received $4.5 million in a seed funding round led by Accel along with the participation of Strive.vc.
Ola acquires GeoSpoc to build next-gen location technology🗺
Ola has acquired geospatial services provider GeoSpoc to build the next generation of location technology, including real-time, three-dimensional and vector maps.
With the acquisition, GeoSpoc’s investors will be exiting the startup, and its team will be joining Ola.
The acquisition will help platforms such as Ola Cabs and Ola Electric to convert satellite imagery into real-time maps as well as 3D, high-definition (HD) and vector maps, Ola founder and chief executive officer Bhavish Aggarwal said in a blogpost.
Ola has made close to eight acquisitions so far to build its ecosystem of products ranging from transport to food tech and fintech.
Tweet of the day🐥

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“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”
- Robert Louis Stevenson
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