Daily Crunch - FedEx invests $100M in Indian logistics giant Delhivery

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Friday, July 16, 2021 â¢ By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 16, 2021. A PSA: A few of us at TechCrunch took some time this week to chat about funding rounds, covering them and how startups might stand out. If thatâs your sort of thing, you can check out the chat here. OK, news time! — Alex

Image Credits: Joel Saget / Getty Images

The TechCrunch Top 3

The Zomato IPO: Indian unicorn Zomatoâs IPO had a good run this week, raising lots of money and generally being oversubscribed. TechCrunch also dug into what the first unicorn offering in the country might mean for other high-priced startups in the country. For more on the companyâs finances, head here. Intelâs big buy? Back in the United States, news broke this week that aging chip giant Intel may dish out $30 billion for GlobalFoundries. Thatâs a lot of money. The deal could help make Intel a full-stack chipmaker able to make silicon for, well, just about anything. More capacity for manufacturing during a global chip shortage wouldnât be so bad, right? Whatâs next for Virgin Galactic: Our own Devin Coldewey got some time with the president of Virgin Galactic to chat about the future of the company after its recent jaunt to space (or nearly space, depending on how you measure). It turns out the company expects to reuse its space plane hundreds of times. That should make for pretty attractive economics, we reckon.

Why Companies Need Data Science, Machine Learning and AI Platforms

Startups/VC

Blend is no longer a startup: Banking tech unicorn Blend went public this week. Itâs now worth $4 billion or so, more than its final private round. So consider the company not only no longer a startup, but also no longer a private unicorn. Blendâs software powers the mortgage option in other apps, making it a company that you may not have heard of but may have used. Halla raises $4.5M to help guess what you are going to eat: Buying groceries online is big business. Amazon is into it. Itâs Instacartâs core remit. And European grocery delivery services have been raising oodles of money. Halla wants to help those companies sell more stuff by âusing human behavior to steer shoppers to food items they want while also discovering new ones as they shop online.â Rivian once again delays EV deliveries: The global chip shortage — see our earlier note regarding Intel — is showing up in a host of places, including Rivianâs ramp toward commercial production of its electric vehicles. Other issues are holding the company up, but this chip shortage is a real kettle of fish for companies of all shapes and sizes. Yummy wants to build Venezuelaâs superapp: Then thereâs Yummy, which just raised a $4 million round. It has big aspirations: ride-hailing, delivery and more. The superapp model may have been spearheaded in Asia, but itâs going global. Yummy will need more than $4 million to build it, however. So if things go well, expect the company to raise again in short order.

From our recent Early Stage event, we have something new for your enjoyment: Cleo Capitalâs Sarah Kunst explains how to get ready to raise your next round.

Image Credits: Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch

Outdoorsy co-founders detail how they expanded the sharing economy to RVs

Seven years ago, ad executive Jen Young and tech entrepreneur Jeff Cavins stepped away from the careers they’d built to launch Outdoorsy, an RV rental marketplace.

Last month, they announced a partnership with high-end camping company Collective Retreats and raised a $90 million Series D and $40 million in debt to speed up an already impressive rate of growth.

To learn more about their approach to building a transportation company that caters to people who crave a taste of nomadic existence, Rebecca Bellan interviewed Young and Cavins for Extra Crunch.

Their conversation explored the impacts of COVID-19, their business strategy and why they decided to take on $30 million in debt financing:

Jeff Cavins: We like to look at macro trends as a business and I think U.S. monetary policy is going to get us all in a little bit of trouble. So we wanted to lock in a credit facility for the company at advantageous terms.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Big Tech Inc.

FedEx pours $100M into Delhivery: First, we love the name for the Indian logistics startup. Itâs rumored to be heading for an IPO this year. The deal underscores how key the Indian market is proving to be not merely for its domestic investors and founders, but also for global brands. Paytm is going public: Indian fintech giant Paytm has filed to go public. Weâre including it in this section of the newsletter because, as we reported, the private company âplans to raise up to $2.2 billion in an initial public offering.â Thatâs a huge, huge amount of money. Itâs hard to call Paytm a startup when itâs raising a few venture capital funds’ worth of capital in a single go. Tumblrâs parent company buys Pocket Casts: Automattic, famous for WordPress and the owner of whatâs left of Tumblr, is buying popular podcasting service Pocket Casts. Itâs not impossible to see how a publishing platform might integrate with a podcasting service, yeah?

To close us off from the world of Big Tech backing money, this from Connie Loizos: Traditional VCs turn to emerging managers for deal flow and, in some cases, new partners.

TechCrunch Experts: Email Marketing

We interviewed Kathleen Estreich, formerly of Intercom, Box, Facebook and Scalyr, and Emily Kramer, formerly of Asana, Carta, and Astro (acquired by Slack), as part of TechCrunch Experts. Weâre taking this conversation to Twitter Spaces on Tuesday, July 20, at 5 p.m. EDT. Join TechCrunchâs Danny Crichton and the MKT1 team as they dive further into the growth marketing trends theyâre seeing.

Image Credits: Kathleen Estreich and Emily Kramer