Indian food delivery start-up Zomato to seek post-IPO valuation of up to $ 8.6 billion – TechCrunch

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 8, 2021. Forget the hot summer ___. It’s hot Initial Public Offering The summer in the land of tech and today’s news underscores just how attractive the global outlet market is.

But before we get into TechCrunch’s Top 3, the good news from the site is that our latest Ultra-Deep Business Teardown, or EC-1, is live. This time around, we took a look at NS1, a company we wrote about building “a strategic node at the heart of the modern webcasting technology stack.” The whole series is on fire. – Alexis

The TechCrunch top 3

When we said it was IPO season, we weren’t kidding. Here’s the biggest release news of the day, which has a theme, as you’ll see:

• Instacart Hires New CEO As It Prepares To Go Public: Big news from the world of grocery delivery today as Instacart CEO and longtime co-founder Apoorva Mehta has been promoted to chairman of the company’s board. Facebook executive Fiji Simo takes the helm. Back from my first stint at TechCrunch, Mehta was sending me Facebook messages when her company was adding new Bay Area markets. How times change!
• The Indian Zomato defines the price range of the IPO: Days other the big news from the delivery world comes from India’s Zomato, which will price its IPO “in a range of Indian rupees 72 (96 cents) to 76 ($ 1) and is aiming for an upper limit valuation of 8 , $ 56 billion, ”reports TechCrunch.
• Crypto-powered Circle goes public via a SPAC: If you’re a crypto-minded person, you’ve heard of Circle. If not, it is the company that bought SeedInvest and is helping to create USDC stablecoin. It is made public via a SPAC at a valuation of several billion dollars. Call it surfing the Coinbase wave.

Startups / VC

Turning the script around and going back to the early stages of a startup’s life, here’s a look at some news from startup land:

• PowerZ Raises $ 8.3 Million to Merge Gaming and Education: The French startup is both a games company and edtech startup. The startup believes that “educational games will become mainstream very quickly,” TechCrunch reports. It makes sense: I learned more about the Middle Ages in Crusader Kings III than in any book I’ve read.
• Rootly raises $ 3.2 million to integrate SRE tooling into Slack: Look, we all live inside of Slack or Teams, so why not bring more functionality to the services? Rootly wants to bring “an inside incident response solution” to the work platform that Salesforce is purchasing. The round and the company are neat, as is the fact that startups build themselves on top of Slack itself.
• Z1 wants to bring fintech to LatAm zoomers: Homebrew is putting money at an early stage to work in Latin America in the hope that Z1 can emulate what Nubank has achieved in the region, which is to build a fintech titan and raise a billion dollars. According to TechCrunch, Z1 was a recent Y Combinator graduate, which means Homebrew acquired around 0.8 beeps of equity within $ 2.5 million of the deal. We laugh.
• Popshop Live Raises $ 20 Million For Modern QVC: Worth around $ 100 million, Popshop Live has built a “standalone business that harnesses the millennial taste for shopping from smaller, more daring brands and individuals, as much as larger retailers.” With a new boost in capital and retailer, it’s a startup to watch.
• Smile Identity Raises $ 7 Million Series A To Verify Identities: Focused on the African market, Smile Identity has set up a literate tour for KYC and ID services on the continent. TechCrunch reports that Costanoa Ventures co-led the deal with CRE Venture Capital.

To close, Natasha picked up that “Peter Boyce II left General Catalyst to start his own business, just over a year after the venture capitalist promoted him to partner.” It’s a busy week for new venture capital funds, with Acrylic and Renegade also making the news.

The NS1 EC-1

For the latest entry in our series of long articles that explore the inner workings of notable startups, we took a look at NS1, an internet infrastructure company known for its software-defined domain name (DNS) services.

Part 1: Origin story: How three engineers decided to rebuild the Internet’s basic addressing system.

Part 2: Product Development and Roadmap: Experimentation, open source efforts, and expansion beyond DNS.

Part 3: Competitive landscape: A look at the wider Internet infrastructure market.

Part 4: Customer development: How the stumble of their main competitor became “the gift that kept on giving”.

If you’re curious about how NS1 turned “a sleepy and dreary but trustworthy side of the internet” into a “strategic moat and corporate victory” in just eight years, read on.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams move forward. You can register here.)

Big Tech Inc.

A few notes from Big Tech before we wrap up our media coverage. Enjoy:

• Dropbox is reinventing the workplace: No, not in the sense of the product, but in terms of how it approaches offices as COVID slowly wanes. The result? Something more like a chic, private cafe than an office. I demand that all companies imitate this immediately.
• Offers starting at $ BYND: Yes, Beyond Meat has launched plant-based “chicken” offerings at some 400 American restaurants. The company, long a public company and therefore worthy of our nickname Big Tech, has had a tumultuous life since its IPO. Its shares have traded as high as $ 239 since its inception. Today, the company is still worth $ 140 per share, well above its initial IPO price of $ 25.

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