STARTUP DIGEST: Snapdeal files IPO papers, Spinny completes ESOP buyback worth $12 mn, & SpaceX launches 52 Starlink satellites from California base

Here are the top headlines from the startup space.

Snapdeal has filed its DRHP for an initial public offering (IPO) that comprises a fresh issue of equity shares worth up to Rs 1,250 crore and an offer-for-sale (OFS) of up to 30,769,600 equity shares by existing shareholders.

Snapdeal’s founders, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, are not selling any of their holding in the IPO. Blackrock, Temasek, eBay, Intel Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Tybourne, RNT Associates, Premji Invest, and others will also not sell any of their shares in the IPO.

The selling shareholders include SoftBank, Foxconn, Myriad Opportunities, Madison India, Sequoia Capital, Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan Board, who are collectively selling less than 8 percent of the company’s pre-offer equity share capital.

The proceeds of the issue will be used for funding growth initiatives, expanding logistics capabilities, and enhancing the company’s tech infrastructure, with Rs 900 crore marked for organic growth initiatives.

Snapdeal may also consider private placement of Rs 250 crore before the IPO, as per the filing.

MapmyIndia shares gave up some of their initial gains after a strong debut on Dalal Street. The stock of CE Info Systems -- which owns the MapmyIndia platform -- finished its listing day at Rs 1,394.6 apiece on BSE, a premium of 35 percent over its issue price of Rs 1,033. On NSE, the MapmyIndia stock ended at Rs 1,375 apiece, a premium of 33.1 percent.

Earlier in the day, MapmyIndia shares began their journey in the secondary market at a premium of up to 53 percent, listing at Rs 1,581 on BSE. On NSE, MapmyIndia shares opened at Rs 1,565, a premium of 51.5 percent.

During the session, the MapmyIndia stock climbed to as high as Rs 1,586.9 apiece on BSE and Rs 1,590 apiece on NSE -- a premium of nearly 54 percent each.

The strong listing of MapmyIndia, a provider of digital maps, geospatial software and location-based IoT technologies, at a time when most IPOs have received a robust response from investors though the recent sell-off in the market has dented the appeal of debutants.

MapmyIndia's IPO, which was open for subscription from December 9 to December 13, was subscribed an overall 154.7 times the shares on offer. The portions reserved for qualified institutional buyers (QIBs) and non-institutional investors saw bookings of 196.4 times and 424.7 times respectively. The quota reserved for retail investors was booked 15.2 times.

The company raised Rs 312 crore from 24 anchor investors ahead of the IPO.

Pre-owned car retailing platform Spinny has announced the completion of $12 million (about Rs 90 crore) ESOP buyback for its current and former employees.

This is the first ESOP (employee stock ownership plan) buyback that Spinny, which recently onboarded former cricketer Sachin Tendulkar as a strategic investor, has facilitated.

"The ESOP pool was constituted to ensure that our team members are rewarded for their belief in Spinny's vision, and relentless hard work that goes in turning vision into reality," said Niraj Singh, founder-CEO, Spinny.

The platform announced the closure of a $283-million Series E funding round from global investors, giving it a valuation of $1.8-billion.

Edtech platform Masai School has acquired data analytics firm Prepleaf for $1 million in a cash-and-stock deal.

As per reports, with this acquisition, Masai will start offering courses in data and business analytics, in addition to web development and UI/UX Design.

Earlier this year, Masai School also acquired Design Shift Academy to add courses in User Experience Design (UX) and User Interface Design (UI).

Masai School has projected its monthly recurring revenue to hit $1 million by February 2022.

Plum, an employee health insurance platform has launched Plum-Lite, a comprehensive group health benefits membership exclusively for early-stage startups, SMEs and gig workers/freelance consultants.

The membership will offer new-age health insurance covers, doctor consultations and COVID-19 treatment covers for companies with teams as small as two members and for a premium starting as low as Rs 85 per month, the company said in a statement.

According to the startup, current employee health plans in the industry have only been available for larger teams requiring a minimum of 10 members. Through Plum’s new plan, bootstrapped teams starting with just two members can get covered.

The membership covers health insurance up to ₹5 lakh, unlimited doctor consultations, weekly wellness sessions, dental and vision checkups, mental wellness consultations and COVID-19 treatment claims. It also covers employees, spouse and kids and has a zero human touchpoint.

Plum recently partnered with Razorpay Rize to offer exclusive group health benefits to early-stage startup founders and aims to cover over 1 lakh new businesses and entrepreneurs.

StarryNift, a gamefied massive creation platform and launchpad for digital collectibles has launched its NFT marketplace to facilitate convenient buying and selling of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on it platform.

StarryNift is creating an NFT game metaverse. Here, "Collect to Earn", "Play to Earn”, “Create to Earn" and "Govern to Earn" are the core concepts, the company said in a statement.

After launching the Binance IGO and 1.0 metaverse game, the NFT gamefy metaverse project StarryNift is going to release new functions to enrich the metaverse with multiple dimensions. Having accomplished NFT collecting, mining, and gaming, StarryNift will activate more metaverse spaces for users to enjoy diverse Play to Earn and Create to Earn fun.

ReshaMandi, a B2B marketplace for silk, has announced that they have successfully improved the incomes of the sericulture farmers by approximately 50%, within just 16 months of commencing their operations.

The company has assisted over 1,500 farmers' families by leveraging ingenious methods of linking the entire silk supply chain in a highly chaotic B2B market space, it said in a statement.

“Our vision is to create a supply chain based on trust and transparency and to ensure that practically all of the income is consumed by the producers. We have sold silk products worth over Rs 60 crore in the last four months and the procurement of all silk products has been done at prices that are extremely favourable to the stakeholders -- be it farmers, reelers, or weavers,” said Utkarsh Apoorva, co-founder and CBO at ReshaMandi.

The company had raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Creation Investments. The startup claims to have engaged with over 10,000 farmers and is working closely with 7,500 farmers, 560 reeling plants and 3,840 weaving units.

SaaS platform for doctors HealthPlix said it has amassed 10,000 monthly active users (MAU) with 70+ percent of them being power users of the platform.

The startup attributed its success to the pandemic-fuelled multi-channel strategy and supporting doctors with proprietary digital tools.

The company said the total number of new patients added and the corresponding prescriptions written by doctors through the platform have grown by twofold over the past year.

“Being a doctor-first company, we have differentiated ourselves from other platforms by putting our doctor-users at the centre of our growth strategy. We have served more than 1.2% of the patient population in India and stay committed to digitizing healthcare for Bharat. Moving forward, HealthPlix is well-positioned to release 3-4 new products for doctors by early 2022,” said Sandeep Gudibanda, CEO, HealthPlix Technologies.

Delivery platform Swiggy said that Indians ordered 115 plates of biryani per minute in 2021.

The report mentioned that over 4.25 lakh new users made their Swiggy debut by ordering a chicken biryani, while the most-binged snack of the year was samosa with about 5 million orders on Swiggy, equal to the population of New Zealand.

"Swiggy's sixth annual StatEATstics report reveals how Indians ordered 115 plates of biryani per minute, samosas equal to the population of New Zealand, and enough tomatoes to play the Spanish Tomatina festival for eleven years," the company said in a statement.

"In 2020, 90 biryanis were ordered per minute, which has gone up to 115 in 2021, which comes to 1.91 per second," the statement said.

While samosa was ordered six times more than chicken wings, pav bhaji was India's second favourite snack with 2.1 million orders.

With a total of 2.1 million orders, gulab jamun was the most-ordered dessert on Swiggy, followed by rasmalai with 1.27 million orders.

The search for healthy foods on Swiggy doubled in 2021, and health-focused restaurants on Swiggy HealthHub witnessed a 200 percent increase in orders. Bengaluru emerged the most health-conscious city, followed by Hyderabad and Mumbai.

Instamart delivered over 28 million packs of fruits and vegetables alone in 2021. Tomatoes, bananas, onions, potatoes, and green chilies were the top five fruits and veggies delivered in under 30 minutes.

China Mobile aims to raise up to 56 billion yuan ($8.8 billion) in what could be the country's biggest public offering in a decade, a year after being kicked off the New York Stock Exchange, Reuters reported.

The world's largest mobile network operator by total subscribers is selling shares publicly in Shanghai, as a growing number of US-traded Chinese companies seek listings in China or Hong Kong amid rising Sino-US tensions.

China Mobile said in a prospectus that it plans to sell up to 845 million shares at 57.58 yuan apiece, raising as much as 48.7 billion yuan before an over-allotment option is exercised.

After that option is fully exercised, it will raise up to 56 billion yuan, making the public share sale China's fifth-biggest on record, according to Refinitiv data. It would also be China's biggest listing since Agricultural Bank of China's public offering in 2010.

US Senators Marco Rubio and Sherrod Brown have asked the US Labor Department for a full investigation into Amazon’s labour practices, according to Reuters.

Rubio, a Republican, and Brown, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, wrote in a letter that about "one out of every 170 US workers is an Amazon employee, underscoring our particular interest in ensuring that the company's employment practices are fair, and in accordance with the law. We urge you to use every mechanism at your disposal to investigate Amazon's labor and employment practices immediately".

The lawmakers noted that the National Labor Relations Board had found that Amazon wrongfully terminated a worker who complained about unsafe working conditions during the coronavirus pandemic as well as two others who criticized Amazon's practices.

The board also ordered a re-run of an election by workers who voted not to unionise because Amazon's actions "made a free and fair election impossible."

Sweden's VOI Technology, which operates e-scooter service in Europe, has raised $115 million from investors such as Raine Group and VNV Global, valuing the company at just over $1 billion.

The revenue of VOI, whose competitors include Germany's Tier and American companies Lime and Bird, has grown by 140% this year but the company has yet to record an annual profit, Reuters reported.

The company has no immediate plans to enter the United States to take on American rivals on their home turf, CFO Mathias Hermansson said in an interview. "It's safe to say that we have plenty of investment opportunities in Western Europe."

By 2023, VOI intends to use only battery cells produced in Europe, in hopes of lowering its carbon footprint by 50%.

Vietnam's biggest e-wallet company, MoMo, has raised $200 million from four investors led by Mizuho Bank, pushing its valuation above $2 billion.

The consortium of investors also comprised Ward Ferry Management and existing shareholders Goodwater Capital LLC and Kora Management, as per a Reuters report.

The exact valuation of the company was not revealed but according to Nguyen Manh Tuong, co-founder of the Ho Chi Minh City-based startup, "We focus on performance not valuation, but we crossed $2 billion valuation after this round."

The company has previously said it intended to go public by 2025.

Enterprise software giant Oracle will buy electronic medical records company Cerner in an all-cash deal for $95 per share, or approximately $28.3 billion in equity value, as per CNBC.

The deal, expected to close in calendar year 2022, could help Oracle boost its presence in health care by bringing troves of health data to its cloud services.

Oracle shares closed down 5% Monday after the companies announced the deal. Shares initially fell 6% on Friday after The Wall Street Journal first reported Oracle would buy Cerner.

The massive acquisition is the biggest ever for Oracle, one of the largest software providers. The company, founded in 1977, had a market cap around $264 billion as of early Monday morning.

A SpaceX rocket carried 52 Starlink internet satellites into orbit from California early Saturday, AFP reported.

The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from coastal Vandenberg Space Force Base at 4.41 am (6.11 pm IST) and arced over the Pacific.

The Falcon's first stage returned and landed on a SpaceX droneship in the ocean. It was the 11th launch and recovery of the stage.

The second stage continued into orbit and deployment of the satellites was confirmed, said launch commentator Youmei Zhou at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

Starlink is a satellite-based global internet system that SpaceX has been building for years to bring internet access to underserved areas of the world.

Saturday's mission was the 34th launch for Starlink, a constellation of nearly 2,000 satellites in low Earth orbit.