Deal Roundup: Zomato opens floodgates for startup IPOs; Byju’s wraps up Toppr, Gradeup buys

The second full week of July will go down as one of the most (if not the most) significant week for the Indian startup ecosystem. Food delivery platform Zomato successfully completed a public issue of shares on the Indian bourses, attracting strong interest from both institutional and retail investors. The initial public offering (IPO) marks the first by a homegrown unicorn – startups valued privately at $1 billion or more -- in the country.

After raising about $562.3 million from 186 anchor investors earlier in the week, Zomato went on to receive bids for 2751.25 crore shares against an offer size of 71.92 crore shares on BSE. The book was oversubscribed 38.25 times.

Get all the important updates on the IPO here.

Notably, two more Indian startups filed for IPOs this week. Payments platforms Paytm and Mobikwik, both from the burgeoning fintech sector, filed their draft red herring prospectus for $2.2 billion and $255 million floats respectively.  

The pipeline of imminent IPOs in the medium terms has a host of other homegrown consumer internet companies, including Walmart-owned Flipkart, logistics platform Delhivery, fashion and beauty platform Nykaa, and insurance marketplace Policybazar in the fray. Also lining up for an IPO this year is SaaS unicorn Freshworks.

Read: Covid-19 pandemic whets startup appetites for public market outings

The week also saw the largest fundraising by an Indian internet company when Flipkart secured a $3.6 billion funding round from a bunch of global investors including sovereign funds, private equity and crossovers in addition to its majority owner Walmart. The round, possibly a pre-IPO wound, was led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Walmart. The investment valued Flipkart at $37.6 billion post-money.

Excluding the Flipkart mega round, a total of $378.8 million was raised by 34 startups. Of  those, six did not disclose the amounts raised.

Outside of Flipkart, the largest venture capital round was raised by IPO-bound Delhivery. The SoftBank-backed company secured a $100 million round from FedEx Express, a subsidiary of US based logistics major FedEx Corp.

Tiger Global-backed news aggregator Inshorts landed a $60 million round led by Vy Capital. With this funding, Inshorts and its location based social network Public App have raised $140 million in the last one year from investors including Lee Fixel's Addition, Tiger Global, SIG, A91 Partners and Tanglin Venture Partners.

Indian-language self-publishing firm Pratilipi raised $48 million in its Series D funding round led by South Korean gaming major KRAFTON Inc.  The company’s existing investor Omidyar Network India also participated in the round. A clutch of reputed startup founders also contributed in this round including Hemesh Singh and Gaurav Munjal (Unacademy), Sahil Barua (Delhivery) and Vidit Aatrey (Meesho) among others.

Bengaluru-based lifestyle community commerce platform Trell bagged Rs 335 crore in its Series B funding round led by Mirae Asset, H&M Group and LB Investments. The company’s existing investors KTB Network, Samsung Ventures, and Fosun RZ Capital participated in the round.

On the mergers and acquisitions front, TechCircle exclusively reported on Tuesday that Byju’s, India’s most valuable unicorn, completed the acquisitions of school-focused exam-preparation platform Toppr and Gradeup, a test platform for competitive examinations.

The transaction is expected to create exits for early investors in Toppr. Multiple reports have put the proposed acquisition of Toppr at nearly $150 million and Gradeup acquisition at $40-$50 million.

On Thursday, Byju’s rival Vedantu snapped up a majority stake in Pedagogy, an artificial intelligence-enabled personalized learning platform that provides online courses and interactive digital books for students preparing for competitive examinations. Pedagogy works on a subscription-based model to provide content to its students, from publishers and content creators.

NSEIT Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Stock Exchange of India Ltd, acquired a majority stake in cloud services firm Cloudxchange.io. The deal is expected to augment NSEIT’s capabilities in cloud and digital solutions for enterprises.