Booking.com has been designated a gatekeeper under the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), meaning the online travel agency will face regulation under the bloc’s market fairness and contestability framework — with the risk of major fines (of up to 10% or even 20%) for non-compliance. The travel platform has been given six months to comply […]
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India’s mobile payments regulator is likely to extend the deadline for imposing market share caps on the popular UPI payments rail by one to two years, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), a special unit of the Reserve Bank of India, plans to extend the deadline for […]
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This year already proved that startups are willing to go public in a less-than-ideal market — and get rewarded for it, too. But bankers, lawyers and investors said the recent IPO successes aren’t enough to foster more than a dozen tech IPOs this year.
“I don’t think we will have the floodgates open like I might have thought,” Greg Martin, co-founder and managing director at Rainmaker Securities, told TechCrunch. “The trickle was delayed; I thought it would happen sooner in Q1. Because of that, I think the floodgates can’t open til 2025, but we could have a healthy flow of 10 to 15 companies for the year.”
Jeremy Glaser, a lawyer and co-chair of Mintz’s venture capital and emerging companies practice, said that despite how the recent IPOs have performed thus far, people need more data than just a few weeks, or a month, of trading to feel confident.
Looking at how Klaviyo and Instacart are performing today shows why people remain cautious. Klaviyo is currently trading at a $5.94 billion market cap, down from its $9.2 billion IPO price. Instacart is faring better, but still trading under its initial IPO price of $9.9 billion. It’s currently trading at $9.47 billion.
“I’ve lived through a lot of IPO cycles, you really do need an extended period of time where you are seeing multiple IPOs staying above the IPO price,” Glaser said. “I don’t know if we are there yet. We have some positive signs but we need to see more companies staying above the IPO price for an extended amount of time.”
Timing plays a big factor here, too, due to the election. If a couple of companies had come out and made their public debuts at the beginning of the year — and had they done well — it might have given other companies enough time and confidence to get through a full S-1 process before the election. But due to the timing of the recent IPOs, companies would be crunched for time.
Martin added that despite the successes, he’s not sure this is really a good market to go out in anyway. Interest rates aren’t being cut the way many predicted and were hoping for this year, and Martin isn’t convinced that the economy is fully in the clear yet after 2022’s bear market — especially with uncertainty about how the markets will react after the election in November.
“I still feel like recession is not out of the woods yet,” Martin said. “We had, what, 1% growth in Q1? Mostly macro economic factors, it feels like the market is sensing relative stability right now but there [are] a lot of things that could turn that. I’m hopeful [the market] remains stable. I’m remaining optimistic at this point.”
The sentiment from Glaser and Martin seems to align with what other folks in the market are saying, too. A top-tier venture fund recently told TechCrunch that it was advising all of its portfolio companies that could potentially IPO to wait until next year. Colin Stewart, Morgan Stanley’s global head of technology equity markets, recently told CNBC that he thinks 10 to 15 companies could go public this year — right in line with Martin’s prediction — and that 2025 will be better.
Investors weren’t sure what to think about the IPO market heading into 2024. Some thought that activity would start to pick back up while others thought it would be another quiet year, according to a TechCrunch survey. The one thing they all seemed to agree on was that any rise in activity wasn’t likely until the second half of the year.
But then Astera Labs filed to go public in February, and Reddit followed shortly after. Ibotta was next in March, followed by Rubrik just a week later. All four have since floated and popped on their first day of trading. While the respective stocks retreated since then, they are all currently trading above their IPO prices — which were all priced above their initial target ranges.
Watching these four stocks hit the market successfully makes us wonder: Were investors wrong about the timeline of the return of IPOs? But based on sentiment from folks like Martin and Glaser, probably not.
This means that VCs likely have to wait another year for the IPO market to be a meaningful source of liquidity. However, exits aren’t fully off the table this year. Glaser said that he isn’t working on IPOs, but his M&A practice has been the busiest it’s been in a long time. For investors looking for returns this year, that’s good news.
Food is significant to Nigerians, with households spending nearly 60% of their income on it, the highest globally, according to official reports. This strong affinity for food, coupled with the rise of online shopping, sets the stage for Nigeria’s food delivery market to potentially reach $2 billion to $3 billion by 2032.
Despite the promising market size, there isn’t a clear leader yet. However, Lagos-based Chowdeck, backed by Y Combinator and armed with a $2.5 million in seed investment, aims to make its mark in a space that has burned heavyweights like Jumia and Bolt.
Founded by Femi Aluko, Olumide Ojo, and Lanre Yusuf, Chowdeck offers consumers the convenience of ordering food and having it delivered to their doorstep within an average of 30 minutes. CEO Aluko shared that the inspiration for launching the startup came from his experience of quick deliveries and exceptional customer service during a work trip to Dubai.
Aluko explained, “Ordering food in Nigeria would usually take one or two hours. But each time I ordered food during my three-month stay in Dubai, I consistently received it on time. If there were any delays, the restaurant would call me to apologize. It was impressive to see, and I wondered if we could replicate the same level of service in Nigeria.” In the first half of 2023 alone, Nigerians spent over ₦60 trillion on food and household items, per the country’s top agency for official statistics.
Aluko and his co-founders initially experimented with the concept by using a few bikes and partnering with two restaurants. After refining their approach, they officially launched the first version of the product in October 2021. Since then, the platform has experienced significant growth, with more than 3,000 riders joining and over 500,000 users (Aluko says over 100,000 are active on the platform).
Chowdeck’s remarkable growth is evident, especially in a competitive market where, at its launch, major players like Jumia Food and Bolt Food already had a strong foothold with thousands of customers.
Additionally, given the industry’s reputation for thin profit margins and infrastructural challenges like traffic and poor roads causing delays in delivery times, the key question was how Chowdeck intended to navigate these obstacles and carve out its niche.
Later entrants in a market have the advantage of learning from the experiences of earlier players. Unlike its predecessors, Chowdeck recognized the importance of maintaining positive unit economics from the outset. While other food delivery platforms often relied on high discounts, Chowdeck opted for a different approach: optimizing its business model to ensure sustainability by minimizing discounts and only offering them on behalf of its partner restaurants when necessary.
“We took the time to figure out the right economics for our delivery business, which is why we’re not big on offering unrealistic discounts,” explained Aluko, a former principal engineer at Stripe subsidiary Paystack. “This approach kept us focused on selling and targeting the right customers rather than trying to capture everyone, which could’ve compromised our economics and marketing strategies.”
By the end of 2023, Jumia Food and Bolt Food had exited the Nigerian market citing various business reasons, leaving Glovo as Chowdeck’s main competition. Both exits partly contributed to Chowdeck’s twofold user growth within the last six months.
Aluko stresses that Chowdeck’s appeal lies in its convenience. While not necessarily the most cost-effective option, he added that Chowdeck targets customers who prioritize time and are willing to pay for fast deliveries.
The startup’s delivery system relies on factors such as geotagging, offering diverse vehicle options from bicycles to motorbikes, and enforcing strict regulations on vendors and riders. (For example, vendors must accept orders within a five-minute window; failure to do so leads to order cancellation and decreased priority for the vendor.)
Similarly, Chowdeck employs automated processes to streamline customer-rider connections, utilizing in-house data for daily demand forecasting and required supply assessment. If, for instance, an average rider completes eight deliveries daily and the platform anticipates 10,000 deliveries, at least 1,250 riders need to be available for that day.
Chowdeck’s logistics setup not only benefits small food vendors and larger quick-service restaurants like Burger King and Chicken Republic but also extends to supermarkets such as ShopRite and pharmacies. The startup, operating across eight cities, has applied lessons from its flagship business to launch delivery services in supermarket/grocery and pharmacy verticals. In 2023, Chowdeck had more than 1,500 active vendors across the three verticals; additionally, it introduced a relay service for intra-city package movement in Lagos.
Last year, the platform’s annual gross merchandise value (GMV) across these verticals stood at over ₦7 billion ($5.8 million). That October, it hit a milestone, crossing the ₦1 billion ($830,000) mark for the first time. By March 2024, it had doubled that figure, reaching ₦2.4 billion ($2 million). Lagos generates 80% of Chowdeck’s volumes, while the remaining 20% comes from other cities: Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, Benin City, Ilorin, Abeokuta and Asaba.
Chowdeck, with a take rate of 24%, saw its revenues surge by 1,200% between 2022 and 2023, according to Aluko.
As a fast-growing business, Chowdeck intends to use the newly raised capital to improve its operational efficiency and extend its reach to more cities across Nigeria. Yet, the on-demand delivery service is also committed to leveraging the investment to better the experience for its customers, vendors, and particularly delivery riders, whose earnings currently exceed three to five times Nigeria’s monthly minimum wage, Aluko noted.
“After a few months of building Chowdeck, it was clear the level of impact we were going to have and teething problems we could solve at scale in the country, especially around earnings,” remarked Aluko. “For many people, including us, it was interesting to see our riders getting paid between ₦100,000-200,000 monthly ($83-$170) regularly and profitably.”
The seed round attracted investment from notable backers, including YC, Goodwater Capital, FounderX Ventures, HoaQ Fund, Levare Ventures, True Culture Funds and Haleakala Ventures. Founders such as Simon Borrero and Juan Pablo Ortega (of Rappi), Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi (of Paystack) also joined the investor list.
Norwest Venture Partners, a 65-year-old firm backed solely by Wells Fargo, has raised its 17th fund at $3 billion.
That’s a noteworthy number, given that NVP last raised the same amount in December 2021. That was the peak of the venture boom, and at that time, the firm said it increased its capital pool by 50% (NVP’s 2019 fund closed at $2 billion) because it needed to stay competitive in the dealmaking environment where round sizes and valuations have climbed to unprecedented levels.
But things have obviously changed since then. Investors are backing fewer companies, and valuations have dropped and may fall further.
Jeff Crowe, a senior managing partner, admitted that the investment rate in venture and certain sectors is slower than it was several years ago, but he said that dealmaking in certain strategies, sectors and geographies, such as growth equity, healthcare and India, is as robust as it was before the downturn.
“We’ve kept a very steady pace and have delivered a number of nice exits,” Crowe told TechCrunch. “We felt it makes sense to keep going at the same pace.”
Since closing its previous fund, the firm has helped 36 companies realize liquidity. Not all exits were great outcomes for the firm (NVP’s portfolio company VanMoof filed for bankruptcy protection), but returns from certain exits greatly outweighed the losses, according to Crowe. He pointed to the firm’s sale of Spiff to Salesforce, the buyout of Avetta by EQT for a reported $3 billion, and the IPO of Indian-based Five Star Business Finance.
Crowe declined to comment on returns, but said: “This is fund 17. We’ve been doing this for a long time, and in the venture world, you get to stay in business if you deliver really good returns.”
NVP attributes much of its success to operating out of one large global multi-strategy fund. The firm invests in North America, India and Israel. It has an early-stage and growth equity business, and has recently added a biotech team to round out its existing healthcare practice.
The diversified approach allows the firm to adjust its strategy when the market changes. For instance, NVP planned to invest in crypto companies when it raised its last fund, but the sector fell out of favor shortly after that, and the firm didn’t pursue many deals in the space.
“Our diversified strategy works well through ups and downs of investment cycles,” Crowe said. “It gives us flexibility. That’s the beauty of it. We react faster to changes.”
Open banking may be a global trend, but implementation is fragmented. The fintech startups doing the legwork to make it a reality in smaller markets could become M&A targets for incumbents like Visa.
One of these is Y Combinator alum Fintoc, a B2B fintech startup that has raised a $7 million Series A round of funding to consolidate its presence in its home country, Chile, and in Mexico, where it expanded one year ago.
Fintoc’s product is an API that lets online businesses accept instant payments coming directly from the customer’s bank account. Known as accounts to accounts, or A2A, this method offers an alternative to credit card transactions, with fewer intermediaries.
For end users, A2A can be as frictionless as an online credit card payment. Instead of entering card details, they can just pick their bank and securely facilitate their bank credentials. But the main selling point is to businesses, which pay a lower commission than the usual credit card transaction fees.
Many countries now facilitate A2A, which has created tailwinds for open banking companies such as Plaid, Visa-owned Tink, TrueLayer and Volt. More generalist fintech players like Adyen and Stripe have also closed partnerships to offer A2A payments to their customers.
Latin America, however, isn’t particularly easy to enter for global players, nor very attractive. It is highly fragmented, and many countries still lag behind in financial inclusion: Fewer than half of Mexican adults have a bank account, according to World Development Indicators.
Mexico’s low banking penetration is a problem, but also an opportunity for Fintoc, CEO Cristóbal Griffero told TechCrunch. He expects neobanks to address the issue, but it will take time. “If we are there right before this boom, we’ll be able to grow with the market.”
Fintoc’s home market was less challenging in some ways. This helped it get quite significant traction: “In 2023, 1,807,000 people paid products, services and bills using Fintoc. This is approximately 13% of Chile’s population,” content manager Pedro Casale wrote in an email. Fintoc says it is used by more than 1.2 million people monthly in Chile.
These numbers are even more impressive considering that Fintoc faces competition from other players such as ETpay and Khipu. But its large clients mean that it is tied to frequent use cases such as topping up public transportation cards, making e-commerce purchases, covering bills and paying credit installments.
Chile’s population size, however, puts a ceiling on Fintoc’s potential growth, Griffero said. “You have the limit that we are 20 million inhabitants, so after a certain amount of revenue, it is very difficult to reach $100 million in ARR. It gets very complicated and you have to go out.”
The necessity to expand applies to any Chilean fintech. But Fintoc’s roadmap also reflects that the market has considerably changed compared to 2021.
When Griffero and co-founder Lukas Zorich joined Y Combinator’s winter 2021 batch, their pitch was pretty straightforward: They were building “Plaid for LatAm.” That’s no longer the case; Plaid’s model was too advanced for the region, and the idea to launch all across the region was too ambitious.
VCs, too, have come to the same conclusion, as Fintoc learned during its fundraising process, Griffero said.
“I believe that the funds are still here, only that their thesis has changed a little. Now you have to explain very well why [you’d go into] each country. Saying “I am X for LatAm” is no longer something appealing to investors, especially those in San Francisco, because Latin America is super fragmented and suddenly it doesn’t make sense to be in every country. So maybe it’s Mexico, Chile and one other country, not Brazil or not Colombia; not “we are going to do all of Latin America because we are close.”
This more measured approach doesn’t warrant mega-rounds. “In 2021 this round would probably have been five times larger,” Griffero said. But maybe that’s for the best; TechCrunch followed more than one unicorn having to scale back on its pan-LatAm expansion and lay off staffers as a result.
Fintoc expects a lot from its Mexican expansion. “Mexico is the market we will most care about in the next two years and we expect it will represent the bulk of Fintoc’s revenue within the next two years,” Griffol said. But the startup is taking it step by step: Out of its team of 48 employees, only five are based in Mexico. Zorich moved there last year, but Griffol might not do so until next year.
With more onerous plans, Fintoc’s Series A round may not have happened at all. In the first quarter of the year, fintech funding slowed to its lowest level since 2017, CB Insights reported. In Latin America, it’s when compared to Q2 2021 that the drop is most blatant: Fintech startups from the region collectively raised $6 billion across 94 deals then, compared to only $0.4 billion last quarter.
Funding LatAm fintech is less en vogue than three years ago. But for VCs willing to wait, the rise of open banking across the region could eventually result in interesting M&As. Not just in Brazil, where Visa shelled out $1 billion for Pismo, a payments infrastructure that will give it access to Pix, the country’s ubiquitous instant payment system. In Mexico, too: In 2021, Mastercard acquired fintech startup Arcus, whose co-founder Iñigo Rumayor participated in Fintoc’s Series A round.
Fintoc’s main investors also have connections to its target market. Brazilian fund Monashees, which previously participated in Fintoc’s seed round and has now made a follow-on investment, has an office there. And its Series A lead, Propel, is based in the U.S., but was able to facilitate introductions to Mexican banks, an important step for the startup’s expansion.
“The closer we get to the payment rails, the better payment experience we can offer,” Griffero said in a statement.
On the client side, Fintoc is targeting Mexican businesses that accept offline payment methods such as cash payments and post-pay methods, where customers must visit a physical location to complete their transaction. This makes A2A a pretty clear upgrade; but eventually, Griffero hopes it will also replace debit cards, and later on, offer a solid alternative to credit cards.
Mastercard and Visa will clearly face more competition as instant payments become commonplace with systems such as Pix in Brazil, but also UPI and India and FedNow in the U.S. A recent Bain & Company report estimates that 90% of today’s payments revenue could “migrate to software vendors, major technology firms, and other contenders.” This explains some of their past acquisitions, and we wouldn’t be surprised if others followed.
YouTube announced on Tuesday that it’s launching new Shopping features that allow creators to curate shoppable collections, better plan their shoppable videos, quickly monetize older videos and more.
The launch of the new features come as TikTok Shop is seeking to take on YouTube Shopping and other competitors in the space. TikTok is reportedly aiming to grow the size of its TikTok Shop U.S. business tenfold, to as much as $17.5 billion this year.
YouTube is launching “Shopping Collections” to allow creators to curate products from their favorite brands for users to browse through. Creators can pick a selection of products based on a theme, such as an everyday makeup look or a capsule wardrobe. The collections will appear in a creator’s product list, Store tab and video description. At launch, creators will be able to make Collections on the Studio app on their phone. YouTube plans to launch the feature on desktop soon.
Image Credits: YouTube
In addition, YouTube is launching a new Affiliate Hub in its app to make it easier for creators to find information about the latest list of Shopping partners, competitive commission rates and promo codes. Creators will also be able to use the hub to request samples from top brands. YouTube says the idea behind the new hub is to make it easier for creators to plan their next shoppable video.
YouTube is also adding Fourthwall, a website builder that helps creators build shops, to its list of integrated platforms. By allowing users to connect their Fourthwall shop, YouTube is making it easier for users to create and manage their content directly in YouTube Studio. YouTube already offers integrations with Shopify, Spreadshop and Spring.
Image Credits: YouTube
Last year, YouTube launched features that allow creators to tag products across their video library in bulk based on products added to the video’s description. YouTube is now expanding this feature to all Shopping creators. The company notes that this feature can help creators earn more revenue from their older content if it’s still getting high traffic.
As part of Tuesday’s announcement, YouTube revealed that users watched over 30 billion hours of shopping-related videos in 2023. The platform saw a 25% increase in watch time for videos that help people shop on YouTube.
Klarna is launching its credit card in the United States, the Swedish fintech giant told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview.
“It was one of our most asked for products,” said David Fock, Klarna’s chief product officer, “and will allow people to pay in the Klarna way but with a card.”
By “Klarna way,” Fock means in installments. While the company’s offerings have evolved over the years, it started out as a buy now, pay later business, giving consumers a way to spread out payments over time.
Klarna launched a credit card in the EU several years ago but this will be the first time consumers in the U.S. can apply for one.
With the Klarna credit card, the company is now competing with the likes of Apple and more recently, Robinhood as well as rival BNPL player Affirm in offering a credit card in the United States. It is partnering with Salt Lake City-based WebBank in the effort. There is no annual fee for the card, and no foreign transaction fees.
Users can earn up to 10% cash back on selected merchants when using the card in its app and the card integrates with the company’s AI assistant to find deals on planned purchases, he said. Klarna’s virtual Visa card is compatible with Google and Apple Pay.
For now, people can apply to be on a waitlist for the card, which will be rolling out in coming months. Customers can pay for purchases either in stores or online. They will have the option after the fact to spread out the payments for a larger purchase across 3 to 6 months, with an interest rate of 33.9%. Or, they can extend the due date by one month, also paying 33.9% on that purchase. While that interest rate isn’t unheard of for BNPL offerings (though it can be far lower), it is high compared to typical credit cards, which tend to be closer to 30% at the high end, according to Nerdwallet.
“We want to offer payment option flexibility but we don’t want it to be like a credit card that builds revolving credit for consumers,” Fock told TechCrunch. “We see it as a problem that the credit card debt in the U.S. is hitting record levels, and we believe our options are healthier and more sustainable.”
Affirm’s debit card also provides consumers with the flexibility to pay upfront or request to pay over time via the Affirm app. And Apple too gives the option to pay in installments (though Apple’s APR taps out at 29.49%). Where Affirm differs from BNPL cards issued by competitors is that Affirm underwrites transactions made using its debit card, according to Affirm’s head of product, Vishal Kapoor.
Like other credit cards, or other Klarna BNPL options, if users pay off their balances before they are due, they’ll avoid paying interest, Fock says. “Our customers are typically looking for the free option,” he said. “We really want this to be an extension of how customers are used to using Klarna.”
Naturally, Klarna will earn interchange revenue as well as any interest collected.
The Stockholm-based company has seen success in expanding to the U.S., telling TechCrunch in February of 2023 that the country was its biggest market by revenue. (As of last November that momentum had continued with Klarna saying it had over 37 million users in the country alone). Today, Klarna said the U.S. and Germany represent its largest markets but that “the US is gaining all the time and is often largest on a quarterly basis.”
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When IVP recently announced the closing of its 18th fund, I called Eric Liaw, a longtime general partner with the growth-stage firm, to ask a few questions. For starters, wringing $1.6 billion in capital commitments from its investors right now would seem a lot more challenging than garnering commitments during the frothier days of 2021, when IVP announced a $1.8 billion vehicle.
I also wondered about succession at IVP, whose many bets include Figma and Robinhood, and whose founder and earlier investors still loom large at the firm — both figuratively and literally. A recent Fortune story noted that pictures of firm founder Reid Dennis remain scattered “in all sorts of places throughout IVP’s San Francisco office.” Meanwhile, pictures of Todd Chaffee, Norm Fogelsong and Sandy Miller — former general partners who are now “advisory partners” — are mixed in with the firm’s general partners on the firm’s website, which, visually at least, makes less room for the current generation.
Not last, I wanted to talk with Liaw about Klarna, a portfolio company that made headlines last month when a behind-the-scenes disagreement over who should sit on its board spilled into public view. Below are parts of our chat, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the longer conversation as a podcast here.
Congratulations on your new fund. Now you can relax for a couple of months! Was the fundraising process any more or less difficult this time given the market?
It’s really been a choppy period throughout. If you really rewind the clock, back in 2018 when we raised our 16th fund, it was a “normal” environment. We raised a slightly bigger one in 2021, which was not a normal environment. One thing we’re glad we didn’t do was raise an excessive amount of capital relative to our strategy, and then deploy it all very quickly, which other folks in our industry did. So [we’ve been] pretty consistent.
Did you take any money from Saudi Arabia? Doing so has become more acceptable, more widespread. I’m wondering if [Public Investment Fund] is a new or existing LP.
We don’t typically comment on our LP base, but we don’t have capital from that region.
Speaking of regions, you were in the Bay Area for years. You have two degrees from Stanford. You’re now in London. When and why did you make that move?
We moved about eight months ago. I’ve actually been in the Bay Area since I was 18, when I came to Stanford for undergrad. That’s more years ago than I care to admit at this point. But for us, expansion to Europe was an organic extension of a strategy we’ve been pursuing. We made our first investment in Europe back in 2006, in Helsinki, Finland, in a company called MySQL that was acquired subsequently by Sun [Microsystems] for a billion dollars when that was not run-of-the-mill. Then, in 2013, we invested in Supercell, which is also based in Finland. In 2014, we became an investor in Klarna. And [at this point], our European portfolio today is about 20 companies or so; it’s about 20% of our active portfolio, spread over 10 different countries. We felt like putting some feet on the ground was the right move.
There has been a lot of drama around Klarna. What did you make of The Information’s reports about [former Sequoia investor] Michael Moritz versus Matt Miller, the Sequoia partner who was more recently representing the firm and has since been replaced by another Sequoia partner, Andrew Reed?
We’re smaller investors in Klarna. We aren’t active in the board discussions. We’re excited about their business performance. In many ways, they’ve had the worst of both worlds. They file publicly. They’re subject to a lot of scrutiny. Everyone sees their numbers, but they don’t have the currency [i.e., that a publicly traded company enjoys]. I think [CEO and co-founder] Sebastian [Siemiatkowski] is now much more open about the fact that they’ll be a public entity at some point in the not-too-distant future, which we’re excited about. The reporting, I guess if accurate, I can’t get behind the motivations. I don’t know exactly what happened. I’m just glad that he put it behind them and can focus on the business.
You and I have talked about different countries and some of their respective strengths. We’ve talked about consumer startups. It brings to mind the social network BeReal in France, which is reportedly looking for Series C funding right now or else it might sell. Has IVP kicked the tires on that company?
We’ve researched them and spoken to them in the past and we aren’t currently an investor, so I don’t have a lot of visibility into what their current strategy is. I think social is hard; the prize is massive, but the path to get there is pretty hard. I do think every few years, companies are able to establish a foothold even with the strength of Facebook-slash-Meta. Snap continues to have a strong pull; we invested in Snap pretty early on. Discord has carved out some space in the market for themselves. Obviously, TikTok has done something pretty transformational around the world. So the prize is big but it’s hard to get there. That’s part of the challenge of the fund, investing in consumer apps, which we’ve done, [figuring out] which of these rocket ships has enough fuel to break through the atmosphere and which will come back down to earth.
Regarding your new fund, that Fortune story noted that the firm isn’t named after founder Reid Dennis as proof that it was built to outlive him. Yet it also noted there are pictures of Dennis everywhere, and others of the firm’s past partners, and now advisers, are very prominently featured on IVP’s site. IVP talks about making room for younger partners; I do wonder if that’s actually happening.
I would say without question, it’s happening. We have a strong culture and tradition of providing people in their careers the opportunity to move up in the organization to the highest echelons of the general partnership. I’m fortunate to be an example of that. Many of my partners are, as well. It’s not exclusively the path at the firm, but it’s a real opportunity that people have.
We don’t have a managing partner and we don’t have a CEO. We’ve had people enter the firm, serve the firm and our LPs, and also as they get to a different point in their lives and careers, take a step back and move on to different things, which by definition does create more room and responsibility for people who are younger and now are reaching that prime age in their careers to help carry the institution forward.
Can I ask: do those advisers still receive carry?
You can ask, but I don’t want to get into economics or things along that dimension. So I’ll quietly decline [that question]. But we do value their inputs and advice and their contributions to the firm over many years.
There’s obviously a valuation reset going on for every company seemingly that’s not a large language model company, which is a lot of companies. I’d guess that gives you easier access to top companies, but also hurts some of your existing portfolio companies. How is the firm navigating through it all?
I think in terms of companies that are raising money, the ones that are most promising will always have a choice, and there will always be competition for those rounds and thus those rounds and the valuations associated with them will always feel expensive. I don’t think anyone has ever reached a great venture outcome feeling like, “Man, I got a steal on that deal.” You always feel slightly uncomfortable. But the belief in what the company can become offsets that feeling of discomfort. That’s part of the fun of the job.
Jio Financial Services, part of the Indian conglomerate Reliance, is forming a joint venture with U.S. asset manager BlackRock to set up a wealth management and broking business in India, the two firms said Monday.
The announcement follows BlackRock and Jio Financial launching a joint venture last year to offer asset management services in India. The two companies plan to invest $150 million each in the joint venture, they said last year. That joint venture is awaiting the Indian market regulator’s approval.
The expansion of BlackRock and Jio Financial’s partnership underscores Reliance’s growing ambitions in the financial services sector. The $237 billion Indian firm already leads the nation’s refinery, retail and telecom sectors. (India’s central bank doesn’t permit tycoons to receive the banking license.)
Jio Financial Services said in a report last year that it was taking a direct-to-customer approach, using alternate data models for personalized offerings and a unified app for diverse customer financial needs, to cut costs and tailor interactions.
Since its public debut in August, Jio Financial Services has already expanded to insurance and lending businesses.
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