Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart has hit the market to raise about $1 billion at up to $30 billion valuation in a pre-IPO financing round, two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The Bangalore-based startup, which sold majority stake to Walmart in 2018, initiated fundraise possibilities with some investors earlier this year and has since grown more serious and hired bankers.
In recent months, the company has also internally discussed pushing its public listing timeline to early next year, the people said, requesting anonymity as details are private. (The firm still intends to file for an IPO later this year. A [...]
from Connie Loizos
Even the most sanguine industry observer has to be stunned at times by the pace of dealmaking right now. Not quite halfway through 2021, startups are routinely closing new rounds just months apart and sometimes seeing their valuations triple and even quadruple with every new round.
Maybe they will all become trillion-dollar companies. It's more likely, however, that they will not, which is where year-old Caplight comes in. Led by Javier Avalos, a former investment banker who recently spent more than three years with the secondaries platform Forge, Caplight is developing tech to enable institutional investors to [...]
Serialized fiction app Radish will be acquired by Kakao Entertainment in a transaction valued at $440 million. Kakao Entertainment is owned by Kakao, the South Korean internet giant whose services include its eponymous messaging platform. Radish founder Seungyoon Lee will hold onto his role as its chief executive officer, while also becoming Kakao Entertainment's global strategy officer to lead its growth in international markets.
Radish claims millions of users in North America, and the acquisition will help Kakao Entertainment expand its own webtoons and web novel business there, and in other English-speaking markets. Radish will retain management autonomy and continue [...]
Toyota has tapped Japanese company ENEOS to help develop the hydrogen fuel cell system that will power its futuristic prototype city Woven City.
The vision for the 175-acre city, where people will live and work amongst all of Toyota's projects, including its autonomous e-Palette shuttles and robots, is to build a fully connected ecosystem powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
Woven Planet, the innovation-focused subsidiary of Toyota that is in charge of the project, announced Monday that ENEOS, a Japanese petroleum company that's investing heavily into hydrogen, will help make Toyota's “human-centered” city of the future. This new partnership not only signifies Toyota's [...]
More investors are joining the wave to bet on lidar, the remote sensing method that uses laser light to measure distances and has garnered ample interest from automakers in recent times. But it's also a technology that has long been scorned by Elon Musk partly due to its once exorbitant costs.
Innovusion, a five-year-old lidar company and a supplier to Chinese electric car upstart Nio, just landed a Series B funding round of $64 million. The new proceeds boost its total investment to over $100 million, not a small amount but the startup is in a race crowded with much [...]
from Richard Black, Steve Smith & Thomas Hale, The Conversation
