Namaste, Sat Sri Akaal, and Salaam. 🫡

Happy morning, folks. 🙏

Today we’re diving into -
- Coinbase’s full exit from the Indian market,
- Saudi’s renewed appetite for desi dhamaka,
- And a logistics startup’s $30mn round.

Our read time today is 4 minutes and 57 seconds - faster than Dadi breaks the chai-pakode out on a rainy afternoon. 🍜

Let's dive in. 👇

Market Vibe Check

Coinbase gets shivers from Indian regulations. 🥶

TLDR -
- Coinbase is discontinuing ALL new services in India.
- Management says they “are still committed”, but this move says otherwise.
- Troubles with regulators have been ROCKETING over the last 2 years.

For the last 5 years, crypto in India has been in limbo.

Not in regulatory heaven, not in regulatory hell - but floating somewhere in the middle and refusing to be acknowledged by the law.

Coinbase seems to be frustrated by this, so they’re packing their bags and “discontinuing all services“ in India.

There are a few standout incidents -
- Coinbase launched the ability to buy crypto with UPI, but regulators literally refused to acknowledge them. 72 hours later, the product was scrapped.
- In May last year, they were forced to halt trading for Indian clients after the Reserve Bank put some pressure.
- Reports have surfaced of Coinbase employees trying to communicate with lawmakers, but simply getting ignored/ghosted!

The absurdity gets worse when you take into account that Coinbase has spent over $250 MILLION in India to build a crypto ecosystem.

They are lead investors in India’s top 2 crypto exchanges and have backed tens of startups under their Coinbase Ventures arm.

Maybe it’s just about crypto, but other big tech companies might get rubbed the wrong way because of this.

Motabhai on top. 🔝

Saudi Arabia shows some appetite for Indian markets. 📈

TLDR -
- Saudi has committed publicly to opening an office in India for it’s $800bn state fund.
- They want to allocate hefty chunks of cash - but still want some diversity and exposure.
- Modi is moving FAST on the “make in India” side of things.

India is the fastest growing economy in Asia.

Saudi Arabia is the fastest growing economy in the Middle East.

And Mohammed bin Salman is on his Saudi state visit to India, and there are some amazing things in the pipeline.

For one, Saudi will be setting up it’s state investment fund PIF in India.

When you manage a corpus of money that large, your only job is to follow the yield.

India offers Saudi the diversity of a Western market with the explosive growth of an emerging one.

There’s also gonna be some regulatory hurdles waived for Saudi businesses who want to invest in India.

Literally welcoming the world with open arms.

Saudi’s Sheikhs 🤝 Gujjubhai Modi

PS, Indian Leader of the House Piyush Goyal called Saudi’s investment minister “Khalid bhai”, and they had a good chuckle about it. 😂

Logistics startup snaps up $30mn. 🤔

TLDR -
- A logistics company Kale, just picked up $30mn to scale their functionality.
- They digitize paper processes for shipping and logistics companies.
- The real money is in boring businesses.

Another example of how SaaS is eating the world…

Normal logistics handling and cargo shipping requires tons of co-ordination between tens (sometimes hundreds!) of 3rd parties.

This usually leads to paperwork being copy-pasted and needlessly reciprocated for the exact same shipment.

Kale literally does nothing but digitize these boring paper processes. No more time wasted organizing paperwork and no more duplication of the same papers.

They just picked up $30 million to expand their functionalities - which is another great thing about SaaS.

Once the actual software is built, there is literally no cost other than your advertising/marketing.

You just have to be a killer salesman…

In other news… ☕

Google pays out over $10b/year to be the top search engine (FT)

Dubai real estate prices cross the highest ever amount in a decade (BBG)

Paytm tries hopping on the AI boom (Inc42)

Birkenstock (premium chappals company) files for an IPO in the US (BBG)

India gets a very underwhelming 3.5% discount on the iPhone (TC)

And that’s the tea the chai for today.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoyed it. Have a mauj-masti filled day.

Lots of ❤️,

Team Cutting Chai