Namaste, Sat Sri Akaal, and Salaam. 🫡

Hope aal izz well.

Today we’re diving into -
- Ola Electric’s IPO filing (at an $8 billion price tag),
- Hyperloop’s crazy bankruptcy,
- and code.org’s WHJ lawsuit.

Our read time is 4 minutes and 57 seconds - faster than I broke my promise to myself when I said I wouldn’t watch anymore cricket… 💀

Let's dive in. 👇

Market Vibe Check

Ola Electric charges up for an $8 billion IPO. 🙈

TLDR -
- Ola Electric just filed their IPO papers, with a $8bn valuation target.
- They’re gonna raise $210mn, with the founder pocketing $100mn of this if all goes well.
- Ola-E will be spending close to $400mn post-IPO to beef up their business.

EV investors across the world have gotten an early Christmas present courtesy Ola Electric, who just submitted their IPO filing.

They’re on the hunt for $210 million in fresh cash against a valuation of $8-8.5 billion. The final details are gonna be ironed out early next year.

This is decently optimistic, when you consider the fact that their (much bigger) competitors TVS and Hero Motocorp have market caps of $11.2bn and $9.4bn respectively.

$200mn of the $210mn raise is gonna be earmarked for some CRAZY R&D moves. They’re combining this with their existing cash pool and spending heavy -
- $204mn for a fresh battery plant and the initial operating kharcha
- $100mn to repay debt lol
- $30mn on improved charging infrastructure pan-India
- $12mn on more retail stores and physical presence (jo dikhta, woh bikta)

Interesting caveat - more than half the shares being sold in this fundraise belong to the founder, Bhavish Aggarwal. If Ola does manage to sell $210mn of shares, he’s gonna pocket $100mn in cash. Not a bad payoff.

Hyperloop gets sucked into the vacuum they tried creating. 🚅

TLDR -
- Hyperloop, the fabled “traffic murdering solution” is shutting down after going bankrupt.
- They picked up over $450mn (all gone) and will be laying off around 250 direct employees and 500 more indirect ones.
- Pretty big write-off for DP World, Virgin, and all their other big investors.

Hyperloop came in with big dreams - to revolutionize travel by packing us inside a capsule inside a vacuum’ed tube, then pinging us back and forth with magnets at high speeds.

Despite how cool this sounds (and Abu Dhabi <> Dubai in 15 mins!), Hyperloop is unfortunately shutting down.

They’ve raised over $450mn since founding, most of which is now irrecoverable. Whatever test tracks were built are now being sold for pennies on the dollar so that investors can at least get a return of (you guessed it) pennies on the dollar.

Hyperloop was even briefly called “Virgin Hyperloop” when Richard Branson invested, but he took Virgin’s name off the company when they desperately pivoted to focus on cargo transportation over human transportation.

Maybe one day, someone else will have the guts to kill traffic for good… 🙈

BYJU’s badmashi continues… 🤦

If you thought that the BYJU’s team learnt something from the hundreds of lawsuits, millions of angry messages, and thousands of customers - think again.

They just got served a $4mn lawsuit from US-based code.org, who are apparently owed the same amount for having their platform white-labeled and licensed in India.

This adds to their existing issues -
- founder had to sell 2 Dubai houses to pay salaries
- investors wrote down stakes from $22bn to $3bn
- regulatory bodies started looking into customer complaints more seriously
- enforcement directorate raided their main office hunting for evidence of money laundering and fraud
- Byju (the founder) apparently pigeonholed himself in his DXB apartment and started crying 😭😭😭

Crazy how it's gotten this bad... 💀

In other news… ☕

Total banking job cuts cross the 60,000 mark (FT)

Hackers stole $2bn in crypto this year (TC)

Santa Rally is real, S&P500 is within a whisker of it’s all-time high (NYT)

Twitter gets sued over unpaid bonuses (NYT)

CZ from Binance made over $25bn this year despite getting the boot (BBG)

And that’s the tea the chai for today.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoyed it.

Lots of ❤️,

Team CC