Namaste, Sat Sri Akaal, and Salaam. 🫡

Happy morning, folks. 🙏

Today we’re diving into -
- Dunzo’s $35mn penny pinched emergency round,
- Bolt’s $20mn raise to build India’s EV network,
- And JP Morgan’s move into Indian bonds.

Our read time today is 4 minutes and 52 seconds - faster than you can dig into a choti-waali 5-star. ⭐

Let's dive in. 👇

Market Vibe Check

Dunzo dhamaal continues with a $35mn investment. 💸

TLDR -
- Dunzo has missed salary payouts, vendor payments, and loan deadlines because they're cash strapped.
- They'll be picking up $35mn from Google and Reliance Retail.
- The only profitable arm of their business is B2B - and investors wanna see a hard pivot towards it.

Dunzo is a 10-min grocery delivery startup, and the last few months have been HELL for them.

They've stopped paying salaries, missed important vendor payments, and put customer experience in the bin.

To get out of this mess, they're trying to raise some money - $35 million from Google and Reliance Retail.

Since it's a “distressed” raise, the price tag is gonna be heavily discounted - probably in the $800 million range.

Cash has been tight because of two big reasons - the fall of 10min delivery, and money mismanagement.

Dunzo spent way too much money chasing the quick-commerce dream, and that meant they had less resources to focus on other, more profitable opportunities.

The only arm of their business that actually makes money is (ironically) their B2B segment - where they offer delivery and logistics solutions.

Now investors are running behind the management with a MASSIVE figurative danda, since they want to see a pivot towards this profitable business.

Golmaal hai bhai sab golmaal hai…

Bolt picks up $20mn at a $100mn valuation. ⚡

TLDR -
- Bolt is an EV solution provider, and they raised $20mn to build out their network.
- Infrastructure (not cost) has forever been, and probs will continue to be the biggest hurdle to EV ownership.
- There are gonna be bigger and bigger pushes from the government to further the electric agenda and hit their 17m/year EVs by target by 2030.

Owning an EV in India has always been a hassle - charging points are very few and far, and the infra just isn’t there yet.

But things are changing - a startup called Bolt just picked up $20 million to fix this.

Bolt is the largest provider of EV solutions in India, with 20k+ individual charging points and over a lakh users per month.

This is an industry that's growing SUPER fast.

Modiji & Co. are pushing the EV agenda, which means billions in subsidies help serious players 10X their growth.

Government wants Indian manufacturing to hit 17mn cars/year by 2030, so you can guarantee all sorts of sarkari support in seducing automakers to go electric.

Nothing beats the roar of petrol-powered, heavily polluting gaddiyaan, but EVs definitely are the future 🙈

JP Morgan adds Indian bonds to their EM indices. 📈

Jamie Dimon out in New York has decided to include Indian government debt in their Emerging Markets index.

This could be decently big stuff - since it opens the door to as ~10% of the $236 billion of assets at funds that follow the EM index and its smaller offshoots.

That’s $24 billion in inflows…

In other news… ☕

Amazon gets ready to infuse $4bn into Anthropic AI (BBG)

Lego isn’t gonna be making oil-free bricks (FT)

Hackers nab $200 million from Mixin, a crypto business (TC)

MTNL telco heads for a $400 million bond issue (Mint)

KukuFM clocks an 8X surge in top-line (Inc42)

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