TechCrunch |
- Coinbase taps former Snap India head in emerging markets push
- Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire on competition and conviction in crypto venture — ‘A lot of VCs… are going to pull back’
- Getting to the bottom of UiPath’s plunging valuation
| Coinbase taps former Snap India head in emerging markets push Posted: 01 May 2022 03:01 PM PDT Coinbase has hired Durgesh Kaushik, the former head of Snap India, as the global cryptocurrency exchange looks to expand its reach in emerging markets including India, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed. Kaushik is joining Coinbase as Senior Director for Market Expansion and is tasked with helping the company with its launch in India and several other markets in the Asia Pacific region, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. Reached for comment over the weekend, the company confirmed the development and said Kaushik will be joining the firm on May 9. "We're excited to confirm that Durgesh Kaushik will be joining Coinbase on May 9 as our Senior Director for Market Expansion,” said Nana Murugesan, VP of International, Business Development and Partnerships at Coinbase, in a statement provided to TechCrunch by a company spokesperson. Murugesan added: “[Kaushik’s] appointment to this global leadership role is an important step toward our entry in India, as well as our mission to increase economic freedom around the world. Beyond his initial focus on our India launch, Durgesh will draw from his extensive experience to also support our entry into other markets in APAC, EMEA, and the Americas as laid out in our recent blog post on our global expansion strategy.” Kaushik — who has previously worked at firms including Facebook and hyperlocal delivery service Dunzo and also co-founded a social-video platform — is widely credited in helping Snap turn around its position in India. Under his leadership, the company grew its India’s monthly active user base to about 130 million, according to mobile insight firm Data.ai (formerly known as App Annie), up from about 30 million when Kaushik joined the firm in April of 2019. He was tasked to help the social media platform grow to 100 million users by Q1 or Q2 2021, according to an executive who has engaged with Snap officials. Kaushik announced his departure from Snap last month. The appointment of Kaushik comes at a time when Coinbase is scrambling to, and in many ways feeling a tad helpless in, making its eponymous cryptocurrency exchange service operational in India. The publicly listed firm announced the launch of Coinbase in India to much fanfare last month. Coinbase last month launched in India with support for UPI, a payments railroad built by a coalition of retail banks that has become the most popular way Indians transact online today. But the same day the National Payments Corporation of India, the payments body that oversees UPI, threw a curveball at the firm by asserting that it was not aware of any crypto exchange using UPI. Three days later, Coinbase suspended the support for UPI from the app and currently its users in the country have no means to top their fiat currency. The NPCI, which is a special unit of India’s central bank (the Reserve Bank of India), and the RBI continue to informally put pressure on banks into creating friction with crypto-related transactions despite India’s Supreme Court lifting the RBI-imposed ban on cryptocurrency trading three years ago, according to an executive at a cryptocurrency exchange. Indian newspaper the Economic Times reported late last month that several banks have approached and questioned the NPCI on its “shadow banning” of cryptocurrency-related transactions and are seeking a formal directive. Reacting to the news piece, Brian Armstrong, co-founder and chief executive, said: “Tough questions, and good questions, for NPCI and RBI in India. Is their “shadow ban” a violation of the supreme court ruling?” Murugesan said the company is also looking to hire a new regional managing director for India and South Asia. |
| Posted: 01 May 2022 02:45 PM PDT As crypto continues its wild rise, storied venture firm Sequoia is not just competing with the a16z’s of the world but with a rising crop of crypto native venture funds that are seeing their assets balloon and their influence upend the traditional venture hierarchies. In a conversation on TechCrunch’s new web3 podcast Chain Reaction, Sequoia crypto partner Shaun Maguire talked about the firm’s commitment to the sector, regulatory challenges and what plenty of crypto investors still don’t understand. Earlier this year, Sequoia announced a $500 to $600 million sub-fund dedicated exclusively to buying up cryptocurrencies. The firm has made a number of equity investments in crypto startups over the years including Fireblocks and FTX, but while Andreessen Horowitz was early to commit to a dedicated crypto fund in 2018, Sequoia has continued made its equity investments through its general funds. While the crypto industry continues to mint new unicorn startups, the rapid cooling of public market tech stocks has threatened to stall growth in the emerging category, which has still proven awfully susceptible to macro conditions. In our conversation, Maguire emphasized his belief that plenty of other funds dipping their toes into crypto “are going to pull back” when the market grows less frothy, but he believes that Sequoia has already committed to a lengthy relationship with the sector — “we have permanent intentions.” “Sequoia is very deliberate with everything we do and we spend huge amounts of time debating every strategy change, everything, we debate every seed investment to sometimes excruciating detail, but it helps us make really good decisions and make decisions as a team rather than as individuals,” Maguire tells us. “When we make a decision to do something, it doesn’t happen unless the whole team is behind the decision. So that’s what you’ve seen get unleashed with crypto over the last 18 months, we went from it being some people with really, strong positive views, to the whole firm being completely behind it.” The crypto category has dealt with plenty of skeptics, some in the venture capital community, who believe that the sector’s benefits are being oversold and that the web3 promise of decentralization is just smoke and mirrors. “I am an absolute crypto maxi, but I think there are a lot of things that are misunderstood by the masses today,” Maguire said. “Decentralization is not a silver bullet that just solves all problems and is better for everything. You know for the vast majority of compute, you want it to be centralized. For a lot of decision making, centralization can be better for certain types of decisions.” Maguire said that more important than decentralization for its own sake, is the ability of users to “be able to leave with their identity and data,” an effort which should protect consumers from platform overreach. While decentralization allows for a certain type of consumer protections, Maguire still contends that the rulebook of traditional investor protections shouldn’t be thrown out. “One of the tensions I have in my head is that I think people sometimes forget that a lot of the consumer protections put in place by US law were won out of hard-fought lessons over like a century. And there’s a lot of wisdom in there,” Maguire says. “In some ways, one way to view what’s happening in crypto right now is it’s almost like throwing all the old rules out and starting with a blank canvas.. I think what we’re seeing is a lot of the crypto community is actually coming back in 90% of the situations and realizing that, ‘Oh, actually, the way things were done in the past was actually pretty good and got there for an optimal reason,’ But 10% is like radically different and… you can kind of meaningfully improve the whole system by getting some of those things right.” You can listen to the entire interview with Maguire on our podcast, Chain Reaction. Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple, Spotify or your alternative podcast platform of choice to keep up with us every week. |
| Getting to the bottom of UiPath’s plunging valuation Posted: 01 May 2022 11:00 AM PDT Just over a year ago, UiPath was among the most favored startups in the world. Last February the company raised a massive $750 million round at a staggering $35 billion valuation. The robotic process automation, or RPA company, was firing on all cylinders. By the time that UiPath went public in April of last year, its final private price looked a bit, well, pricey. The company's early IPO price range was underneath its last valuation, but after raising that range and pricing above it, the unicorn was still valued at a modest deficit to that $35 billion figure. During its first day's trading however, the company managed to crest the price set by its round worth three-quarters of a billion dollars. TechCrunch chatted with the company's CFO about its method of going public at that time, and the timing of its debut for more context; the executive praised the ability to attract new investors in a traditional offering, instead of the more trendy direct listing option. UiPath's value shot to as much as $90 per share, pushing its valuation to around $43 billion per YCharts data. Since then, however, things have gone poorly for UiPath, at least in valuation terms. The company was down over 3% at $18.29 per share on Friday afternoon, bringing its valuation under $10 billion. From red-hot unicorn to uneven IPO, to strong early trading, to a painful descent — what went wrong with UiPath? TechCrunch has two hypotheses: The first being that the company simply got caught up in a broad repricing of technology revenues by public-market investors; this is not a new story, and if it explains the UiPath valuation declines would put the technology concern in good company. However, there could also be a technology-related explanation at play, as well. And, of course, both factors could be at play at once. To understand what may have happened with UiPath's disappearing valuation, let's first talk numbers and then riff on the tech side of the coin! Did UiPath just get hit by the market's technology repricing?UiPath remains a company on the move. In the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2022 — in English, the three months ending January 31, 2022 — the RPA market leader reported revenues of $289.7 million in total revenue and a quarter-ending annual recurring revenue (ARR) figure of $925.3 million. From those data points you can see how the public markets have changed their mind about the value of software revenue. |
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