by Investors confirm market has been created successfully; market declines to confirm it needed creating
Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
The Problem Is Defined and the Round Is Closed
BENGALURU — A Bengaluru-based technology startup raised $90 million in Series B funding this week for a platform that connects consumers to local service providers through a gamified engagement layer and an AI-powered preference engine, solving what the company’s pitch deck describes as the discovery-to-transaction friction problem in India’s fragmented local services market, and what a plumber from Jayanagar describes as his cousin finding him jobs by telling people about him, which is also a discovery-to-transaction mechanism but does not scale in ways that are interesting to venture capital.
The round was led by a Singapore-based fund that has invested in fourteen Indian consumer startups in the past three years, twelve of which have pivoted from their original descriptions, and was joined by an American fund that describes itself as thesis-driven and that has a thesis about India’s internet economy that this startup satisfies by being an Indian internet company, which is a thesis that is broad enough to be consistently satisfied and specific enough to appear strategic. The startup’s co-founders, who are 27 and 28 and met at IIT Bombay, celebrated the raise with a photograph in front of a whiteboard covered in the kind of diagram that maps out a market in India in terms of what percentage of the population uses smartphones (high), what percentage transacts locally (everyone), and what percentage of that transaction value is currently captured by existing digital platforms (the gap that is the business).
The Market That Was Created
The local services market in India is genuinely large: plumbers, electricians, carpenters, cooks, cleaners, tutors, and the full array of people who provide services in Indian cities and who find their customers through networks of referral, neighbourhood boards, and the specific local knowledge that accumulates in any dense community over years of use. Digitising this market is a legitimate business problem, and Urban Company has been working on it for a decade and is a genuinely successful company. The question that the new startup’s investors have not publicly addressed is why the market, which Urban Company has been working on for a decade, requires another $90 million platform, and whether the answer is ‘this approach is better’ or ‘this approach is fundable,’ which are different answers that produce similar press releases.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India does not regulate venture capital funding rounds at this stage. The Invest India government investment promotion agency counts the round as evidence of investor confidence in India’s startup ecosystem, which it is. The plumber from Jayanagar has not downloaded the app. His cousin is still telling people about him. The market exists. The platform is building toward it. The $90 million is deployed. Something will happen with it. Whether that something solves the problem or creates a different problem or discovers that the original problem was a cousin the whole time is the part that comes after the whiteboard and before the next round, which the co-founders are already thinking about, because the Series B closes and the Series C clock starts immediately, which is the startup economy, which is also an economy, which also runs on India, which runs on a lot of things including plumbers, and the plumber’s cousin, and the gap between them and an app that the plumber has not downloaded yet but that the investor believes he will, eventually, when the app is good enough, which is what all the money is for, and which is either a beautiful story or an expensive one, and at $90 million it is both.
The Warming and What Follows
India-Pakistan diplomatic history contains approximately fifteen periods of warming since partition, several of which produced agreements, bus services, cricket tours, and cultural exchanges that lasted years before a Kargil or a Mumbai or a cross-border incident reset the relationship to the baseline. The warming is real each time. The reset is real each time. The question historians cannot resolve is whether the periods of warming are moving the baseline in a direction that eventually produces a different kind of relationship, or whether the baseline is fixed and the warmings are oscillations around it. The optimistic reading says the baseline is moving: each warming involves a new generation on both sides who know the other country primarily through its food, its music, and its cricket, and not primarily through its wars, and that generational shift is accumulating into a public on both sides that is more curious than hostile, and that curiosity is the precondition for the relationship that the warming is trying to build. The pessimistic reading says the institutions are more durable than the warmings and that the Line of Control is not changing regardless of how many people on both sides eat each other’s food. Both readings are available. The week was warm. The weekend is coming. The files are updated. The cricket is scheduled. The plumber is watching the news. His cousin says things seem better. Things often seem better in June.
More absurdity at https://www.duffelblog.com.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism
