Elon Musk is now the richest man on the planet – Tesla shares are skyrocketing and aren’t showing any signs coming back down to earth. And even though others have already caught up to the quality of its cars, Tesla still has one more “young and restless” ace up its sleeve.
The Rockaway Capital investment group is sending another of its start-ups out into the world and selling its stake in the Techloop.io tech start-up, in which it invested in 2017 and 2018. Techloop will become part of LMC, which is part of the Finnish Alma Media Group. Both parties agreed to refrain from providing details of the transaction.
Tech startup Storyous, which is part of the portfolio of the Rockaway Capital investment group and provides cash register systems and operations management to restaurants, has a new strategic investor: SaltPay, a leading European FinTech player that provides innovative and complete payment solutions for businesses and a related payment eco-system.
Brian Chesky in a suit on the front page of the Financial Times: yes, it’s here, the long-awaited, then postponed and now re-announced Airbnb IPO on NASDAQ, at a share price of U$ 68. Through this emission, the company will receive U$ 3.4 billion, giving the company a total market cap of U$ 40.6 billion. Seven percent of shares will be allocated to the hosts who rent their apartments, rooms, villas and wigwams through Airbnb. That’s of course a smart move that will ensure their loyalty to the platform and a stable selection of accommodations for guests.
At first glance it seems simple. You click a few times in an application, get a phone call from a courier who runs up to the fifth floor do give you bags full of groceries, and your shopping is done. Thanks to the pandemic, thousands of new customers have learned to shop on Košík.cz, our on-line supermarket, because they’ve realized that visiting an e-shop is significantly more convenient than a brick-and-mortar one. And that it saves tons of time.
Two companies in the Rockaway portfolio have fought their way into Deloitte’s Fast 50 Central Europe for 2020, a list of the fifty fastest-growing tech companies in Central Europe – the Gjirafa content and e-commerce platform took 11th place, and Brno start-up ThreatMark 32nd place. The list monitored revenue growth over four years during 2016-2019, which was 1509 % for Gjirafa and 783 % for ThreatMark.
These are truly trying times for restaurateurs. Only slightly over half of restaurants are open, and in October revenues in the industry dropped by 49 % compared to last year. The only options now available to keep a restaurant going are to have a take-out window or deliver food to customers’ homes. However, the most popular delivery services often operate on terms that make it untenable for many restaurants to work with them. Storyous, which focuses of developing technologies for the restaurant industry, and Zdeněk Pohlreich, a popular chef and owner of of several successful restaurants, have therefore come up with an alternative platform, OneMenu.cz, which is built on fairness to customers, delivery services, and especially restaurants. The project’s delivery partner is successful Czech transport company Liftago.
Originally I wanted to comment on the IPO of Chinese company Ant Group. Just a week ago, it seemed that a new record would be set, or rather a number of new records. Ant, the fintech group owned by Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, announced that on November 5th its shares would start trading on the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges, where it had decided to launch the largest IPO of all time and collect U$ 34.4 billion from investors.
Sustainability is a very frequent topic in international financial publications. In the Czech Republic, it’s usually looked upon as some kind of hobby for a handful of naive enthusiasts, but that depends on whom you’re talking to. The younger that person is, the more likely they are to prefer sustainability even at the expense of other criteria such as profitability or absolute growth.
Through the eyes of the restaurant business, this year is really not looking like a good one. Restaurant revenues are a quarter of what they once, and they have to fight for every customer. But when I look around, I can’t shake the impression that in many cases they’re fighting a losing battle. And yet they don’t have to. For several years now, Rockaway Capital has had a couple of companies in its portfolio that have perfectly merged two important ingredients: the restaurant industry and digitalization. And as the group’s investment partner, I can say with a clear conscience that no matter what, this is the road we have to take, my dear restaurateurs. Even if it means spending a few sleepless nights over your laptop. And as they say, yesterday was too late.
