TELECOM

Ultra Reliant

India’s Reliance Jio Platforms is having a global moment. The 3.5-year-old telecom is a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, India’s largest publicly traded company. Jio Platforms has huge ambitions, and high-profile backers are coming along for the ride, investing over $10 billion into the Indian telecom in under a month. 

Microsoft could be next. The Seattle company is in talks to invest up to $2 billion in Jio Platforms, Indian newspaper Mint reported last week. 

About that bandwagon...

On April 21, Facebook announced a $5.7 billion investment for a 9.99% interest. Over the next few weeks, Jio took in $1.5 billion from Vista Equity Partners, $750 million from Silver Lake, $1.5 billion from KKR, and $870 million from General Atlantic. 

Mubadala, Abu Dhabi’s state investment fund, is in talks to invest $1 billion as well, per Reuters. Google has also held discussions with Jio Platforms, but is currently focused on investing in a rival—Vodafone’s Indian operation, the FT reported last week. 

Jio Platform’s story

The telecom tapped into India’s booming mobile industry by offering cheap pricing for 4G subscriptions. The gambit paid off, and Jio Platforms quickly became India’s largest telecom operator with over 388 million subscribers. Many of these mobile users came online for the first time via Jio Platform’s services. 

In addition to operating a nationwide network, Jio Platforms also offers mobile, e-commerce, and payments services—and has a new war chest to build out 5G networks. 

Bottom line: Big Tech is interested in taking a stake in Jio Platforms because it gives them a beachhead in India; with 600 million users, the country is the world’s second largest internet market to China.

AUTOMATION

News on Automatic

Microsoft is automating part of its news service. The company laid off about 50 U.S. editors and news staffers, Business Insider reported Friday, and 27 U.K. contractors, The Guardian reported Saturday. 

• As of two years ago, Microsoft News had over 800 editors in 50 locations around the world. 

AI will partially take over the news curation tasks. “I spend all my time reading about how automation and AI is going to take all our jobs, and here I am—AI has taken my job,” one staffer told The Guardian. 

Automation in news aggregation and curation has accelerated over the last decade. But delegating language and sentiment analysis to algorithms can be a risky move, as Microsoft learned with its Tay AI chatbot in 2016. Other services, from Facebook’s mobile app to HBO streaming apps, emphasize human oversight in media/news curation. 

Zoom out: Don’t want social media algorithms to serve you the news? Rest assured, the Brew’s curation is algorithm-free.

SPONSORED BY MASTERWORKS

No Hyperbole

A single painting sold for $450M. Total art value is expected to grow by over $900B in the next six years. The price of works of art by famous artists are skyrocketing—nobody saw it coming. Except one company.

Masterworks were the first to turn the $1.7T art market into an investable asset class for all. They’ve spent thousands of man hours putting together the most comprehensive dataset of valuation so you can outsmart even the most savvy art collectors: billionaire CEOs and hedge fund titans.

Unlike traditional art investing, where you’re forced to hold the painting for 3–7 years before you can sell it, they let you trade individual shares to other members, just like stocks. So you can take advantage of the surging demand for art without having to spend millions.

Sound awesome? That’s because it is. And if you act fast you can skip the 25,000-person waitlist by .

TRENDS

The Top 25

What were the fastest growing Software as a Service (SaaS) companies in the first half of May? We partnered with analytics firm SimilarWeb to find out. The top 25 list was determined by month over month increases in web traffic. 

Most of the companies are niche service providers rather than household names. But we uncovered an underlying theme: The companies with the biggest leaps in online traffic last month are catering to workforces, events, and correspondence that are shifting remote. 

• No. 1: WorkJam, which saw a 206% MoM leap, is a “digital workplace” company. 
• No. 2: 6Connex, which received 105% more traffic, is a virtual event software provider. 
• No. 3: RFPIO, is yet another remote software company. 

Check out the . And if you want a more comprehensive breakdown of how digital patterns shifted during the first few weeks of coronavirus-related lockdown, check out the COVID Traffic Report.

BITS & BYTES

Stat: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft, which WSJ columnist Chris Mims dubs the “Faaam,” spent nearly $29 billion on R&D in Q1, a 17% annual increase. 

Quote: “This is the first time in human history NASA Astronauts have entered the [International Space Station] from a commercially made spacecraft.”—NASA. Watch the video of astronauts Bob Behnken and Col. Doug Hurley entering the ISS from a SpaceX capsule .

Read: The Plug compiled a list of tech companies that have made statements on racial justice, BLM, and George Floyd.

SPONSORED BY TRUST STAMP

Some of the biggest investors have identified this as a primo opportunity. Trust Stamp has created a new identification verification system that is set to revolutionize personal security using biometric sources. Why is that good for you? Biometrics will authenticate $2T (that’s trillion) worth of in-store and mobile payments by 2023. You can cash in on this innovation and invest in Trust Stamp like the best in the biz.

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Zynga acquired Turkish mobile game developer Peak for $1.8 billion. 
• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang suggested to VentureBeat that he’d be open to letting employees work remotely forever. 
• Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz stepped down as the company announced new funding.
• Walmart’s anti-fraud AI system is ineffective, a group of employees told Wired. 
• Waymo’s autonomous vehicles will return to public roads in the Bay Area on June 8, The Verge reports.
• U.S. Customs and Border Protection flew a Predator drone over Minneapolis late last week to monitor protests.

WHAT'S BREWING THIS WEEK

Monday: First day of June; U.K. hearing over WikiLeaks cofounder Julian Assange’s extradition to the U.S.

Tuesday: Zoom earnings; Cisco Live runs through Wednesday

Wednesday: Cannes Film Festival official selection announced; 60th anniversary of Sega founding

Thursday: Slack earnings; NBA Finals would be starting in an alternate universe; Sony PlayStation 5 event

Friday: 42 years ago, the Apple II computer went on sale

TECH THINGAMABOBS

For sticking the landing: The video of SpaceX’s Falcon rocket returning to Earth is something else. 

For Grey's Anatomy fans: A Tokyo hospital is livestreaming surgical procedures in VR. 

For pod data: Stitcher’s Podcasting Report breaks down listening habits, popular genres, and more. 

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