IPO Looms For India Unicorn, No Deal For Snapdeal

IPOs are re-emerging as a topic of discussion swirling around unicorns. And an upcoming entrant to the public markets may be ShopClues, a marketplace company based in India that expects to see sales of $2 billion on its platform through the next year (even despite demonetization) and will look to file for Nasdaq listing by next fall.

And in the wake of the currency impact stemming from the banned notes, widely reported on in the last few weeks, ShopClues has launched an SMS-based payments service.

In the land of acquisitions, it appears that (at the time of this writing, anyway) Snapdeal is not, in fact, a takeover target for Alibaba. That rumored buyer/seller pairing has circulated a few times over the past year.

And in a follow-on to news of an investment round that would value Stripe at as much as $9.2 billion last week, Xero is integrating Apple Pay through Stripe across the mobile accounting application, allowing payment verification through fingerprint IDs. In addition, the firms said this week that they can attach payment options for businesses across online invoices.