From Zero Hedge: COVID has created a situation where millions of people are quarantined at home. Some are under lockdown rules, others have been laid off; and some have decided it’s just better to stay at home. This has caused huge surges in business that can be done online, and one of those businesses is trading. […]
From Tech Crunch 9/2/2020 Wish, the San Francisco-based, 750-person e-commerce app that sells deeply discounted goods that you definitely don’t need but might buy anyway when priced so low — think pool floats, guinea pig harnesses, Apple Watch knockoffs — said yesterday that it has submitted a draft registration to the SEC for an IPO.[…]
From Venture Beat 9/2/2020 Skillz today announced it’s going public through a quick initial public offering process, raising an estimated $849 million in cash from investors at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation. This valuation is 6.3 times the company’s projected revenue for 2022. The San Francisco startup launched in 2012 with a very simple proposition and[…]
From CNBC: At a time when some tech companies are bowing to employee pressure to pull back from work with the government, Palantir CEO Alex Karp is loudly defending his posture. Palantir, a Silicon Valley software and servicies company founded in 2003 with the explicit purpose of helping the intelligence community with counterterrorism investigations, filed its paperwork to[…]
From Zero Hedge: Bill Ackman’s “The Simpsons”-inspired “blank check” investing vehicle, known as “Pershing Square Tontine Holdings”, is set to raise between $3 billion and $4 billion during its upcoming IPO after Ackman increased the size of the offering by $1 billion. The deal, which will be the largest-ever IPO by a special purpose vehicle,[…]
From Zero Hedge: After failing to convince GrubHub’s millennial managers that a tie-up would be the best bet for the publicly traded takeaway rival to Uber’s fast-growing Uber Eats, Uber has moved on to ‘Plan B’, and agreed to buy Postmates in a $2.65 billion all-stock deal. Uber Eats head Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty is expected to[…]
From Crunchbase: Now that we are halfway through 2020, we thought it would be a good time to check in and report on the latest unicorn data. Leading industries for new unicorn companies this year include education–with four new unicorns; Quizlet, Udemy, ApplyBoard, Course Hero–and software service companies, including Notion (workplace collaboration), Figma (design collaboration), and Podium (local customer communication). Software services and online education[…]
From Bloomberg: Palantir Technologies Inc., the secretive big-data firm, plans to file to go public in the coming weeks and could start trading as early as the fall, according to people familiar with the matter. The Palo Alto, California-based company is preparing to register an S-1 filing confidentially with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission,[…]
From Bloomberg.com 5/28/2020: The Sherpa people living at high altitudes in Nepal and the Himalayas have a genetic trait that puzzles and fascinates scientists. They’re able to lead healthy, active lives with blood oxygen levels far below what most humans need to function properly. Where other people in high altitudes have adapted to boost their[…]
From Tech Crunch news: Vast monoculture farms outstripped the ability of bee populations to pollinate them naturally long ago, but the techniques that have arisen to fill that gap are neither precise nor modern. Israeli startup BeeHero aims to change that by treating hives both as living things and IoT devices, tracking health and pollination progress practically[…]