The Techee

Peloton, the famous maker of connected fitness equipment, has like many companies in this period unveiled its latest quarterly earnings results . In its case, it posted solid earnings results with sales rising high as the company got keen on foreign expansion outside the US. By the numbers: Officially, the quarter ending March 2021 was this year's first quarter, but in Peloton's own calendar, it was its fiscal 2021 third quarter. Peloton reported $1.3bn in revenue for the quarter, up 141% year-over-year. Most of the revenue, 81% of it in its case, came from fitness equipment sales while subscriptions to digital content pulled in the remaining 19%. Peloton's net loss shrank from $56mn a year earlier to $8.6mn in the quarter. Peloton rounded up the quarter with 2.08 million fitness content subscriptions, up 135% from a year earlier. Highlights: The pandemic led to a large boost for indoor fitness equipment sales globally and in Peloton's case caused outsized demand that s

Two major startups from China have newly filed for their respective IPOs on the US markets. They are Ximalaya , a popular podcast app in the country, and Qiniu , a cloud computing startup backed by investors including local e-commerce giant Alibaba. As required for foreign companies seeking to list their shares on the US markets, Ximalaya and Qiniu have filed their respective F-1 documents with the SEC. The F-1s provide strong insights into both companies' business with information not publicly disclosed before. Details Qiniu: Qiniu's F-1 document shows that of a company with fast-growing revenues over the past few years. It reported $166mn in revenue in 2020, up 100% year-over-year. Qiniu is slightly unprofitable, reporting a small net loss of $3mn in 2020.  For the three months ending March 31, 2021, the company reported $49mn in sales, up 100% year-over-year, and a $4mn loss. With fast-growing revenues and relatively small net losses as reported, Qiniu has strong business p

Moderna was among the few biotech companies that saved the day with the development of an emergency-authorized vaccine to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic. It was a breakthrough for the company, which was before then a cancer-fighting moonshot with minimal revenues and no working product. Being a publicly-traded company, Moderna is mandated to release quarterly earnings reports to the public and it has done so this time around, releasing its financial results for the first quarter of this year 2021. Moderna's latest earnings report shows that of a company that saw big success from its Covid vaccines, as it reported record revenue and its first-ever net profit as a public company. By the numbers: Moderna made $1.9bn in revenue in Q1' 21, compared to a paltry $8mn for the same quarter in 2020. The revenue came wholly from Covid vaccine sales in the US and foreign markets. Moderna reported a huge net income of $1.2bn in the quarter, compared to a net loss of $124mn for the same perio

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has continued his routine selling of Amazon shares to fund his other escapades. For a few years now, he's had an arranged trading plan that sees him regularly sell Amazon stock worth billions of dollars. Jeff Bezos' latest sell-off is of 739,000 Amazon shares worth around $2.5bn, SEC filings show. Another separate filing indicated that he plans to sell as many as 2 million shares that could net him nearly $7bn at current prices. This latest share sell-off from Bezos is noteworthy as one of his last in his position as Amazon's CEO which he's handing off soon to a top lieutenant named Andy Jassy. Jassy is currently CEO of AWS, Amazon's very profitable cloud computing division. Usually, a CEO offloading large amounts of stock in a company he leads draws some displeasure from investors, but as Jeff Bezos would soon no longer be Amazon's CEO, it opens up opportunities to sell larger amounts of shares than usual if the desires. Amazon's

A startup from Utah has agreed to one of the biggest startup exits seen in the region, strengthening the state of Utah's appeal as a locality for building successful technology companies. That startup is Divvy , an expense management platform for small businesses. Divvy's acquirer is Bill.com, a provider of cloud-based accounting software. It's traded on the public markets with a current market value of nearly $11bn. Details: Bill.com has agreed to acquire Divvy  for a sum of $2.5bn to be paid with a mix of cash and stock. The acquisition is ideal and strategic to Bill.com, giving it a fast-growing startup in its field of accounting software to latch onto. Bill.com is paying $625mn in cash and $1.9bn in stock to buy Divvy, summing up to $2.5bn. It's the company's biggest acquisition to date, and the deal is expected to be finalized in Q3' 21. Highlights: Divvy is a five-year-old startup based out of Utah, a state that's positioned itself stronge

A major fintech startup from the Latin American region has filed for an IPO on the US markets. That startup is DLocal , which offers cross-border payment gateways for merchants doing business in emerging markets like its home region of Latin America. DLocal has filed an F-1 document with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as required for foreign companies seeking to list shares on its markets. The F-1 as usual gives a great insight into DLocal's business with information not publicly known before. Details: DLocal's F-1 document shows that of a fast-growing startup with a history of profitability. It's unlike many companies in the recent crop of IPOs with little or no history of profitability. DLocal made $104mn in revenue in 2020, nearly double its $55mn revenue in the previous year. In 2020, the company reported $28mn in profit, nearly double its profit of $16mn in the previous year, 2019.  DLocal has made its mark as a fast-growing cross-border payment start

A medical apparel startup making waves, and also a handful of enemies, has filed for an initial public offering on the US markets. That startup is Figs , a direct-to-consumer online medical apparel retailer that's majority-owned by film magnate Thomas Tull.  Figs filed on Wednesday with the US SEC to raise money with an IPO. It's headed for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Details: Figs has unveiled an S-1 filing to the SEC indicating its plans to raise up to $100mn in an IPO. More often than not, that $100mn is a placeholder figure used to calculate listing fees and is subject to change. The financial stats from Figs' S-1 document shows that of a fast-growing and highly profitable direct-to-consumer startup, both very desirable outcomes in the current crop of IPOs.  Figs made $263mn in sales in 2020, compared to $110mn in 2019. Its respective annual profits in those years were $112mn and $50mn.  Figs has filed to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the tick

  Zynga is the gaming company that made its name developing those social, addictive games that you likely played back when young people were largely on Facebook. After the mania for Facebook Games died down, the company re-invented itself in the market for mobile gaming. A public company, Zynga is mandated to release quarterly earnings reports and has done so this time for the first quarter of this year 2021. The company had record quarterly revenue, driven by strong engagement with older games like  Words With Friends and Empires & Puzzles as well as newer games like  Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells . In Q1, Zynga also made a major acquisition. By the numbers: Zynga reported $680mn in Q1' 21 revenue, up 68% year-over-year. It's a record quarterly revenue for the company in its history. Out of the $680mn, revenue from mobile made up the vast majority at $661mn. Zynga makes money primarily from ads on its games and in-app purchases, with the latter bringing in the major

Ride-hailing giant Uber has unveiled its earnings report for the first quarter of this year 2021 shortly after its rival Lyft did the same . As expected, the earnings report gives great insight into how Uber's business has fared as it gradually recovers from the effects of the Covid pandemic. By the numbers: Uber made $2.9bn in revenue in Q1. Its delivery business brought in the bulk of revenue with $1.7bn while its ride-hailing business brought in $853mn. It's an unusual turn, as Uber's ride-hailing business usually brought in the majority of its revenues while deliveries brought in a minority, but that switched over during the pandemic. Uber reported a Q1 net loss of $108mn which's a record low for the company. The unusually small net loss on Uber's scale was due to a $1.6bn gain recorded from the divesture of its self-driving business rather than a phenomenal feat from its core ride-hailing and delivery businesses. Gross bookings of Uber's platform in Q1 wa

One event that rocked the global tech and business worlds yesterday was Microsoft founder Bill Gates announcing a divorce  from his wife of 27 years, Melinda Gates. The divorce marked an end to a partnership that saw them build one of the world's foremost philanthropic entities, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As expected, Gates' divorce announcement brought about speculations on how his huge monetary fortune, reported at $145bn by Bloomberg , will be split between the couple. Already, such speculations are starting to give way to facts as the Gateses appear to have begun splitting their fortune substantially. Details: Cascade Investment, the personal investment vehicle of Bill Gates, transferred $1.8bn of equities to Melinda's ownership on the day their divorce was announced, SEC filings show. The equities transferred were huge blocks of just two companies; car dealer AutoNation and Canadian National Railway Co. Bill Gates handed over to Melinda 2.94 million sha

A hot crypto startup is headed for a big exit with a sale to Galaxy Digital, a leading crypto-focused financial services firm. That startup is BitGo, a crypto custodian platform for institutional holders and large investors. Details: BitGo has agreed to be bought for a price of $1.2bn by Galaxy Digital, a crypto-focused merchant bank with its shares traded on the public markets. The price will be paid with a mix of $265mn in cash and 33.8mn newly issued units of Galaxy Digital common stock, summing up to $1.2bn based on the firm's closing share price on May 4, 2021. The deal comes as Galaxy Digital is gearing up for a listing on the US markets this year. Currently, the company trades on the Canadian stock market. Before now, BitGo reportedly got an acquisition offer of as much as $750mn from PayPal but didn't go through with it. Now with an agreed $1.2bn offer, it doesn't seem like a bad decision. With BitGo's crypto custodian service, Galaxy Digital is increasing its

A cryptocurrency exchange serving the Latin American market has raised a big round of funding with a big valuation to match. That exchange is Bitso , which stands out as one of the few licensed and regulated crypto exchanges in the Latin American region. Details: Bitso has raised a $250mn Series C round valuing it at $2.2bn. The round was co-led by buddy investors Tiger Global and Coatue, whom were joined by a mix of new and existing investors including Mary Meeker's Bond, Valor Capital Group, and Paradigm, a crypto-focused investment firm headed by a co-founder of Coinbase. The Series C round follows an earlier $62mn Series B that Bitso closed in December 2020. For a seven-year old startup backed by such huge funding, Bitso is an outlier and obvious leader in the Latin American startup world. People across Latin America have joined the rest of the globe in increasing adoption of crypto  recently, particularly as local fiat currencies in the region depreciate. Such adoption requir

It's currently of no doubt that electric vehicles represent the future for the automobile market, and many automakers have taken heed to that. Tens of billions of dollars in spending have been earmarked for the R&D and production of electric vehicles by global automakers, with efforts spanning battery development, building new factories, charging stations et al. Now, two of the world's biggest automakers, BMW and Ford, have jointly invested in a startup working on battery technology for electric vehicles. That startup is Solid Power, a Colorado-based startup developing solid-state batteries for EVs. Details: Solid Power has raised a $130 million Series B round  co-led by Ford and BMW. The two automakers were joined by green-focused venture fund Volta Energy Technologies in the round. As part of the strategic round, Ford and BMW have expanded their joint agreements with Solid Power to develop solid-state batteries for their use. In a way, the two automakers are funding and o

Lyft, the main ride-hailing rival of Uber in the US, has unveiled its earnings report for the first quarter of this year which was a distinct quarter marked by a slow return to normal following the drastic changes caused by the Covid pandemic. Lyft has been Uber's main rival for a long time and both companies are very similar. In fact, they seem to mimic each other many times, such as recently when Lyft sold its self-driving division to Toyota shortly after Uber sold its own division to a venture-backed startup named Aurora.  By the numbers: Lyft reported $609mn in revenue in Q1' 21, an increase of 7% from the previous quarter but down 36% year-over-year. The slight 7% increase indicates a slow recovery for Lyft from the bottoms of the first few months of the pandemic. As it's been for a long time, Lyft wasn't profitable in the quarter and reported a $427mn net loss, up from $398mn year-over-year. The net loss included $181mn of stock-based compensation and related pa

Pfizer, one of the few pharmaceutical companies worldwide to produce an approved Covid-19 vaccine, has unveiled its earnings report for the first quarter of this year. As usual, the report provides a solid peek into the company's financials and with very noteworthy nuggets this time around. One key nugget from Pfizer's earnings report is that the company brought in $3.5bn in revenue from its Covid-19 vaccine in Q1' 21. It made up nearly a fourth of the company's total $14.6bn revenue for the period. The Covid vaccine was the biggest single source of revenue for Pfizer in the quarter. It's definitely a good time for the company in that regard, as it elected to keep the profit from the sale of its vaccines unlike some of its competitors which volunteered to waive off any profit-seeking from their vaccines. Unlike some of its competitors also, Pfizer didn't take money from the US government to fund the development of its vaccine under the Trump administration'

A top fintech company from Sweden has called off its plans for an IPO on the domestic markets after regulators in the country raised concerns about its lack of due diligence on end customers. That company is Trustly, which provides a way for merchants to take payments directly from their customers' bank accounts with consent without the use of a card or app. Details: Trustly had proposed a $9bn stock market floatation that was set to be one of Europe's landmark tech listings this year. It was planned to take place this quarter but now has been postponed indefinitely, Trustly said on Monday. In April, Sweden's Financial Supervisory Authority  warned Trustly  that it should perform due diligence on some consumers using its service to pay merchants online. This implied that the regulatory agency had suspicions of some of Trustly's end-users using its service for questionable stuff. Also, this March, Trustly noted in its annual report that Sweden's financial regulator

Fortnite maker Epic Games is having a court battle with Apple over the latter's App Store practices and that battle has led to several documents coming out of the shadows with valuable information about Epic Games not publicly known before.  Among the information revealed in court proceedings between Epic and Apple is the sheer scale of Epic's revenue largely gotten from its hit game Fortnite . Official documents indicate that Epic Games made respective annual sales of $5.6bn, $4.2bn, and $5.1bn in 2018, 2019, and 2020, summing up to just shy of $15bn. Epic's revenue in 2018 and 2019 was revealed in financial documents made public as part of its court battle with Apple while its revenue for 2020 was separately revealed in a court testimony by Epic CEO Tim Sweeney. The vast majority of Epic's revenue comes from Fortnite while its other products like the Unreal Engine and the Epic Games Store bring in a minority of revenues. Specifically, Fortnite brought in $5.5bn a

Sony Interactive Entertainment, the gaming giant famous for making the PlayStation consoles, has bought a stake in one of the current hottest gaming startups and partnered with the startup. That startup is Discord, the VoIP and chat platform popular with gamers around the globe. Details: Sony has moved to make a minority investment in Discord as part of a tie-up between both companies. The investment, of undisclosed size, is part of Discord's Series H round which opened with a $100 million raise  last December at a valuation of $7bn. The tie-up between Sony and Discord that brought about the investment entails the Discord chat and messaging app getting integrated on the PlayStation Network early next year.  The integration is beneficial to both companies, as the user base of Discord substantially overlaps with that of PlayStation console owners. Discord is the biggest gaming chat app of its kind with more than 140 million monthly users as reported by the company, and with that, a

Flywire, a Boston-based payments startup, has filed for an initial public offering on the US markets. It's unveiled its S-1 document filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The S-1 as expected provides a peek into the company's business and financials with information not publicly known before. Flywire is a payments startup serving the education, healthcare, and travel industries. It's a platform for cross-border payments which's crucial in those industries. By the numbers: Flywire's S-1 prospectus shows that of a company with healthy and steadily growing revenue over the years. It reports $132 million in revenue in 2020, compared to $95 million in the previous year 2019. Flywire isn't profitable but reports losses not out of place for a fast-growing startup backed by venture money. It posted respective net losses of $11 million and $20 million in 2020 and 2019. Flywire is backed by venture funding to the tune of over $260 million which it&#

To bring back one of our most favorite sayings, "America is the land of many things, including very enormous executive pay". Executives of publicly-traded companies in the US are familiar with very large compensation packages on a scale not seen in other countries, take recent examples including Palantir CEO Alex Karp landing a $1.1 billion payday  and former T-Mobile CEO John Legere getting a $137 million severance pay . But with all the large executive pay packages flying around, it appears that the shareholders of one public company are not okay with it and that company is telecoms giant AT&T.  Details: AT&T in a statement  revealed that the majority of its shareholders voted not in favor of the compensation of its executive officers in 2020. Just under 49% of votes were cast in favor of the compensation, leaving the remaining majority 51%, not in favor.  Last year, AT&T had large pay packages for its top brass including $21 million for CEO John Stankey and $52

Telecoms giant Verizon has found a buyer for its Verizon Media Unit which includes veteran internet properties like Yahoo and AOL, and that buyer is a major private equity firm. To note, though Yahoo and AOL have long faded from their glory days, they aren't exactly dead properties but ones still with a great deal of users bringing in a few billion in revenue annually. Details: Verizon has struck a deal to sell 90% of Verizon Media to private equity firm Apollo which will pay $5 billion for it, while Verizon retains a  10%  minority stake in the business. The deal takes off many internet properties off Verizon's hands, including bigger ones like Yahoo and smaller ones like technology news site TechCrunch operating under the AOL umbrella. Though it's selling for a seemingly huge price of $5 billion, Verizon paid a combined $9 billion to buy the web properties making up its Verizon Media unit so it doesn't come out on top financially from the sale.  Verizon paid $4.4bn t