The Techee

After going public last year through a SPAC merger in December, iBuying company Opendoor has dropped its first earnings results as a public company, reporting its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2020 as well as the full year. Opendoor reported $2.6 billion in revenue in 2020, compared to $4.7 billion in 2019 and implying a 45% annual revenue drop. The revenue drop is though expected as Opendoor's business was significantly affected by a wide pause in the US home buying market in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic last year. Opendoor's revenue dropped sharply in the fourth quarter of 2020, as it reported $249 million in revenue compared to $1.3 billion in Q4 2019. An 80% drop in quarterly revenue over the past year is definitely something to point out. Opendoor isn't profitable, reporting a net loss of $287 million in 2020, slightly down from $339 million in 2019. In Q4 2020, the company's net loss was roughly $88 million. Opendoor sold a total of 9,91

It seems that this is the season of deals for rapper-cum-businessman Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter as just barely two weeks after he reached a deal to sell half of his premium champagne brand to luxury goods giant LVMH, he's reached yet another deal to sell one of his main business ventures, the music streaming app Tidal. Tidal has agreed to be taken over by Square, the payments company led by Jack Dorsey who's more popular for his role as the CEO of Twitter. In a statement , Square said it'll pay the sum of $297 million in a mix of cash and stock to acquire a "significant majority ownership" stake in Tidal leaving the remaining minority stake will be held by Tidal's artist shareholders. The exact percentage that Square is buying in Tidal isn't disclosed but it's definitely over 50% given it's a majority stake. With Square's statement of acquiring a "significant majority ownership", one can guess somewhere between 50%-80% of the com

Amid a flurry of SPAC mergers as of late, the latest technology company to tap into the boom and reach a deal to merge with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) is Hippo, a home insurance startup that makes use of satellite imagery and smart home sensors to gauge and offer better home insurance policies. Hippo will merge with Reinvent Technology Partners Z (NYSE:RPTZ), a SPAC formed by the respective founders of LinkedIn and gaming company Zynga, Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus. Hippo will merge with  Reinvent Technology Partners Z in a deal that'll hand it over $230 million of cash held in trust by the SPAC, plus a $550 million PIPE round to be led by existing investors  Dragoneer, Lennar, and Ribbit Capital. The PIPE round will value Hippo at $5 billion. Following the merger's completion, Hippo expects to have $1.2 billion of cash at hand, fueled by the funds from its SPAC deal plus venture funding that it's already raised. A hot insurance startup, Hippo has raised o

ThredUp, an online consignment and thrift store offering secondhand clothes, filed confidentially for an IPO in October 2020 and has now publicly released its S-1 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for that as expected. ThredUp will list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market  under the symbol “TDUP.” By the stats: ThredUp's S-1 filing shows $186 million in revenue for 2020, compared to $164 million in the previous year, 2019, and $130 million in 2018, the year before that. The company isn't profitable and hasn't been for the past three years, reporting respective net losses of  $48 million, $38 million, and $34 million in 2020, 2019, and 2018. ThredUp has a high Gross Profit rate, being nearly 70% in both 2020 and 2019. Most of the company's expenses making it record net losses are attributed to 'Operations, product and technology'.  ThredUp doesn't spend so much on sales and marketing, with its 2020 and 2019 spend for the segment com

A very big new acquisition has happened in the tech industry, with Okta (NASDAQ: OKTA), the publicly-traded cloud identity and access management software provider, announcing an agreement to buy Auth0, a fellow cloud identity software provider, for a price of $6.5 billion to be paid all with shares. A $6.5 billion exit for Auth0 marks a major win for the startup scene in Seattle, the tech hub where Auth0 is based and also a major win for the company's backers and investors. Auth0 last raised venture funding last year in July with a $120 million Series F round that valued the company at $1.9 billion. Now, it's about to sell for more than triple that amount. Auth0 has raised more than $330 million in total venture funding, with investors including the likes of Salesforce Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Telstra Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and DTCP. Salesforce Ventures led Auth0's most recent $120 million Series F round. With its acquisition of a fellow cloud identity a

Vizio, a well-known maker of smart TVs and other complementary equipment such as soundbars, has filed an S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a public listing, seeking to do so for the second time after having previously filed to go public in 2015 but later withdrew its plan in lieu of a $2 billion sale agreement to a Chinese company that unfortunately didn't pan out. The market for technology IPOs has been very hot as of late and it seems that Vizio is coming in at the right time to capitalize on that hotness. A popular maker of smart TVs, Vizio has sold over 80 million TVs and 11 million soundbars since the company's inception, as indicated in its S-1 filing. The company sold 7.1 million TVs in 2020 alone. Vizio has strong revenues and is profitable, reporting $102 million in net income on over $2 billion in revenue in 2020. In the previous year, 2019, Vizio reported a net income of $23 million on $1.8 billion in revenue. Most of Vizio's revenue c

After taking his data analytics and mining company, Palantir, public last year, it seems that Peter Thiel is keen on cashing out significantly from his stake in the company after getting an opportunity to do so on the public markets.  Thiel founded and helped build Palantir from the ground up into a data analytics powerhouse with annual sales of over $1 billion.   Palantir stayed as a private company for 17 years before hitting the public markets. According to regulatory filings and records , Peter Thiel has sold over $780 million of Palantir shares since the company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in September 2020.  Thiel's largest single sale transaction was an offloading of 20 million shares for $504.8 million on the 19th of February, 2020. His second-largest was the sale of 23 million shares in a transaction netting around $236 million on the 30th of September, 2020, which was the very day Palantir began trading on the NYSE. Altogether, Thiel has netted mor

The latest tech company to join the IPO train with a filing for a public listing is AppLovin, an ad-tech platform for mobile app developers, mostly developers of video games. AppLovin has publicly released its S-1 filing for an IPO, giving a peek into the company's finances with information not disclosed publicly before. By the stats: AppLovin's S-1 filing shows $1.45 billion in revenue in 2020, compared to $994 million in 2019 and $483 million in 2018. As it is, the company's annual revenue tripled between 2018 to 2020, a signal of rapid growth. AppLovin isn't profitable, reporting a net loss of $125 million in 2020, $119 million in 2019, and $256 million in 2018. The company has been able to withstand significant losses as its revenue grew rapidly thanks to venture equity and debt funding to the tune of $1.4 billion that it's raised over the span of its existence. AppLovin ended 2020 with $317 million in cash and cash equivalents at hand. AppLovin is an ad-tech

The hot on-demand grocery delivery startup Instacart has raised another big funding round, this time a $265 million round led by a group of existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity, and T. Rowe Price. The new round values Instacart at $39 billion, more than double the $17.7 billion valuation it got after a $200 million round closed just five months ago. As expected, Instacart will deploy its new capital towards business expansion and operations. The company has grown at an unprecedented rate over the past year as a Covid-19 pandemic widely drove up the demand for on-demand grocery delivery services. For reference, Instacart reportedly had its very first profitable month last year at a time of record grocery orders made on its platform. In line with its rapid expansion, the company says it plans to boost its corporate headcount by 50% this year, with the growth fueled by recently raised capital. Instacart will focus on expanding

Zoom Video Communications, the company behind the popular online videoconferencing tool of the same name, has posted its earnings results for its fiscal 2021 fourth quarter and as well the full year, which in actuality is the fiscal year ending January 31, 2021 . The company reported record profit and revenue as it wrapped up a year of unprecedented user growth that was spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic. Zoom reported $672.3 million in net income on $2.65 billion in revenue in its fiscal full-year 2021, compared to a net income of $15.3 million on $622.7 million in revenue in the previous year. In its fiscal 2021 fourth quarter, Zoom reported $882.5 million in revenue, up 369% year-over-year, and a net income of $260.6 million. As of the end of its fiscal 2021, Zoom reported having 467,100 business customers with more than 10 employees and 1,644 such customers each contributing over $100,000 in annual sales. The company ended its fiscal year 2021 with $4.2 billion of cash and marketable

The latest global automaker to commit to transitioning to a fully-electric production output in the future is Swedish carmaker Volvo, which has announced plans to become a fully electric car company by 2030. By then, the company says it intends to have phased out any car in its portfolio with an internal combustion engine, including hybrids, and transition to producing fully electric cars. The announcement of Volvo's grand plan comes a year after the company launched its first fully electric car, the XC40 Recharge , around the globe, and with just one fully electric car in its product portfolio now, it's apparent that the automaker would need to put in hard work to achieve a fully-electric portfolio in nine years time. To work towards its goal, Volvo has announced that it'll roll out 'several' additional electric car models in the coming years, the word several making the number indistinct. The Swedish automaker is aiming for fully electric cars to make up half of

After confidentially filing for an initial public offering (IPO) this January, the venture-backed online real estate listings company Compass has now publicly released its S-1 filing with the US SEC, giving a peek into its financials and operational stats with information not publicly-known before, and we're here with noteworthy bits from the company's S-1 filing. Bits from Compass's S-1 filing; Compass reported $3.7 billion in revenue in 2020, compared to $2.4 billion in the previous year, 2019. The company's revenue grew sporadically from $187 million in 2016 to around 20 times that amount in 2020. Compass isn't profitable, reporting a net loss of $270.2 million in 2020, down from $388 million in 2019. The company hasn't posted annual profits in the past consecutive five years. Compass' biggest annual operating expense comes from 'commission and other transaction-related expenses' while the second-biggest expense lies in sales and marketing. The

Twilio, the publicly-traded cloud communications company, has sought to strategically team up with an old-guard provider of mobile and wireless communications technology named Syniverse, with a formal business partnership just  announced between both parties that'll see Twilio invest up to $750 million for a minority stake in Syniverse under its terms. Twilio has agreed to invest up to $750 million in cash for a minority stake in Syniverse, buying the stake from the company's current owner which is the private equity firm Carlyle Group. The partnership between Twilio and Syniverse will see both companies enter into a major business partnership that entails a wholesale agreement whereby Syniverse will process, route and deliver application-to-person (A2P) messages originating and/or terminating between Twilio’s customers and mobile network operators. On Syniverse's end of the deal, the company is getting a business boost by providing services for Twilio which is one of the

As usual, new weeks bring new SPAC merger deals and this new week has brought two new merger announcements, this time from the space industry. They are Rocket Lab , a well-known small satellite launch service provider, and Spire Global , a startup that specializes in the tracking of global data sets, e.g. maritime and aviation patterns, with the use of satellites in orbit. Rocket Lab Rocket Lab has announced an agreement to merge with Vector Acquisition Corporation (Nasdaq: VACQ), a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) sponsored by San Francisco-based investment firm Vector Capital.  Rocket Lab's merger deal will hand it over $320 million of cash held in trust by Vector Acquisition, plus a $470 million private-investment-in-public-equity (PIPE) round committed by investors including Vector Capital, BlackRock, and Neuberger Berman.  With the investors buying shares at $10 each, it implies a $4.1 billion valuation for Rocket Lab, 5.4x the satellite launch provider's projec

Skydio, an American startup that makes autonomous drones, has closed a new funding round of $170 million that values it above $1 billion. The round was led by the famous venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from existing backers Next47, IVP, and Linse Capital, plus a new investor UP.Partners. Andreessen Horowitz led the new Series D round for Skydio from its Growth Fund, and with it, Skydio has now raised a total of over $340 million in external funding and then with a $1 billion+ valuation that makes it the highest-valued drone startup in the US. It seems that Skydio has drawn wide investor attraction after the US government placed China's DJI on a blacklist last year. DJI made its mark as the biggest drone maker globally and the largest in the US market but got placed on a government Entity List last year that barred American companies from supplying it with components. The blacklist was instituted by the former Trump administration due to alleged ties to

DraftKings, a popular sports betting site in the US, has reported its earnings results for what's its first fiscal year as a publicly-traded company after going public through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) last year. It reported $322 million in 2020 revenue, up 98% from the previous year. DraftKings' annual revenue soared high in 2020 compared to the past year as it capitalized on a stronger betting market spurred by the legalization of online sports betting in more American states for growth. The company also did well getting new customers in existing legalized sports betting markets in the US. For example, the state of Tennessee formally legalized mobile and online sports betting on the 1st of November, 2020 and saw DraftKings immediately swoop into the market. In just the first two months operating in the state, DraftKings processed over $300 million in bets, its earnings report noted. In 2021, DraftKings held successful launches in the states of

The Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank has reached a settlement for a legal fight with the founder of WeWork, the office leasing company that counts as one of its biggest investments and was the subject of a  financial and operational saga that saw SoftBank record a big  $4.6 billion loss on the company and moved to buy it up in order to try to stabilize it. After the WeWork saga which saw the company's founder Adam Neumann ousted, he moved to sue SoftBank claiming entitlement to a deal where SoftBank initially laid out plans to buy up $3 billion of WeWork stock from shareholders of which nearly $1 billion would have gone to Neumann but later backed out of its plans. Now, after a fairly lengthy legal battle, SoftBank has announced that it's reached a settlement with Adam Neumann as well as WeWork's board in a Delaware court. Officially, the terms of the settlement weren't disclosed, but a Financial Times report  says it entails SoftBank committing to purchase

The latest company to get into the center of chatters and rumors of an imminent public listing is SentinelOne , a Mountain View-based cybersecurity startup that's made a mark as one of the hottest of its kind with investor attraction. SentinelOne is preparing for a soon public listing that could value it at more than $10 billion and has begun interviewing banks for potential roles in its public listing, according to a report from Bloomberg . It's said that SentinelOne could list even as soon as this very year. SentinelOne is part of a cohort of technology startups that have brought artificial intelligence to the field of cybersecurity, using AI to detect and protect companies from cybersecurity threats and breaches. The company has roots in Israel, a major cybersecurity hub, and was founded in 2013. SentinelOne has been a hot startup for venture backers, drawing around $700 million in private funding of which a majority was raised just in the past two years. The Mountain View

The popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase recently released its S-1 filing to the SEC in preparation for a public offering that's expected to come soon, with the S-1 filing providing a peek into its financials and operational stats with information not publicly known before. The core information to have been revealed by Coinbase's S-1 filing is that the company is very profitable, posting a net income of $322 million on $1.28 billion in revenue in 2020. The popular crypto exchange swung from a $30 million loss in the previous year 2019 and grew its annual revenue from $533.7 million to $1.28 billion over the year. Among the noteworthy disclosures to have come from Coinbase's S-1 filing is that the company's founder and CEO Brian Armstrong pulled in a big compensation package of nearly $60 million in 2020, precisely $59.5 million.  Brian Armstrong's $59.5 million pay package consisted of a base salary of $1 million, stock options awards of $56.7 million, and $1.

Silicon Valley venture capital firm Bessemer enture Partners has made new major moves that include adding $3.3 billion of capital to its investment coffers and appointing Jeff Blackburn, a long-time top Amazon executive and lieutenant of Jeff Bezos who just recently announced his departure from Amazon, now as a partner at the venture firm. Bessemer raised $3.3 billion with two separate funds, the first a fund named BVP XI  that raised $2.475 billion and the second a fund named  BVP Century II that raised $825 million. The majority of the new funds will be used for early-stage investments consistent with Bessemer's practice of starting with seed and Series A rounds for companies and then following up with late-stage investments. Bessemer now counts Jeff Blackburn as a Partner, with Blackburn joining the firm after a 22-year career at Amazon where he rose to become one of the company's highest-ranking executives. Before announcing his departure just this month, Blackburn served

Velodyne Lidar, the leading maker of lidars for autonomous vehicles in the US, is in the midst of a leadership tussle that's seen its founder and biggest shareholder David Hall pushed out from his position of Chairman at the company along with his wife Marta Hall who held the position of Chief Marketing Officer at Velodyne. David and Marta Hall were pushed out from Velodyne after a board investigation that brought accusations of the couple behaving "inappropriately" and acting without "respect, honesty, integrity and candor” when interacting with other officers and directors at Velodyne as claimed by the company's board. As they were pushed out, Velodyne named a new Chairman and another new board director. In response to his ouster, Velodyne founder David Hall put out a press statement  accusing his company of staging a "boardroom ambush" to reprimand him and his wife "based on an opaque, secret investigation into baseless, unfounded claims".

The American-French private equity firm L Catterton is back with yet another big deal in the fashion industry after leading a $115 million investment round for Rihanna's Savage X Fenty brand just a few weeks ago. The firm has just announced an agreement to buy a majority stake in Birkenstock, a well-known German shoemaker that was founded 25 decades ago. L Catterton is buying a majority stake in Birkenstock along with some affiliates including Financière Agache which is the family holding company of LVMH boss and European fashion titan Bernard Arnault. Arnault is a major investor in L Catterton whose company LVMH and personal holding company Groupe Arnault hold a collective 40% stake in the private equity firm so it's no surprise that he's chipping into the Birkenstock deal. The price that L Catterton is paying for a majority stake in Birkenstock isn't formally disclosed, but a report from Reuters citing sources   familiar with the deal says it values Birkenstock at 

AT&T, the American telecoms giant and parent company of mass media giant WarnerMedia, has reached a deal to sell a stake in one of its most notable properties, satellite broadcaster DirecTV, to private equity firm TPG. AT&T and TPG have agreed to a business deal that'll see both parties establish a new company to control AT&T’s U.S. video business unit consisting of the DirecTV , AT&T TV , and U-verse video services. AT&T will hold a 70% stake while TPG gets the remaining 30% stake in the new company to be formed as DirecTV's parent. The deal agreed between both companies values DirecTV's new parent at $16.25 billion. Notably, AT&T is taking a big loss from its DirecTV deal with TPG given that it paid $48.5 billion excluding debt for the broadband satellite provider in 2014. Now with a deal valuing the business at $16.25 billion, it's apparent that AT&T is taking a big loss from its DirecTV business in what's a testament to the decline

After going public in 2020, the online rentals company Airbnb and food delivery company DoorDash have respectively posted their first earnings results as public companies, with both showing healthy growth though with increasing losses. Airbnb In Q4 2020 which was Airbnb's first quarter as a publicly-traded company, it reported $859 million in revenue, down 22% from $1.1 billion in Q4 2019. The yearly drop wasn't unexpected as the global travel and rentals market is still reeling from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. In Q4, Airbnb reported a huge net loss of $3.9 billion which mostly came from a $2.8 billion stock-based compensation expense that the company recorded after its IPO and also an $827 million non-cash 'mark-to-market adjustment' charge related to Airbnb share purchase warrants. For clarity, mark-to-market adjustment refers to the accounting practice of adjusting the value of an asset to reflect its value as determined by current market conditions. Due to