Digital streaming business Roku has soared in its public debut. After pricing its IPO Wednesday at $14 per share, Roku finished its first day of trading at $23.50, up nearly 68%. And by the end of Friday, Roku closed at $26.54, or up 90% in less than 48 hours. The company is now valued at about $2.6 billion. So this must be great news for the company, right? Well, sort of. Roku’s team… Read More
from TechCrunch
French startup Heetch has been around for quite a few years. Although things were running smoothly, the company had to start over mostly from scratch. In March 2017, a court in Paris ruled that Heetch had been illegally operating a transportation company. The startup is now rising from the ashes and raising $12 million to fund its new service. Read More
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Alibaba has spent 2017 pushing its cloud computing business and now it is preparing to make its first major investment in a Western startup in the space.
The Chinese e-commerce giant has agreed to lead a €22.9 million ($27 million) investment in MariaDB, the European company behind one of the web’s most popular open source database servers, according to a source with knowledge of… Read More
from TechCrunch
Boston-based private equity shop Berkshire Partners announced this afternoon that it is acquiring Accela — a nearly 20 year old startup that sells regulatory management solutions to government clients. Accela has gone through a troika of CEOs in the last year. Previously acting CEO Mark Jung replaced Maury Blackman last October who had managed the company for about a decade. We… Read More
from TechCrunch
Angry Birds-maker Rovio Entertainment priced its IPO at 11.50 euros, at the top of its proposed range. It raises 30 million euros in proceeds.
This values the company a little above $1 billion, just half of the $2 billion the company was previously said to be hoping for. The company previously raised at least $42 million in venture funding from Accel, Atomico, Felicis Ventures and… Read More
from TechCrunch
Roku is off to the races since going public on the stock market. After pricing its IPO shares at $14, the digital content streaming company began trading at $15.78 per share Thursday morning. It’s now trading above $18, up about 30%. Bankers usually recommend that companies “pop,” in the debut, to make a good impression on public investors. But this can be hard to predict. If… Read More
from TechCrunch
TaskRabbit, the on-demand platform for hiring people to do everything from build furniture to stand in line for you at the Apple Store, has sold itself to Ikea, Recode reports. Financial terms of the deal are unknown, but the plan is for TaskRabbit to be operate as an independent subsidiary within Ikea, according to Recode. Back in April, word on the street was that TaskRabbit was looking to… Read More
from TechCrunch
A quarter of Americans listen to podcasts each month, but far fewer make them. Anchor is a startup that is looking to change that with its app that makes it easy to record and distribute content. Anchor also has a discovery platform, which allows users to find audio across categories like news, sports, music and tech. The New York-based team is announcing $10 million in Series A funding, led by… Read More
from TechCrunch
LetGo, a startup that has built a marketplace for people to buy and sell used goods, is one of the fastest growing apps in the U.S. at the moment according to comScore, with some 75 million downloads, “tens of millions” of active users, and 200 million listings in the last two years. Now it is gearing up for another stage of expansion. TechCrunch has learned from a source that… Read More
from TechCrunch
Daimler — the German car giant that owns Mercedes Benz among other brands — has made one more acquisition to further its reach in ridesharing and what it sees as the next generation of how cars are owned and used. It has acquired Flinc, a startup also out of Germany that has built a platform and app for peer-to-peer-style carpooling. People who are driving in one direction find… Read More
from TechCrunch