SoftBank Group has agreed to be a cornerstone investor in the initial public offering of ZhongAn, China’s first online-only insurance agency, on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange today. SoftBank Group will buy a 5 percent stake in the company, or about 72 million shares, at the offer price, which is in the range of HKD $53.70 to HKD $59.70 per share. If calculated based on the… Read More
from TechCrunch
To wrap up our series of looks into the IPOs of tech’s Big 5, we turn to Apple. Being the first of five to go public, what can we learn from Cupertino’s debut? Heading back in time as we are, we lack readily accessible S-1 documents that the younger entrants to the group have posted. So what was Apple’s story as it raced to the public markets? Read More
from TechCrunch
Remember Angry Birds? Well, apparently enough people are still playing it to justify an IPO.
Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish parent of the popular smartphone game, is getting ready to go public on the Helsinki Nasdaq in two weeks. And it’s set the price range for an IPO that would value the company at about $1 billion, a lot less than the over $2 billion they were said to be hoping… Read More
from TechCrunch
Spotify has long been linked with going public in the U.S. — it is speculated to be preparing for an IPO-less listing next year — but it has emerged that the company rebuffed the opportunity to sell to a major tech name earlier this year: Tencent, the Chinese internet giant valued at $38 billion. Tencent is said to have approached Spotify with a view to acquiring the company to… Read More
from TechCrunch
Data scientist Michael Roytman and his statistician friend Jesse Berns were working on a non-government organization project together in Iraq that required a lot of the data to be in a central place and analyzed on the fly. But like a lot of countries in the developing world, WiFi was spotty and they didn’t have a lot of the tech available to make that possible. Many of these operations… Read More
from TechCrunch
In an era where art is shared and streamed for free, Patreon offers new hope for turning content creation into a career. Illustrators, comedians, game makers, and musicians use Patreon to let fans pay a monthly subscription fee for special access to their work. In exchange, Patreon takes only a tiny 5% cut. With 50,000 creators and 1 million subscribers on board paying an average of $12 per… Read More
from TechCrunch
Over $10 billion is wasted every year due to fraudulent e-commerce charges and that number is growing. This is not only costly and time-consuming for the businesses, but also the credit card companies and customers. But now there are several startups including Signifyd that believe they can use technology to cut down on some of this fraud before it occurs. Another is CashShield, which has… Read More
from TechCrunch
Silicon Valley venture firm Social Capital just completed the first step in its mission to take startups public without an IPO. The team has listed something called a special purchase acquisition company, known as a SPAC. More common outside of the tech industry, these blank-check companies are specifically designed to buy private companies and bring them public without going through the… Read More
from TechCrunch
Costanoa Ventures has raised a $175 million fund, the third fund for the Palo Alto-based venture firm. With a focus on enterprise technology, Costanoa Ventures typically invests at seed stage and Series A. The new fund brings the total capital for the five-year-old firm to $500 million under management. Read More
from TechCrunch
We stopped by HAX’s demo day at the San Francisco Mint to check out all the hardware startups in the accelerator’s 10th batch. Many of the startups showcased creative combinations of hardware and software, particularly machine learning, to improve upon legacy services and outdated business models. HAX is known for its expertise in prototyping and manufacturing in China. The… Read More
from TechCrunch