Tag: The TechCrunch Exchange

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Justice for OpenSea

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. 

Team! Happy Saturday. It’s Friday afternoon as I write this to you, so I hope you are not at your desk. We’re having fun today, so please read this from the couch.

A well-known Wildeism goes that friends stab you in the front, which is true enough to make the quip worth remembering. It came to mind over the last week or two as I pondered the recent decision by Coinbase to get into the NFT game.

A few facts will help detail why the Wilde reference fits the moment:

  • a16z co-founder ​​Marc Andreessen sits on the board of Coinbase, a company that his firm backed before it went public.
  • a16z led OpenSea’s Series A, a $23 million transaction that gave the NFT marketplace quite a lot of cash and cachet.
  • Coinbase Ventures also invested in OpeanSea, one of a great many investments that the corporate venture capital firm has made.
  • And then Coinbase announced that it was getting into NFTs, driving a huge number of signups for its waitlist.

According to crypto-watching group DappRadar, OpenSea is the biggest NFT marketplace today. Coinbase may swamp it if the users that have signaled interest in its competing solution wind up actually buying and selling NFTs on the well-known crypto-investing platform.

Which would put OpenSea in something of a pickle.

It’s fine for VCs to stay on corporate boards after they go public if they so choose and their portfolio companies retain them. Some VCs make a habit out of public board membership. Marc Andreessen is on Facebook’s board, for example, which notes in its blurb on the man that he previously held board seats at eBay and HP. Cool.

But it gets a little sticky when the investor in question stays on the board of a portfolio company after it goes public and decides to directly take on portcos of that same investor’s firm. Where that investor still works. If I was OpenSea and saw Marc on the Coinbase board at the same time as his venture firm was on my cap table, while Coinbase decided to attack my market, I’d be pissed.

Friends stab you in the front?

Also recall that Facebook’s latest crypto push is in partnership with, you guessed it, Coinbase!

There have been other ironies lately involving Facebook board members. For example, Peter Thiel is on Facebook’s board. And he’s backing J.D. Vance, an aspiring politician. Notably, J.D. Vance is attacking Facebook while running for office. While the OpenSea saga is a bit irksome to watch as big companies working to sink smaller concerns is not really my favorite thing, watching Facebook money circulate back to biting Facebook in the ass is hilarious because no small fries were harmed in the process.

Still, though, you have to wonder if we shouldn’t spread the board seats around a little bit. Else a16z is going to keep finding itself working to undercut the very founders it backs.

Volvo and other IPOs

I meant to find time this week to dig into the Volvo offering, but failed. You can take a look at the company’s notes on itself here. Recall that Volvo has split from Polestar, which is going public via a SPAC.

And as this week came to a close, Braze filed to go public. More on that company and its S-1 first thing on Monday.

More to come, including a look into the high-stakes startup race to build the best corporate gifting platform (no joke),

— Alex

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Should we be worried about insurtech valuations?

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by what the weekday Exchange column digs into, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Hello everyone, I hope you had a lovely week. I turned 32 after experiencing sleep-destroying heartburn. So, a little good and a little bad. But that didn’t stop the markets. Nope. Not a bit. Which means we have a lot to talk about, including falling insurtech stocks and what the situation might mean for startups, and a raft of IPOs. This will be fun!

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of our chats with newly public companies Kaltura, Couchbase and Enovix, let’s talk insurtech.

In the last year or so we’ve seen a number of insurtech startups go public, including Root (auto insurance), Metromile (car insurance), and Lemonade (rental insurance). Here’s a quick digest of how their performance looks today:

  • Root: $7.72 per share, 71.4% down from its $27 per share IPO price.
  • Metromile: $7.26 per share, down 64.4% from its post-combination highs.
  • Lemonade: $86.97 per share, up 199.9% from its IPO price of $29 per share.

Recall that Root and Metromile began to trade after Lemonade, so their declines are not over a longer time horizon, but a shorter interval. Which makes the situation all the more interesting.

What’s going on? Well, two of the three insurtech public offerings (SPACs, IPOs, etc.) are sharply underwater. That doesn’t bode incredibly well for Hippo, which is pursuing its own SPAC-led combination that should be wrapping up in short order. The huge declines don’t seem bullish for insurtech startups, who will have to answer private-market investor doubts concerning their value.

China’s expected edtech clampdown may chill a key startup sector

Does Lemonade’s strong post-IPO performance allay concerns? It’s tricky. The company has been busy expanding into new markets, including auto insurance. The company did take a somewhat material hit from the Texas freeze earlier this year — per its most recent earnings report — but past those two data points it’s not entirely clear what the company is doing that the other two are not. But investors are stoked about Lemonade, and not Root and Metromile. Figuring out why that’s the case, and why their startup is more Lemonade than the other two, is going to be key for the many insurtech startups still scaling toward their own IPOs.

It’s IPO season

The Exchange has been busy on the phones these last two weeks, talking to CEOs of companies going public to try and learn from their recent experiences. So, what follows are notes from calls with folks at Kaltura, Couchbase and Enovix. Enjoy!

Kaltura

  • Reminder: Online-video-focused Kaltura filed to go public earlier this year before delaying its IPO and taking another run at the funding event.
  • The Exchange spoke with Kaltura CEO Ron Yekutiel, who said that the company’s IPO’s timing was impacted by the early-2021 public market turmoil. That was not a surprise, but it was good to get confirmation regardless.
  • That freeze was partially caused by the Archegos implosion, per Yekutiel. That makes sense, but was news to us.
  • Yekutiel said that his company wasn’t thrilled about the delay — going public is the only fundraise that you pre-announce, he noted — but added that investors his company had already spoken to the first-time around were still enthused about Kaltura on its second run at an IPO.
  • Per the CEO, Kaltura’s preliminary Q2 results showed investors that what it was talking about earlier in the year was coming true. He also stressed uptake in new products as key to the company’s continued growth.
  • The CEO was happy with how his company priced and traded during its first day, snagging a flat 20% uptick in value upon trading. He noted that more would have been excessive, and less would have been un-good.
  • Regarding the lower valuation that Kaltura priced at compared to its March-era IPO price range, Yekutiel said that you don’t get a third chance to make a first impression and that his company wanted to get the offering done. So they did. Points for not getting lost in their own head.
  • Kaltura is up 17.5% from its $10 per-share IPO price as of the time of writing.

One anecdote, if I may. Kaltura won an early TechCrunch40 — the precursor to the TechCrunch50 event, itself a predecessor to today’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference series — thanks to a single vote cast via physical token. Yekutiel still has that token, and showed it to us during our chat. Neat!

Couchbase

  • The Exchange spoke with noSQL database company Couchbase’s CEO Matt Cain. Couchbase priced at $24 per share, above its $20 to $23 per-share IPO price range.
  • Today it’s worth $33.20, rising 9.2% in today’s trading as of the time of writing.
  • Cain was talking from a pretty strict script — a pretty standard situation amongst newly public CEOs worried about fucking up and going to jail — so we didn’t get the precise answers we were looking for. But we still managed to learn a few things, including that Couchbase was yet another company that found the meeting density made possible by remote roadshows to be accretive.
  • The CEO was focused on discussing the scale of the opportunity ahead of Couchbase, namely the world of operational databases. It’s hard to find a bigger market, he argued, which made investors excited about what his company might be able to accomplish. Our read here is that there’s probably plenty of surface area for startups in the database world, if the market is as big as Cain reckons it is.
  • We wanted to learn a bit more about how public-market investors view open-source powered companies, but didn’t get too much from him on the matter. Still, the company’s IPO is a pretty damn strong one, implying that being OSS-built isn’t exactly a detriment to a company hoping to exit.

Everyone wants to invest in open-source startups now

Enovix

  • The Exchange wanted to chat with newly public company Enovix because it debuted via a SPAC. Why does that matter? Because there are other battery-focused companies looking to go public via SPACs. So, the chat was good background for later work.
  • And we love talking to public companies. Who doesn’t?
  • Asked if combination-and-trade-under-new-ticker-symbol day was like an IPO to his firm, Rust said that it was. Fair enough.
  • The company’s combination date for its SPAC slipped from Q2 to Q3, we noticed. Why was that? Some SEC changes regarding accounting, in short. Not a big deal was our impression from the chat, but one that did cause a slight delay to Enovix’s trading date.
  • Why go public via a SPAC? Cash, but also the particular sponsor of their combination, which Rust said was a key resource in terms of operational knowledge. The company has also hired from its SPAC sponsor’s network, which felt notable. (Hey look, actual investor value-add!)
  • Asked why his company is worth less than the impending SES SPAC, another battery company that has yet to generate revenue, Rust said that the value of his company in its SPAC deal was a negotiation, and that if the company is successful, whether it was valued at $1.1 billion or $1.4 billion wouldn’t really matter.
  • What’s fun about Enovix is that it is not starting with its impending battery tech aimed at EVs. Instead, it’s targeting high-end electronics. Why? Quick cycles to get batteries into hardware and possible pricing power. It does intend to get into EVs in time, however.
  • The company is worth $17.33 per share, giving it what Yahoo Finance describes as a $2.5 billion valuation. That’s a good markup from what it expected and could bode well for SES’s own, future debut.

Yo, that was a lot. Thanks for sticking with me. And thanks for reading The Exchange’s little newsletter. You can catch up on all our work here if you want some long-form reads on the global venture capital market, edtech and other topics. Stay cool!

Your friend,

— Alex

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Watching startups eat markets is good fun

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

The huge sale of Utah-based startup Divvy to Bill.com is still bouncing around my head this week, not only because the $2.5 billion exit was huge for both the company and its local scene, but also because its target market is exciting to watch.

Divvy competes in what we call the corporate spend market with a few other unicorns, including Ramp and Brex. Now with Divvy taken off the table, the pair of competitors are differentiating in a few ways that matter.

And Brex is getting back on its billboard game.

This week Brex announced that it is rolling out IRL advertising in a few American cities. Residents of San Francisco back when Brex was a baby will recall how the startup plastered its brand all over the city. Essentially, it was a cheap way to get a lot of impressions.

Now the startup is taking the strategy to Houston and Miami and D.C. Why? The Exchange caught up with Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras this week to chat about the matter. Per the executive, his company has two goals for its renewed meatspace marketing push. First, Brex wants to talk up its software game over its initial branding as a corporate card for startups. And, second, it wants business owners to know that it works with all types of companies now, not merely those with Sand Hill Road on speed dial.

The push to get the Brex name out in markets less known for their startup activity than overall business climate makes sense, if the unicorn wants to attract more nonstartup customers. But it’s the software element of its efforts that unsurprisingly caught our attention.

That’s because Brex recently rolled out Brex Premium, a package of software services that it charges around $600 per year for. Brex and rivals like Ramp and Divvy have spent lots of energy and money in recent quarters building out increasingly sophisticated software around their traditional corporate card products. The result thus far are codebases more and more able to supplant other pieces of enterprise software, like expense software.

But as Brex looks to double down via an advertising push on its decision to charge for Brex Premium — which Dubugras says is performing better than his company had initially anticipated — competitor Ramp is pushing its free software as an edge.

Ramp CEO and co-founder Eric Glyman pointed The Exchange to his company’s refreshed pricing page, which highlights its zero-cost software. And, he said in an email, the new page was “powering the fastest growth month we’ve ever had.”

Broadly, what we’re seeing with Ramp and Brex and Divvy — along with Airbase and others that also compete in the space — is a cohort of startups attacking an aged corporate issue with more nimble, lower-cost products. And proving while doing so that there was huge untapped demand for something different and better. The various players competing for the startup crown in the corporate spend world wouldn’t all be growing as rapidly as they are if that weren’t the case.

If you want more, here’s our dig into the Divvy-Bill.com deal.

More from startup-land

The Exchange was lathered up in SPACs this week, which means that we missed a host of interesting news that we otherwise would have loved to poke into. For example, here are some very neat venture rounds that it would have been fun to dig into more deeply:

  • ProducePay raised a $43M Series C: LA-based ProducePay helps food growers access capital, software and market data, linking them to food demanders (importers, etc.). Per its website, ProducePay funded a Bajío, Mexico-based asparagus growing operation to the tune of a half million dollars to hire labor and invest in its growing operation. Repayment, again per the company, starts when product ships.
  • Farming is hard, fickle, expensive and not always aligned with traditional banking requirements. Throw in an increasingly global production/consumption food network, and you can see why G2VP and IFC co-led the round.
  • Oh, and The Exchange learned that ProducePay’s reported 2020 doubling was measured in GAAP revenue terms. The startup’s gross margins “grew by over 75% from 2019 to 2020, thanks to improved underwriting policies and a more attractive cost of funds as volume scaled,” per its PR team. That’s super cool.

Another neat company that raised this week was Panther, which put together a $2.5 million round. Panther wants to help companies hire in 160 different countries. Our read of the company and its round is that, as more companies go remote-first, this sort of service is going to become a must-have. Gusto also competes in the market, so it should be an active one to watch from both VC and M&A perspectives.

Panther is based in Florida, and raised funds from, per its release, “Tribe Capital, Eric Ries, Naval Ravikant and Carta Ventures.”

One more round: Lance, a freelancer-focused neobank, raised $2.8 million this week. The round was led by, per the company, “Barclays, BDMI, Great Oaks Capital, Imagination Capital, Techstars, DFJ Frontier, New York Venture Partners” along with some angels.

Now that the fintech world has created Chime and other broad-remit neobanks, it’s not surprising to see more targeted efforts get put together. And Lance CEO Oona Rokyta is betting that the freelance world is set to grow further. Given how the labor market has evolved in the last few years, I’d hazard she’s making an intelligent bet.

To close out today, a quick note on Alpaca. It’s a startup that TechCrunch has dug into here and there, as it fits into both our general focus on API-delivered services (on-demand pricing is hot), and it exists in the consumer fintech world (powering other companies’ equities trading services). We caught up with CEO Yoshi Yokokawa this week to chat about what’s been going on at his company since we last tracked its growth rates.

After all, whatever we can learn about the world of consumer investing — and Robinhood told us quite a lot this week — is useful given the somewhat global savings/investing boom that we’ve seen in the last year or so.

Per Yokokawa, Alpaca has global plans, including rolling out with new partners on a few continents in the coming months. The company is handling 1,000 new accounts daily outside the United States, which Yokokawa expects to rise sharply in the coming months. And the company recently built out a broker API to make onboarding users simpler for its partners.

Sounds like growth to us. More when we can milk it out of, er, the alpaca.

Alex

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Maybe SPACs were a bad idea after all

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

Hello friends, I was out yesterday with what I’m calling Moderna Syndrome. Basically I got whacked by my second vaccine dose, and instead of enjoying a day off eating candy and spoiling my dogs I spent the entire day on the couch unable to move. All that’s to say that I missed Coinbase and DoorDash earnings when they came out.

Catching us up, Coinbase met its forecasts that it had previously released (more here), and today its stock is flat. DoorDash, in contrast, beat market expectations and is currently up just over 25% as I write to you.

But despite huge quarters from each, both companies are far below their recently set all-time highs. Coinbase is worth around $265 per share today, off from an all-time high of $429.54, which it set recently. And DoorDash is worth $145 this afternoon, far below its $256.09 52-week high.

They are not alone amongst recent public offerings that have lost steam. Many SPAC-led combinations are tanking. But while Coinbase and DoorDash are still richly valued at current levels and worth far more than they were as private companies, some startups that took SPAC money to float are not doing well, let alone as well.

As Bloomberg notes, five electric vehicle companies that SPAC’d their way to the public markets were worth $60 billion at one point. Now the collection of mostly revenue-free public EV companies have shed “more than $40 billion of market capitalization combined from their respective peaks.” Youch.

And SPAC hype-man and general investing bon vivant Chamath Palihapitiya is taking some stick for his deal’s returns as well. It’s all a bit messy. Which, to be fair, is pretty much what we’ve expected all along.

Not that there aren’t some SPAC-combinations that make sense. There are. But mostly it’s been more speculative hype than business substance. Perhaps that’s why Coinbase and DoorDash didn’t need to lean on crutches to get public. Sure, the market is still figuring out what they are actually worth, but that doesn’t mean that they are in any real trouble. But consider, for a moment, the companies that have agreed to go public via a SPAC before the correction and are still waiting for their deal to complete.

TFW ur forecast is conservative

The Exchange has been on the horn recently with a few public company CEOs after their earnings report. After those conversations, we have to talk a bit about guidance. Why? Because it’s a game that I find slightly annoying.

Some public companies simply don’t provide forecasts. Cool. Root doesn’t, for example, provide quarterly guidance. Fine. Other companies provide guidance, but only in a super-conservative format. This is in effect no guidance at all, in my view. Not that we’re being rude to companies per se, but they often wind up in a weird dance between telling the market something and telling it something useful.

Picking on Appian’s CEO as he’s someone I like, when discussing his own company’s forecasts Matt Calkins said that its guidance is “unfailingly conservative” — so much so that he said it was nearly frustrating. But he went on to argue that Appian is not short-run focused (good), and that if a company puts up big estimates it is more judged on the expectation of those results versus the realization of said results. That line of thinking immediately makes ultra-prudent guidance seem reasonable.

This is a philosophical argument more than anything, as Wall Street comes up with its own expectations. The financial rubber hits the road when companies guide under Wall Street’s own expectations or deliver results that don’t match those of external bettors. So guidance matters some, just not as much as people think.

BigCommerce’s CEO Brent Bellm helped provide some more guidance as to why public companies can guide a bit more conservatively than we might expect during our recent call. It helps them not overspend. He noted that if BigCommerce — which had a super solid quarter, by the by — is conservative in its planning (the font from which guidance flows, to some degree) it can’t deploy too much near-term capital.

In the case of BigCommerce, Bellm continued, he wants the company to overperform on revenue, but not adjusted profits. So, if revenue comes in ahead of expectations, it can spend more, but won’t work to maximize their near-term profitability. And he said that he’s told analysts just that. So keeping guidance low means that it won’t overspend and blast its adjusted profitability, while any upside allows for more aggressive spend?

Harumph, is my general take on all of the above. It’s very fine to have public company CEOs play the public game well, but what I’d greatly prefer is if they did something more akin to what startups do. High-growth tech companies often have a board-approved plan and an internal plan that is more aggressive. For public companies this would be akin to a base case and a stretch case. Let’s have both, please? I am tired of parsing sandbagged numbers for the truth.

Sure, by reporting a guidance range, public companies are doing some of that. But not nearly enough. I hate coyness for coyness’s sake!

That’s enough of a rant for today, more on BigCommerce earnings next week if we can fit it in. You can read more from The Exchange on Appian and the larger low-code movement here, if that’s your jam.

Never going back

We’re running a bit long today, so let me demount with some predictions.

Nearly every startup I’ve spoken to in the last year that had 20 or fewer staff at the time of the chat is a remote-first team. That’s due to their often being born during the pandemic, but also because many very early-stage startups are simply finding it easier to recruit globally because often the talent they need, can afford or can attract, is not in their immediate vicinity.

Startups are simply finding it critical to have relaxed work location rules to snag and, we presume, retain the talent that they need. And they are not alone. Big Tech is in similar straits. As The Information reported recently:

An internal Google employee message board lit up last Wednesday morning as news of what many staff perceived as a more relaxed policy for working remotely circulated. One meme shared on the board showed a person crying, labeled “Facebook recruiters.” Another showed a sad person labeled “San Francisco landlords.”

If you aren’t laughing, maybe you have a life. But I do this for a living, and I am dying at that quote.

Look, it’s clear that lots of people can do lots of work outside of an office, and even though labor purchasers (employers) want to run 1984-style operations on their employees (labor sellers) to ensure that they are Doing Precisely Enough, the actual denizens writing code are like, naw. And that’s just too much for Big Tech to handle as they are literally just cash flows held up by people who type for a living.

What this means is that tech is not going back to 100% in-office work or anything close to. At least not at companies that want to actually ensure that they have top-tier talent.

It’s a bit like when you see a company comprising only white men; you know that it doesn’t have nearly the best team that it could. Firms that enforce full-office policies are going to overindex on a particular demographic. And it won’t be to their benefit.

Alex

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Betting on upcoming startup markets

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

Betting on upcoming startup markets

This week M25, a venture capital concern focused on investing in the Midwest of the United States, announced a new fund worth $31.8 million. As the firm noted in a release that The Exchange reviewed, its new fund is about three times the size of its preceding investment vehicle.

I caught up with M25 partner Mike Asem to chat about the round. Asem joined M25 in 2016 after partner Victor Gutwein spearheaded the effort with a small $1 million fund. Asem and Gutwein have led the firm since its first material, if technically second fund.

Asem said that his team had targeted a $25 million to $30 million fund three, meaning that they came in a bit higher than anticipated in fundraising terms. That’s not a surprise in today’s venture capital market, given the pace at which capital is both invested into VC funds and startups.

The investor told The Exchange that M25 has been investing out of its third fund for some time, including CASHDROP, a startup that I’ve heard good things about regarding its growth rate. (More here on the CASHDROP round that M25 put capital into.)

All that’s fine, but what makes M25 an interesting bet is that the firm only invests in Midwest-headquartered startups. Often when I chat to a fund that has a unique geographical focus, it’s merely that, a focus. As opposed to M25’s more hard-and-fast rule. Now with more capital and plans to take part in 12-15 deals per year, the group can double down on its thesis.

Per Asem, M25 has done about a third of its deals in Chicago, where it’s based, but has put capital into startups in 24 cities thus far. TechCrunch covered one of those companies, Metafy, earlier this week when it closed more than $5 million in new capital.

Why does M25 think that the Midwest is the place to deploy capital and generate outsize returns? Asem listed a number of perspectives that underpin his team’s thesis: The Midwest’s economic might, the network that his partner and him developed in the area before founding M25, and the fact that valuations can prove to be more attractive in the region at the stage that his firm invests. They are sufficiently different, he said, that his firm can generate material returns even with exits at around the $100 million mark, a lower threshold than most VCs with larger capital vehicles might find palatable.

M25 is not alone in its bets on alternative regions. The Exchange also chatted with Somak Chattopadhyay of Armory Square Ventures on Friday, a firm that is based in upstate New York and invests in B2B software companies in what we might call post-manufacturing cities. One of its investments has gone public, and the group’s latest fund is a multiple of the size of its first. Armory now has around $60 million in AUM.

All that’s to say that the venture capital boom is not merely helping firms like a16z raise another billion here, or another billion there. But the generally hot market for startups and private capital is helping even smaller firms raise more capital to take on less traditional spaces. It’s heartening.

On-demand pricing, and grokking the insurance game

This week The Exchange chatted with Twilio CFO Khozema Shipchandler about his company’s earnings report. You can read more on the hard numbers here. The short gist is that it was a good quarter. But what mattered most in our chat was Shipchandler riffing on where the center of gravity at Twilio will remain in revenue terms.

Briefly, Twilio is best known for building APIs that allow developers to leverage telecom services. Those developers and their employers pay for as much Twilio as they used. But over time Twilio has bought more and more companies, building out a diverse product set after its 2016-era IPO.

So we were curious: Where does the company stand on the on-demand versus SaaS pricing debate that is currently raging in the software world? Staunchly in the first camp, still, despite buying Segment, which is a SaaS service. Per Shipchandler, Twilio revenue is still more than 70% on-demand, and the company wants to make sure that its customers only buy more of its services as they sell more of their own.

Startups, then, probably don’t have to give up on on-demand pricing as they scale. Twilio is huge and is sticking to it!

Then there was Root’s earnings report. Again, here are the core numbers. The Exchange is keeping tabs on Root’s post-IPO performance not only because it was a company we tracked extensively during its late private life, but also because it is a bellwether of sorts for the yet-private, neoinsurane companies. Which matters for fellow neoinsurance player Hippo, as it is going public via a SPAC.

Alex Timm, Root’s CEO, said that his firm performed well in the first quarter, generating more direct written premium than anticipated, and at better loss-rates to boot. The company also remains very cash-rich post IPO, and Timm is confident that his company’s data science work has lots more room to improve Root’s underwriting models.

So, faster-than-expected growth, lots of cash, improving economics and a bullish technology take — Root’s stock is flying, right? No, it is not. Instead Root has taken a bit of a public-market pounding in recent months. The Exchange asked Timm about the disparity between how he views his company’s performance and future, and how it is being valued. He said that the insurance folks don’t always get its technology work and that tech folks don’t always grok Root’s insurance business.

That’s tough. But with years and years of cash at its current burn rate, Root has more than enough space to prove its critics wrong, provided that its modeling holds up over the next dozen quarters or so. Its share price can’t be great for the yet-private neoinsurance companies, however. Even if Next Insurance did just raise another grip of cash at another new, higher valuation.

Corporate spend’s big week

As you’ve read by now, Bill.com is buying corporate-spend unicorn Divvy for $2.5 billion. I dug into the numbers behind the deal here, if that’s your sort of thing.

But after collecting notes from the CEOs of Divvy competitors Ramp and Brex here, another bit of commentary came in that I wanted to share. Thejo Kote, the corporate spend startup Airbase’s CEO and founder did some math on Divvy’s results that Bill.com shared with its own investors, arguing that the company’s March payment volume and active customer account implies that the company’s “average spend volume per customer was $44,400 per month.”

Is that good or bad? Kote is not impressed, saying that Airbase’s “average spend volume per customer is almost 10 [times] that of Divvy,” or around “$375,000 per month.” What’s driving that difference? A focus on larger customers, and the fact that Airbase covers more ground, in Kote’s view, than Divvy by encompassing software work that Bill.com itself and Expensify manage.

I bring you all of this as the war in managing spend for companies large and small is heating up in software terms. With Divvy off the table, Ramp is now perhaps the largest player in the space not charging for the software it wraps around corporate cards. Brex recently launched a software product that it charges for on a recurring basis. (More on Brex at this link, if you are into it.)

Various and sundry

Two final notes for you, things that should make you either laugh, grimace, or howl:

  1. The Wall Street Journal’s Eliot Brown tweeted some data this week from the Financial Times, namely that amongst the roughly 40 SPACs that completed deals last year, a dozen and a half have lost more than half their value. And that the average drop amongst the combined entities is 38%. Woof.
  2. And, finally, welcome to peak everything.

More to come next week, including notes on the return of the Kaltura and Procore IPOs, and whatever it is we can suss out from the Krispy Kreme S-1 filing, as donuts are life.

Alex

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Big Tech is now worth so much we’ve forgotten to be shocked by the numbers

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. If you want it in your inbox every Saturday morning, sign up here. Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

TechCrunch isn’t a public-market-focused publication. We care about startups. But public tech companies can, at times, provide interesting insights into how the broader technology market is performing. So we pay what we might call minimum-viable attention to former startups that made it all the way to an IPO.

Then there are the Big Tech companies. In the United States the list is well-known: Facebook, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon. And, in a series of results that could indicate a hot market for startup growth, they had a smashingly good first quarter of 2021. You can read our notes on their results here and here, but that’s just part of the story.

Yes, the Big Tech financial results were good — as they have been for some time — but lost amid the usual earnings deluge of numbers is how shockingly accretive Big Tech’s recent performances have proven for their valuations.

Microsoft fell as low as the $135 per-share range last March. Today it’s worth $252 and change. Alphabet traded down to around $1,070 per share. Today the search giant is worth $2,410 per share.

The result of the huge share-price appreciation is that Apple is now worth $2.21 trillion, Microsoft $1.88 trillion, Amazon $1.76 trillion, Alphabet $1.60 trillion and Facebook $0.93 trillion. That’s around $8.4 trillion for the five companies.

Back in July of 2017, I wrote a piece noting that their aggregate value had reached the $3 trillion mark. That became $4 trillion in mid-2018. And then in the next three years or so it more than doubled again.

Why?

Myles Udland, a reporter at our sister publication Yahoo Finance, has at least part of the puzzle in a piece he wrote this week. Here’s Udland:

And while it seems that almost every earnings story has sort of followed this same arc, data also confirms that this is not just our imagination: corporate earnings have never been this far out of line with expectations.

Data out of the team at Refinitiv published Thursday showed the rate at which companies were beating estimates and the magnitude by which they were beating expectations through Thursday morning’s results were the best on record.

So earnings are beating the street’s guesses more frequently, and at a higher differential, than ever? That makes recent stock-market appreciation less worrisome, I suppose. And it helps explain why startups have been able to raise so much capital lately in the United States, as they have in Europe, and why private-market investors are pouring so much capital into fintech startups. And it’s probably why Zomato is going public and why we’re still waiting for the Robinhood debut.

This is what a market feels like when the underlying businesses are firing on all cylinders, it appears. Just don’t forget that no business cycle is unending, and no boom is forever.

An insurtech interlude

Extending The Exchange’s recent reporting regarding fintech funding, and our roundup from last week of insurtech startup rounds, a few more notes on the latter startup niche, which can be broadly viewed as part of the larger financial technology world.

This time we’ll hear from Accel’s John Locke regarding his investments in The Zebra — which recently raised even more capital — and the insurtech space more broadly.

Asked why insurtech marketplaces like The Zebra have been able to raise so very much money in the last year, Locke said that it’s a mix of “insurance carriers […] finally embracing marketplaces and willing to design integrated consumer experiences with marketplaces,” along with more consumer “comparison shopping” and, finally, growth and revenue quality.

The Zebra, Locke said, is “still growing north of 100% at ~$120M+ revenue run-rate.” That means it can go public whenever it wants.

Insurtech startups are leveraging rapid growth to raise big money

But on that matter, there has been some weakness in the stock market for some public insurtech companies. Is Locke worried about that? He’s neutral-to-positive, saying that his firm does not “think all the companies in the market will work but still thinks ‘insurtechs’ will take market share from incumbents over the next decade.” Fair enough.

And Accel is still considering more deals in the space, as are others. Locke said that the venture market for insurtech investments is “definitely more aggressive” this year than last.

Various and sundry

Closing today, a few notes on things that we didn’t get to that matter:

  • Productboard closed a $72 million Series C. First, that’s a huge round. Second, yes, Tiger did lead the deal. Third, the product management software company has around 4,000 customers today. That’s a lot. Add this company to your two-years-from-now IPO list.
  • Chinese bike-sharing startup Hello is going public in the United States. We are going to get back to this on Monday, but its F-1 filing is here. The company turned $926.3 million worth of 2020 revenues into $109.6 million in gross profit, and a net loss of $173.7 million in net losses. Yowza.
  • Darktrace went public this week. I know of it because it sponsors an F1 team that I adore, but it enters our world today as a recent U.K.-listed company. And after Deliveroo went kersplat, the resounding success of the Darktrace listing could make the U.K. a more attractive place to list than it was a week ago.
  • And, finally, drone delivery is, maybe, coming at last? U.K.-listed venture capital group Draper Esprit led the $25 million round into Manna, which wants to use unmanned drones in Ireland to deliver grub. “Manna sees a huge appetite for a greener, quieter, safer, and faster delivery service,” UKTN reports.

A long, weird week. Make sure to follow the second denizen of The Exchange’s writing team: Anna Heim. Okay! Chat next week!

Alex

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You might have just missed the best time to sell your startup

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. 

Happy Saturday, everyone. I do hope that you are in good spirits and in good health. I am learning to nap, something that has become a requirement in my life after I realized that the news cycle is never going to slow down. And because my partner and I adopted a third dog who likes to get up early, please join me in making napping cool for adults, so that we can all rest up for Vaccine Summer. It’s nearly here.

On work topics, I have a few things for you today, all concerning data points that matter: Q1 2021 M&A data, March VC results from Africa, and some surprising (to me, at least) podcast numbers.

On the first, Dan Primack shared a few early first-quarter data points via Refinitiv that I wanted to pass along. Per the financial data firm, global M&A activity hit $1.3 trillion in Q1 2021, up 93% from Q1 2020. U.S. M&A activity reached an all-time high in the first quarter, as well. Why do we care? Because the data helps underscore just how hot the last three months have been.

I’m expecting venture capital data itself for the quarter to be similarly impressive. But as everyone is noting this week, there are some cracks appearing in the IPO market, as the second quarter begins that could make Q2 2021 a very different beast. Not that the venture capital world will slow, especially given that Tiger just reloaded to the tune of $6.7 billion.

On the venture capital topic, African-focused data firm Briter Bridges reports that “March alone saw over $280 million being deployed into tech companies operating across Africa,” driven in part by “Flutterwave’s whopping $170 million round at a $1 billion valuation.”

The data point matters as it marks the most active March that the African continent has seen in venture capital terms since at least 2017 — and I would guess ever. African startups tend to raise more capital in the second half of the year, so the March result is not an all-time record for a single month. But it’s bullish all the same, and helps feed our general sentiment that the first quarter’s venture capital results could be big.

And finally, Index Ventures’ Rex Woodbury tweeted some Edison data, namely that “80 million Americans (28% of the U.S. 12+ population) are weekly podcast listeners, +17% year-over-year.” The venture capitalist went on to add that “62% of the U.S. 12+ population (around 176 million people) are weekly online audio listeners.”

As we discussed on Equity this week, the non-music, streaming audio market is being bet on by a host of players in light of Clubhouse’s success as a breakout consumer social company in recent months. Undergirding the bets by Discord and Spotify and others are those data points. People love to listen to other humans talk. Far more than I would have imagined, as a music-first person.

How nice it is to be back in a time when consumer investing is neat. B2B is great but not everything can be enterprise SaaS. (Notably, however, it does appear that Clubhouse is struggling to hold onto its own hype.)

Private equity, a SPAC and an IPO walk into a bar

Look I can’t keep up with all the damn venture capital rounds

TechCrunch Early Stage was this week, which went rather well. But having an event to help put on did mean that I covered fewer rounds this week than I would have liked. So, here are two that I would have typed up if I had had the spare hours:

  • Striim’s $50 million Series C. Goldman led the transaction. Striim, pronounced stream I believe, is a software startup that helps other companies move data around their cloud and on-prem setups in real time. Given how active the data market is today, I presume that the TAM for Striim is deep? Quickly flowing? You can supply a better stream-centered word at your leisure.
  • Kudo’s $21 million Series A. I covered Kudo last July when it raised $6 million. The company provides video-chat and conferencing services with support for  real-time translation. It had a good COVID-era, as you can imagine. Felicis led the A after taking part in the seed round. I’ll see if I can extract some fresh growth metrics from the company next week. One to watch.

And two more rounds that you also might have missed that you should not. Holler raised $36 million in a Series B. Per our own Anthony Ha, “[y]ou may not know what conversational media is, but there’s a decent chance you’ve used Holler’s technology. For example, if you’ve added a sticker or a GIF to your Venmo payments, Holler actually manages the app’s search and suggestion experience around that media.”

I feel old.

And in case you are not paying enough attention to Latin American tech, this $150 million Uruguayan round should help set you straight.

Is Substack really worth $650M?

Various and sundry

Finally this week, some good news. If you’ve read The Exchange for any length of time, you’ve been forced to read me prattling on about the Bessemer cloud index, a basket of public software companies that I treat with oracular respect. Now there’s a new index on the market.

Meet the Lux Health + Tech Index. Per Lux Capital, it’s an “index of 57 publicly traded companies that together best represent the rapidly emerging Health + Tech investment theme.” Sure, this is branded to the extent that, akin to the Bessemer collection, it is tied to a particular focus of the backing venture capital firm. But what the new Lux index will do, as with the Bessemer collection, is track how a particular venture firm is itself tracking the public comps for their portfolio.

That’s a useful thing to have. More of this, please.

Alex

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Tech companies predict the (economic) future

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here.

Earnings season is coming to a close, with public tech companies wrapping up their Q4 and 2020 disclosures. We don’t care too much about the bigger players’ results here at TechCrunch, but smaller tech companies we knew when they were wee startups can provide startup-related data points worth digesting. So, each quarter The Exchange spends time chatting with a host of CEOs and CFOs, trying to figure what’s going on so that we can relay the information to private companies.

Sometimes it’s useful, as our chat with recent fintech IPO Upstart proved after we got to noodle with the company about rising acceptance of AI in the conservative banking industry.

This week we caught up with Yext CEO Howard Lerman and Smartsheet CEO Mark Mader. Yext builds data products for small businesses, and is betting its future on search products. Smartsheet is a software company that works in the collaboration, no-code and future-of-work spaces.

They are pretty different companies, really. But what they did share this time ’round the earnings cycle were macro notes, or details regarding their forward financial guidance and what economic conditions they anticipate. As a macro-nerd, it piqued my interest.

Yext cited a number of macroeconomic headwinds when it reported its Q4 results. And tying its future results somewhat to an uncertain macro picture, the company said that it is “basing [its] guidance on the business conditions [it sees for itself] and [its] customers currently, with the macro economy, which remains sluggish, and customers who remain cautious,” per a transcript.

Lerman told The Exchange that it was not clear when the world would open — something that matters for Yext’s location-focused products — so the company was guiding for the year as if nothing would change. Wall Street didn’t love it, but if the economy improves Yext won’t have high hurdles to jump over. This is one tack that a company can take when it talks guidance.

Smartsheet took a slightly different approach, saying in its earnings call that its “fiscal year ’22 guidance contemplates a gradual improvement in the macro environment in the second half of the year.” Mader said in an interview that his company wasn’t hiring economists, but was instead simply listening to what others were saying.

He also said that the macro climate matters more in saturated markets, which he doesn’t think that Smartsheet is in; so, its results should be more impacted by things more like “the secular shift to the cloud and digital transformation,” to quote its earnings call.

AI fintech products are operating at scale and investor interest is maturing

What the economy will do this year matters quite a lot for startups. An improving economy could boost interest rates, making money a bit more expensive and bonds more attractive. Valuations could see modest downward pressure in that case. And venture capital could slow fractionally. But with Yext forecasting as if it was facing a flat road and Smartsheet only expecting things to pick up pace from Q3 on, it’s likely that what we have now is mostly what we’ll get.

And things are pretty damn good for startups and late-stage liquidity at the moment. So, smooth sailing ahead for startup-land? At least as far as our current perspective can discern.

We still have a grip of notes from Splunk CEO Douglas Merritt on how to take an old-school software company and turn it into a cloud-first company, and Jamf CEO Dean Hager about packaging discrete software products. More to come from them in fits.

Various and sundry

There were rounds big and small this week. Companies like Squarespace raised $300 million, while Airtable raised $277 million. On the smaller-end of the spectrum, my favorite round of the week was a modest $2.9 million raise from Copy.ai.

But there were other rounds that TechCrunch didn’t get to that are still worth our time. So, here are a few more for you to dig into this weekend:

  • A so-called pre-Series A round for Lilli, a U.K.-based startup that uses sensors and other tech to track the well-being of folks who might need help to live on their own. Using tech to take care of folks is always good by me. The deal was worth £4.5 million, per UKTN.
  • An IPO for Tuya, a Chinese software company that raised $915 million in its American debut. Chinese IPOs on American indices were once a big deal. They are less frequent now. Surprised that I missed this one, but, hey, there’s been a lot going on.
  • And the Republic round, worth $36 million, that is banking on the recently-expanded American crowdfunding regulations. Some startups have seen success with the approach, including Juked.gg.

Forget medicine, in the future you might get prescribed apps

Upcoming attractions

Next week is Y Combinator Demo Day week, so expect a lot of early-stage coverage on the blog. Here’s a preview. From The Exchange we’re looking back into insurtech (with data from WeFox and Insurify), and talking about Austin-based software startup AlertMedia’s decision to sell itself to private-equity instead of raising more traditional capital.

And to leave you with some reading material, make sure you’ve picked through our look at the valuations of free-trading apps, the issues with dual-class shares, the recent IPO win for the New York scene and how unequal the global venture capital market really is.

The global inequity in venture financing is staggering

Closing, this BigTechnology piece was good, as was this Not Boring essay. Hugs, and have a lovely respite,

Alex

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How investors are valuing the pandemic

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here.

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

Kicking off with a tiny bit of housekeeping: Equity is now doing more stuff. And TechCrunch has its Justice and Early-Stage events coming up. I am interviewing the CRO of Zoom for the latter. And The Exchange itself has some long-overdue stuff coming next week, including $50M and $100M ARR updates (Druva, etc.), a peek at consumption based pricing vs. traditional SaaS models (featuring Fastly, Appian, BigCommerce CEOs, etc.), and more. Woo! 

This week both DoorDash and Airbnb reported earnings for the first time as public companies, marking their real graduation into the ranks of the exited unicorns. We’re keeping our usual eye on the earnings cycle, quietly, but today we have some learnings for the startup world.

Some basics will help us get started. DoorDash beat growth expectations in Q4, reporting revenue of $970 million versus an expected $938 million. The gap between the two likely comes partially from how new the DoorDash stock is, and the pandemic making it difficult to forecast. Despite the outsized growth, DoorDash shares initially fell sharply after the report, though they largely recovered on Friday.

Why the initial dip? I reckon the company’s net loss was larger than investors hoped — though a large GAAP deficit is standard for first quarters post-debut. That concern might have been tempered by the company’s earnings call, which included a note from the company’s CFO that it is “seeing acceleration in January relative to our order growth in December as well as in Q4.” That’s encouraging. On the flip side, the company’s CFO did say “starting from Q2 onwards, we’re going to see a reversion toward pre-COVID behavior within the customer base.”

How COVID-19 accelerated DoorDash’s business

Takeaway: Big companies are anticipating a return to pre-COVID behavior, just not quite yet. Firms that benefited from COVID-19 are being heavily scrutinized. And they expect tailwinds to fade as the year progresses.

And then there’s Airbnb, which is up around 16% today. Why? It beat revenue expectations, while also losing lots of money. Airbnb’s net loss in Q4 2020 was more than 10x DoorDash’s own. So why did Airbnb get a bump while DoorDash got dinged? Its large revenue beat ($859 million, instead of an expected $748 million), and potential for future growth; investors are expecting that Airbnb’s current besting of expectations will lead to even more growth down the road.

Takeaway: Provided that you have a good story to tell regarding future growth, investors are still willing to accept sharp losses; the growth trade is alive, then, even as companies that may have already received a boost endure increased scrutiny.

For startups, valuation pressure or lift could come down to which side of the pandemic they are on; are they on the tail end of their tailwind (remote-work focused SaaS, perhaps?), or on the ascent (restaurant tech, maybe?). Something to chew on before you raise.

Market Notes

It was one blistering week for funding rounds. Crunchbase News, my former journalistic home, has a great piece out on just how many massive rounds we’re seeing so far this year. But even one or two steps down in scale, funding activity was super busy.

A few rounds that I could not get to this week that caught my eye included a $90 million round for Terminus (ABM-focused GTM juicer, I suppose), Anchorage’s $80 million Series C (cryptostorage for big money), and Foxtrot Market’s $42 million Series B (rapid delivery of yuppie and zoomer essentials).

Sitting here now, finally writing a tidbit about each, I am reminded at the sheer breadth of the tech market. Termius helps other companies sell, Anchorage wants to keep your ETH safe, while Foxtrot wants to help you replenish your breakfast rosé stock before you have to endure a dry morning. What a mix. And each must be generating venture-acceptable growth, as they have not merely raised more capital but raised rather large rounds for their purported maturity (measured by their listed Series stage, though the moniker can be more canard than guide.)

Five takeaways from Coinbase’s S-1

I jokingly call this little section of the newsletter Market Notes, a jest as how can you possibly note the whole market that we care about? These companies and their recent capital infusions underscore the point.

Various and Sundry

Finally, two notes from earnings calls. The first from Root, which is a head scratcher, and the second from Booking Holdings’ results.

I chatted with Alex Timm, Root Insurance’s CEO this week moments after it dropped numbers. As such I didn’t have much context in the way of investor response to its results. My read was that Root was super capitalized, and has pretty big expansion plans. Timm was upbeat about his company’s improving economics (on a loss ratio and loss-adjusted expenses basis, for the insurtech fans out there), and growth during the pandemic.

But then today its shares are off 16%. Parsing the analyst call, there’s movement in Root’s economic profile (regarding premium-ceding variance over the coming quarters) that make it hard to fully grok its full-year growth from where I sit. But it appears that Root’s business is still molting to a degree that is almost refreshing; the company could have gone public in 2022 with some of its current evolution behind it, but instead it raised a zillion dollars last year and is public now.

Sticking our neck out a bit, despite fellow neo-insurnace player Lemonade’s continued, and impressive valuation run, MetroMile’s stock is also softening, while Root’s has lost more than half its value from its IPO date. If the current repricing of some neo-insurance players continues, we could see some private investment into the space slow. (Fewer things like this?) It’s a possible trend we’ll have eyes on this year.

Next, Booking Holdings, the company that owns Priceline and other travel properties. Given that Booking might have notes regarding the future of business travel — which we care about for clues regarding what could come for remote work and office culture, things that impact everything from startup hub locations to software sales — The Exchange snagged a call slot and dialed the company up.

Booking Holdings’ CEO Glenn Fogel didn’t have a comment as to how his company is trading at all-time highs despite suffering from sharp year-over-year revenue declines. He did note that the pandemic has shaken up expectations for conversations, which could limit short-term business travel in the future for meetings that may now be conducted on video calls. He was bullish on future conference travel (good news for TechCrunch, I suppose), and future travel more generally.

So concerning the jetting perspective, we don’t know anything yet. Booking Holdings is not saying much, perhaps because it just doesn’t know when things will turn around. Fair enough. Perhaps after another three months of vaccine rollout will give us a better window into what a partial return to an old normal could look like.

And to cap off, you can read Apex Holdings’ SPAC presentation here, and Markforged’s here. Also I wrote about the buy-now-pay-later space here, riffed on the Digital Ocean IPO with Ron Miller here, and doodled on Toast’s valuation and the Olo debut here.

Hugs, and have a lovely weekend!

Alex

 

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Oscar Health’s initial IPO price is so high, it makes me want to swear

Amidst all the hype that Lemonade (IPO), Root (IPO), Metromile (SPAC-led debut) and other insurtech players have generated in the last year, it’s been easy to forget about Oscar Health. But now that the company founded in 2012 is approaching the public markets, one of the early tech-themed insurance companies is catching up on the attention front.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

There is some naughty language in The Exchange today. It is necessary. We’ll get back to PG-ifying this column tomorrow. — Alex

So this morning we’re digging into Oscar Health’s first IPO pricing interval, hoping to understand how the market is valuing its unprofitable health-insurance enterprise.

Recall that Oscar Health was valued at around $3.2 billion in March of 2018. That datapoint, via PitchBook, is dated. Oscar Health raised hundreds of millions since (per several venture-capital tracking databases, including Crunchbase) but we lack a final private valuation for the company.

Regardless, with Oscar Health now targeting a $32 to $34 per-share IPO range, we can get our hands dirty.

Let’s get some valuation numbers and then decide if Oscar Health feels cheap or expensive at that price.

Billion-dollar IPO

Oscar Health is looking to reap as much as $1.21 billion in its IPO, a huge sum. The company is selling 30,350,920 shares, with 4,650,000 additional shares reserved for its underwriters. Existing shareholders are selling another 649,080 shares.

This means that after the IPO, Oscar Health will have 197,037,445 Class A and B shares in circulation, or 201,687,445 after counting shares reserved for its underwriters.

Using the company’s $32 to $34 per-share range, we can calculate a valuation minimum of $6.31 billion for the company (lower share count, low-end of price range) and $6.86 billion (higher share count, high-end of price range). That’s the company’s simple IPO valuation.

Oscar Health may also sell up to $375 million of its shares at its IPO price to three different funds. The company advises that the “indication of interest is not a binding agreement or commitment to purchase,” so we can ignore it for now.