IPOs + SPACs of Interest

[gfp927z]

>>> The Trump trade is getting wild


Yahoo Finace

by Rick Newman

October 22, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/commentary-the-trump-trade-is-getting-wild-194822599.html


Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 5. In 2020, news organizations were confident enough to call the race for Joe Biden on Election Day night, which is the usual outcome. The only modern exception was the 2000 election, which hinged on a recount in Florida and took more than a month to decide.

The 2024 election could entail another delayed outcome — and this year, traders are getting in on the action.

Donald Trump’s new company, Trump Technology and Media Group (DJT), has become a sort of proxy bet on whether Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, will win or lose. If Trump wins, his company, known by its ticker symbol DJT, could become a hub of info for the new president and everybody in his orbit through the Truth Social media app. If Trump loses, by contrast, Truth Social, an also-ran behind goliaths such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X, will end up as a rump single-purpose Trump megaphone with little value.

For the last several months, the buying and selling of DJT shares has been a key “Trump trade” — a bet on whether Trump or his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, will win the 2024 election. Investors now seem to be betting on the timing of the election outcome through option contracts that give investors the right to buy or sell the stock in the future at a certain price. Options expire, typically on Fridays, so an investor buying an option is placing a timed bet. If investors were betting on DJT surging or crashing right after Election Day, they’d be piling into option contracts that expire Nov. 8, three days later.

But they’re not. The heaviest action by far is in DJT option contracts that expire Nov. 15, 10 days after Election Day. The amount of “open interest,” or number of contracts traded, is nearly eight times higher for the Nov. 15 vintage than for Nov. 8. After Nov. 15, the open interest plunges.

“People think we’re not going to know the election results on Election Day, or even on Nov. 8,” said Eric Hale, founder and CEO of Trader Oasis. “Traders betting on the election are betting on a Nov. 15 outcome.”

It’s plausible. Most of the seven swing states — Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada — appear to be dead heats that could easily be decided by less than 1% of the vote. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin prohibit the counting of mail-in ballots until Election Day, which slows the tally. Arizona and Nevada also tend to have slow vote counting. And this time around, both parties have armies of lawyers ready to contest any irregularity in court.

In 2020, Pennsylvania took five days to certify Biden’s win in the state, even though news networks projected the outcome on Election Day. Financial markets can move on wisps of information, so in a close vote count this year, DJT would likely be moving on hints that the final tally will go one way or another, well ahead of any official count.

The election will be a reckoning for DJT, which went public in March at around $50. The company has little revenue and poor financial performance — and would probably have no chance if not for Trump’s presidential bid, which could bring millions of new users if he wins. The stock's value has yo-yoed this year, in sync with Trump's electoral fortunes, hitting a high of $66 in March and a low of $12 in September. It's been on an upswing since the beginning of October, with shares up 108% to about $33.50.

The stock is massively volatile, with an “implied volatility,” or IV, of around 300%. That’s off the charts. IV reflects the range of bets traders are placing on the future price of the stock. An IV of around 20% is normal. A stock’s IV might surpass 100% prior to an unusual event such as a clinical trial for a make-or-break pharmaceutical. Hardly any company reaches Trumpian levels of volatility.

Option traders love volatility because it represents an unusual chance to score a big profit with manageable levels of risk. “Volatility is a shiny thing for traders, and right now DJT is the shiniest that exists,” said Hale. DJT is similar to a meme stock that trades for reasons unrelated to the company’s fundamentals, except for one thing: The 2024 election is a singular event that will have a binary outcome and possibly determine the company’s fate.

Standard formulas for pricing an option trade suggest DJT stock could go as high as $39.35 or as low as $16.33 within two weeks of Election Day. What the trading data doesn’t reveal is which outcome, up or down, is more likely. Traders often hedge bullish bets on a higher price with bearish bets on a lower price, hoping to profit by finding gaps or spreads giving them an edge no matter what the outcome.

Frenzied option betting, such as that on DJT, also requires market-makers selling options to buy more actual stock in order to keep their own risks neutral. That in itself can push the stock price up, creating the false impression of bullish sentiment when, in reality, the buying is driven by temporary derisking that will subside.

Betting markets are another Trump trade that has moved in Trump’s favor recently. From late August to early October, Trump and Harris were within a couple points of each other in betting markets, with Harris ahead for part of that time. But Trump is now ahead by roughly 60% to 40% in the RealClearPolitics aggregate, drawn from eight betting pools operated offshore, which Americans are not allowed to bet on but probably do through cryptocurrency and anonymous accounts.

Polymarket has drawn attention because of one “whale” known as Fredi9999 who has wagered more than $18 million on Trump winning the electoral vote, the popular vote, and certain states. The Wall Street Journal recently posited that one individual controls the Fredi account, plus three others accounting for $30 million in Polymarket wagers on Trump. Large wagers can change betting odds in their own right because they sometimes force bookmakers to adjust the odds just to assure they’re not overexposed to a small bet or group of bets.

Betting markets don’t reflect a candidate’s real election odds. One simple reason is that people who participate in betting markets are self-selected and don’t necessarily represent the electorate. Most political analysts say betting markets overstate Trump’s odds, with the presidential race essentially too close to call.

Those rising odds for Trump could make traders more eager to bet on DJT, however, pushing the stock’s volatility even higher than it would otherwise be. And this is all before any meaningful counting of votes.

The unruly 2024 election is also, for the time being, a surreal investing opportunity.

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[gfp927z]

>>> DJT stock extends massive rally as election odds shift in Donald Trump's favor


Yahoo Finance

by Alexandra Canal

October 14, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/djt-stock-extends-massive-rally-as-election-odds-shift-in-donald-trumps-favor-164614651.html


Trump Media & Technology Group stock (DJT) extended its massive rally on Monday, jumping as much as 9% as investors bet on former President Donald Trump's improved odds of winning the November election.

Over the weekend, both domestic and overseas betting markets shifted in favor of a Trump victory, with prediction sites like Polymarket, PredictIt, and Kalshi all showing Trump's presidential chances ahead of those of Democratic nominee and current Vice President Kamala Harris.

Separately, DJT announced the web launch of its Truth+ TV streaming service on Monday. The app is currently available to access on Android devices and will soon be released as a native Apple iOS app.

DJT shares traded at their lowest level since the company's debut following the expiration of the company's highly publicized lockup period last month. The stock has also been under pressure as previous polling saw Harris edging slightly ahead of the former president.

Trump's recent campaign momentum follows an appearance by Elon Musk at his rally in Butler, Pa., earlier this month. It was the same location where the former president survived an assassination attempt in July.

Tech billionaire Musk, who serves as the CEO of Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX and also owns social media platform X (formerly Twitter), has been outspoken about his support of Trump ahead of next month's election. Trump has even said he would consider a Cabinet position for Musk but that the businessman likely would not be able to serve "with all the things he's got going on."

At the rally, Musk told the crowd that Trump is the only candidate who can "preserve democracy in America," adding this will be "the last election" if Trump does not win.

Meanwhile, Harris has recently embarked on a flurry of media appearances in which she was pressed on how she would fund some of her proposals surrounding the economy and immigration.

Trump founded Truth Social after he was kicked off major social media apps like Facebook (META) and Twitter, now X, following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots. Trump has since been reinstated on those platforms. He officially returned to X in mid-August after about a year's hiatus.

But as Truth Social attempts to take on the social media incumbents, the fundamentals of the company have long been in question.

In August, DJT reported second quarter results that revealed a net loss of $16.4 million, about half of which was tied to expenses related to the company's SPAC deal. The company also reported revenue of just under $837,000 for the quarter ending June 30, a 30% year-over-year drop.

Earlier this month, the company revealed that its COO had stepped down in September.

Trump maintains a roughly 60% interest in DJT. At current levels of around $27 a share, Trump Media boasts a market cap of about $5.5 billion, giving the former president a stake worth around $3.3 billion. Right after the company's public debut, Trump's stake was worth just over $4.5 billion.

Trump Media went public on the Nasdaq in late March after merging with special purpose acquisition company Digital World Acquisition Corp. But the stock has been on a bumpy ride since, with shares oscillating between highs and lows as the moves have typically been tied to a volatile news cycle.

Over the past six months, the stock has been off around 15% — a massive improvement on the heels of the rally after shares hit their lowest point last month.

Stakeholders, including the former president, were subject to a six-month lockup period before being able to sell or transfer shares. That lockup period expired on Sept. 19, although Trump said at the time that he would not sell his stake.

“I have absolutely no intention of selling,” the former president told reporters at a press conference prior to the lockup period expiration. “I love it. I use it as a method of getting out my word.”

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[sweet crude]

CLRD merger with NYE SPAC

https://ludlowresearch.com/reports/clrd/

[Invest-in-America]

LPA: "Indicators"??? Well, primarily its sudden UPWARD price movement, as well as the NATURE of what they are doing in Central & So. America. And moreover, this was NOT an "IPO" at all but, rather, simply LPA's shares transfered from the generally LANGUISHING "American Stock Exchange", over to the BIG TIME "New York Stock Exchange". And, their shares were NOT very 'cheap' when in that other exchange. (And just look at this beast in the Post-M right now!! GEEEEEEEE-ZEUS J. KRISTOOOOO, help us all make some SENSE out of this!!!)

[TIMGZ]

WHAT "INDICATORS" GAVE YOU A GO-AHEAD******
NEED TO LEARN WHAT U ARE LOOKING AT**
I WOULD NOT GO NEAR SUCH A HIGH PERCENTAGE UPTREND****RISKY*****TOO RISKY

WHAT INDICATORS U HAVE ON YOUR CHARTS

[Invest-in-America]

LPA: "Only 10,000 sell"???? Was fine with me, Capt. TIm!! Heck, I didn't need 100,000 shares, Bro!! (Hey, Dude, don't forget that I myself created the legendary @HKD iHub board --- HOW did I know THAT freak IPO would hit $2000+-per-share during its mere 2nd day of IPO trading???? And, I grabbed TRUMP's @DWAC IPO when it was already UP by 415%!! And got a 3-bagger from there!!)

[TIMGZ]

BID NOW $290***ASK $350***LPA

[TIMGZ]

U CRAZY, WHAT IF THE TRADE WENT THE OPPOSITE WAY***


WHAT EXACTLY MADE YOU GRABBED THAT MUCH AT THE PARTICULAR PRICE***WHAT DID YOU SEE


ON 30 MINUTES CHART**ALL BUYS AND HOLDING***ONLY 10,000 SELL

[Invest-in-America]

LPA: Before I created the iHub Board for LPA today, I could not frickin' believe that there was NO mention of it anywhere across iHub!! (I grabbed a chunk at circa $55. No baloney, Dude, I had LPA in my Yahoo watch list, but right now I have NO recall as to WHERE I first saw it listed!! It must have been way beneath the BOTTOM of my Yahoo watch list, wherein Yahoo posts all major news for the day.)

[TIMGZ]

MEGA -RUN***WHAO! TOO HIGH FOR ME***FROM $5.59 TO OVER $600 WITHIN 2 MONTHS******NOBODY SEE THIS COMING

[Invest-in-America]

LPA: Heck then, I'll take ALL the God-damned profits for MYSELF!!!

[Stockexpertpro]

BCG Low Float like LPA DXYZ

[gfp927z]

>>> Trump’s Truth Social is now a public company. Experts warn its multibillion-dollar valuation defies logic


by Matt Egan

CNN

March 26, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-truth-social-going-public-090031597.html


For the first time in almost 30 years, part of Donald Trump’s business empire has gone public. Trading started with a bang, but the frenzy eased considerably by the closing bell, with shares ending well off their highs of the day.

Trump Media & Technology Group, the owner of struggling social media platform Truth Social, began its long-delayed journey as a public company at Tuesday’s opening bell under the ticker symbol “DJT.”

The stock surged about 56% at the open, to $78, and trading was briefly halted for volatility. Trump Media shares stabilized around $70 before fizzling. By the closing bell, Trump Media ended at $57.99, up by a more modest 16% on the day.

Despite the late-day slide, Wall Street is still assigning Trump Media an eye-popping valuation of nearly $11 billion — a price tag that experts warn is untethered to reality.

Shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp., the shell company that became Trump Media Tuesday morning, have spiked more than 200% so far this year. That includes a 35% surge Monday after the deal closed. Shares popped again at the start of trading Tuesday — investors’ first opportunity to trade the stock after the merger, under the new DJT ticker.

The skyrocketing share price comes despite the fact that Trump Media is burning through cash; piling up losses; and its main product, Truth Social, is losing users.

“This is a very unusual situation. The stock is pretty much divorced from fundamentals,” said Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business, who has been studying initial public offerings (IPOs) for over 40 years.

Ritter said the closest parallel would be GameStop, AMC and other so-called meme stocks that skyrocketed during Covid-19 as an army of retail traders piled in. He said Trump Media is likely worth somewhere around $2 a share — nowhere near its closing stock price of $58.

“The underlying business doesn’t seem to be worth much. There is no evidence this is going to become a large, highly profitable company,” he said. “I’m reasonably confident the stock price will eventually drop to $2 a share and could even go below that if the company blows through the money it got from the merger.”

The eye-popping valuation is a massive windfall for Trump, who owns a dominant stake of 79 million shares.

At Tuesday’s opening price of nearly $78, that stake is worth nearly $6 billion, although lock-up restrictions likely prevent Trump from selling or even borrowing against those shares anytime soon. The value of Trump’s stake ended at $4.6 billion at the closing bell.

Trump Media generated just $3.4 million of revenue through the first nine months of last year, according to filings. The company lost $49 million over that span.

And yet the market is valuing Trump Media at approximately $11 billion.

For context, Reddit was only valued at $6.4 billion at its IPO last week — even though it generated 160 times more revenue than Trump Media. (Reddit hauled in $804 million in revenue in 2023, compared with Trump Media’s annualized revenue of about $5 million.)

“At these levels, it appears untethered to its underlying business results,” said Matthew Kennedy, senior IPO strategist at Renaissance Capital. “Eventually, valuations tend to fall back on fundamentals. That means this stock is definitely at risk of plummeting back down to earth.”

Michael Ohlrogge, an associate professor of law at the NYU School of Law, told CNN there is “no way to square the current stock price with anything that would be called a rational valuation for this company.”

Truth Social is tiny

Truth Social faces real challenges and is still dwarfed by its rivals.

Truth Social had just 494,000 monthly active US users on iOS and Android combined in February, according to Similarweb stats provided to CNN. That’s a small fraction of the 75 million on X (formerly known as Twitter) and 142 million on Facebook.

Even Threads had more than 10 times the number of monthly active users that Truth Social had in February, according to Similarweb.

Not only that, but Truth Social is shrinking. Its monthly active users plunged 51% year over year in February, Similarweb stats show. The number of unique visitors to Truth Social’s website was 648,000, down 20% year over year.

Kennedy described Trump Media as a “meme-SPAC,” alluding to both its astronomical valuation and the fact it was formed through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.

“Stocks that trade on momentum are subject to falling rapidly,” he said.

Jonathan Macey, a law professor at Yale, told CNN last week that the Digital World stock price is “clearly a bubble.”

Of course, history shows that bubbles can always inflate further, and it’s very difficult to pinpoint when they will pop.

That means Trump Media’s share price could keep skyrocketing for now — even if those gains are not backed up by fundamentals. In theory, a rival company or wealthy group could swoop in and acquire Trump Media even at these price levels, although Ritter said that’s very unlikely.

“We’ve already seen with other meme stocks that even if they eventually fall back to reflecting a fundamental value, the process can take quite a long time,” said Ohlrogge, the NYU professor. “There’s every reason to believe that this stock could remain at highly inflated prices much longer, due to the enthusiasm that Trump’s supporters have for it.”

‘Stay away from it’

Matthew Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management, told CNN that Trump Media is probably not worth anything close to what the market is valuing it at.

“But it doesn’t really matter,” he said.

Tuttle noted that there is a history of SPACs spiking on their first day of trading, and he placed options bets that stand to make money if the stock shoots up.

“Because of what this is, and because it’s Trump — you’ve got people expecting this thing will take off [on Tuesday,]” he said.

But Tuttle advised everyday investors to use extreme caution trading Trump Media, noting the implied volatility is “insane.”

“Stay away from it,” said Tuttle, who has sold his shares of Digital World but still owns options that would pay out if the stock rises sharply. “Normally, I wouldn’t touch this with a 10-foot pole. But I’m not playing with much money and I already made a lot on this. If I wake up tomorrow and it’s trading at $1, oh well.”

Beyond the valuation concerns, there are other risks involved in Trump Media.

For example, this company’s future is inextricably linked to that of one person: Trump.

“There is a unique key man risk because Donald Trump is the chairman, top shareholder and the most popular user. He is one man, and he’s 77 years old,” said Kennedy.

Not only that, but Trump is facing felony prosecution in multiple simultaneous cases.

Trump Media noted that risk in SEC filings, saying: “Donald J. Trump is the subject of numerous legal proceedings, the scope and scale of which are unprecedented for a former President of the United States and current candidate for that office. An adverse outcome in one or more of the ongoing legal proceedings in which President Trump is involved could negatively impact TMTG and its Truth Social platform.”

A history of Trump bankruptcies

Not only does Trump himself face reputational issues, but his companies have a history of going bankrupt.

The last Trump company to go public, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts in 1995, used the same DJT ticker symbol. It went bankrupt in 2004 and was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.

Trump Media even highlighted Trump’s history of bankruptcies as a risk in its SEC filing.

“A number of companies that were associated with President Trump have filed for bankruptcy. There can be no assurances that TMTG will not also become bankrupt,” the company said.

Another question is what happens when the lock-up restrictions on Trump and other key insiders lapse in the coming months.

Trump’s legal troubles could give him a reason to sell his commanding stake, an outcome that would threaten Trump Media’s share price.

Betting on a Trump victory in November

Other insiders, including the sponsor of the SPAC, would also be able to sell.

Like any social media business, Truth Social faces pressure to grow its user base, expand its advertising business and build a subscription service.

Those tasks are complicated by the polarizing political backdrop where at least some portion of the country views the Trump movement skeptically.

Kennedy said that in many ways, Trump Media going public amounts to a “multibillion-dollar bet” on a second Trump term, a return to the White House that could be lucrative for his social media network.

“If he wins in November, Truth Social will probably be the primary means of presidential communication,” said Kennedy. “That’s the bet here.”

Ohlrogge, the NYU professor, agrees that the election could prove to be a real turning point for this company.

“If Trump were to lose the 2024 election, I’d imagine the stock price would crater quite quickly,” he said. “If he were to win, it could conceivably stay higher for longer, maybe much longer.”

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[gfp927z]

>>> DJT having a good first day: Trump's Truth Social media stock price sees rapid rise


by Bailey Schulz

USA TODAY

March 26, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/now-trumps-truth-social-hit-134022713.html


Donald Trump's Truth Social stock price skyrocketed during its stock market debut, gaining more than 40% by early Tuesday afternoon.

The parent company of Truth Social, Trump Media & Technology Group, went public Tuesday morning under the ticker DJT, short for Donald J. Trump. The stock was trading at $71.63 as of 1:32 p.m. ET, up nearly $22.

The public listing was made possible by Trump Media's merger with Digital World Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Digital World’s shareholders voted in favor of the merger Friday, and Trump Media took Digital World's place on the Nasdaq on Tuesday.

How much is Truth Social worth?

Before trading opened Tuesday, Truth Social's parent company had a market value of about $6.8 billion. Because Trump owns about 79 million of the 135 million outstanding shares, his stake in the company was worth about $4 billion.

It’s a pricy valuation, especially for a company that has racked up tens of millions of dollars in losses since its 2021 launch and generated just over $3 million in revenue during the first nine months of 2023.

In comparison, Reddit ? a social media platform that brought in more than $800 million in revenue in 2023 ? was valued at roughly $6.4 million for its IPO last week. Its stock was trading at $70.90 as of 1:16 p.m. ET.

While it's "hard to believe" that Truth Social and Reddit are close in valuation, Trump's social media company has been bolstered by investments from loyal Trump supporters, said Derek Horstmeyer, a finance professor at George Mason University in Virginia.

"It's hard to come up with any reasonable metrics that would get you to this valuation," Horstmeyer said.

What is Trump’s net worth?

Truth Social going public means a massive boost to Trump’s net worth, at least on paper.

Trump is not allowed to sell his shares or use them as collateral for a bond for the next six months. He would need approval from the Trump Media board to lift that restriction.

Trump has been ordered to post a $175 million bond as he appeals the full $454 million civil fraud judgment against him. He has also been ordered to pay $83.3 million after a defamation trial loss to advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.

Why is Truth Social’s ticker DJT?

Research shows that familiar names, such as a former president’s initials, can help a company’s stock performance.

One 2006 study by Princeton University psychologists found that stocks with tickers that are easier to pronounce tend to perform better in the first few days of trading. Another study from Pomona College in 2019 verified earlier research that found clever tickers tend to perform better, partly because they are more memorable to investors.

What is Digital World Acquisition?

Digital World is a SPAC, also known as a blank check company. These publicly traded shell companies exist to acquire or merge with private companies and take them public.

Truth Social’s merger with Digital World was first announced in 2021, when the number of companies going public via SPACs surged. The investment vehicles have since faced criticism for being bad deals for retail investors.

Why did Trump launch Truth Social?

Truth Social was founded after Trump was booted from major social media platforms following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

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[gfp927z]

>>> Trump's Truth Social stock soars in first day of trading


Yahoo Finance

by Alexandra Canal

March 26, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trumps-truth-social-stock-soars-in-first-day-of-trading-133705717.html


Donald Trump's social media platform Truth Social (DJT) surged more than 30% in its first day of trading on the Nasdaq early Tuesday.

Shares of Trump Media & Technology Group, Truth Social's parent company, were trading above $65 under the ticker symbol "DJT," Trump's initials, around mid-morning.

The company merged with special purpose vehicle Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC) in a deal approved by shareholders last week. Prior to the merger, DWAC had been on the public market since 2021.

Trump founded Truth Social after he was kicked off major social media apps like Facebook and Twitter, the platform now known as X, following the Jan. 6 Capitol riots in 2021. He has since been reinstated on the platforms.

Trump will maintain a roughly 60% stake in Truth Social, with nearly 79 million shares. That translates to a valuation of more than $5 billion based on current trading levels.

The merger comes as the former president faces a $454 million fraud penalty and grapples with a campaign fundraising shortfall as he gears up for a 2024 presidential rematch against current commander-in-chief Joe Biden.

But Trump will have to wait before cashing in his shares.

According to the terms of the merger, stakeholders are subject to a six-month lockup period before selling or transferring shares. The only exception would be if the company's board votes to make a special dispensation.

According to an SEC filing from Digital World, Trump Media lost $49 million in the first nine months of last year and brought in $3.4 million in revenue.

As Yahoo Finance's Rick Newman pointed out, short interest in DWAC stock — bets that the stock price will fall rather than rise — was about 11% of outstanding shares. To note, average short interest in public companies sits in the 3% to 4% range.

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[gfp927z]

DWAC - >>> Donald Trump is set for a $3 billion paper windfall. It may not solve his current cash crunch.


Yahoo Finance

by Ben Werschkul

March 22, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-is-set-for-a-3-billion-paper-windfall-it-may-not-solve-his-current-cash-crunch-150305891.html


Donald Trump could net a $3 billion paper windfall after shareholders of Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC) voted Friday to merge with his media business.

It comes at a critical time for the former president as he struggles with hundreds of millions in legal judgments and a 2024 campaign fundraising shortfall ahead of his rematch with President Joe Biden this fall.

The deal may not, however, solve that immediate cash crunch for Trump, who may not be able to quickly convert his shares to cash.

Stakeholders are likely to be subject to a lock-up period of about six months where they are not allowed to sell or transfer shares unless the company's board votes to make a special dispensation.

The vote to merge the blank check company with the Trump Media & Technology Group came during a special meeting of DWAC stockholders. The now-approved plan will allow Trump's company, which operates the Truth Social social media site, to take over DWAC's listing on the Nasdaq within days or weeks.

The combined company is set to be renamed after Trump’s company and change its ticker symbol from DWAC to DJT, the former president's initials.

Trump himself is set to receive a stake in the combined company valued at over $3 billion. Digital World's current stock price, which ticked down Friday, has nonetheless more than doubled this year as Trump has become the presumptive GOP presidential nominee for the third time in a row.

Friday’s meeting was led by Eric Swider, the chief executive officer at Digital World Acquisition Corp., who said he was excited to see the combined company "provide a home for free speech and a platform to promote those values."

Trump himself didn't immediately react to the decision but posts dozens of times daily on his social media site and often touts the business's prospects. He said just yesterday that Truth Social is "the real voice of America!!"

Can Trump use the windfall to pay his legal bills?

What remains to be seen is how much access Trump will have to the cash during the coming campaign season. The New York Attorney General is taking steps to seize his assets if he fails to pay $464 million, plus interest, to appeal the recent financial fraud conviction of his company.

Trump could see assets at risk of seizure as early as next Monday if he doesn't have the cash by then.

The expected windfall also comes as the latest 2024 campaign filings from the Federal Election Commission show Biden's reelection campaign significantly out-raising Trump. As of the end of February, the current president has raised $71.2 million in cash on hand versus Trump’s $33.5 million.

One option for Trump to get at the cash more quickly would be for the company's board votes to make a special dispensation.

Such a move could be possible with the seven board members of the combined company set to be populated by close Trump allies like Devin Nunes, the former congressman and current CEO of the Trump Media & Technology Group; Linda McMahon, a former Trump cabinet official; and Donald Trump Jr., his son.

Trump could also try to use the expected forthcoming windfall to secure a loan before the lockup period ends. That's seen as a more complicated option, as it would require a bank to offer him the money up front.

A potential return to Wall Street

The two companies first announced their merger plans back in October 2021 but the merger was long delayed by issues such as investigations into the deal by the SEC and a federal grand jury investigation.

The merger also faced a lawsuit from the founders of Trump's media group, who alleged a scheme to water down the value of their shares.

But with these hurdles apparently cleared, Friday’s vote also marks a return to Wall Street, which Trump has courted throughout his career with mixed success.

In 1995, Donald Trump bought 40 Wall St., down the street from the New York Stock Exchange, but the property has proven to be his most durable connection to public markets in recent decades.

One Trump foray into public markets began in 1995 when Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts began to trade.

"This is such a big day for us, it's the New York Stock Exchange," Trump said at the time.

But the adventure was short-lived, with the stock falling below its IPO price by 1997 and being delisted a few years later.

But one legacy of that effort could live on. The ticker symbol for Trump's company in the 1990s and early 2000s? DJT.

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[gfp927z]

>>> Trump Eyes $4 Billion Stock Windfall as His Legal Bills Pile Up


Bloomberg

by Bailey Lipschultz

Feb 28, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-eyes-4-billion-stock-113000959.html


(Bloomberg) -- On the financial front, the news has appeared dire for former president Donald Trump this year. Within a span of just a month, two judges in two separate cases ordered him to pay about $540 million in total — a sum so great that pundits have speculated it could erode his campaign finances.

What’s gotten far less attention, though, is this: A frenetic rally in a stock tied to Trump Media & Technology Group — which operates the Truth Social platform he posts on daily — has minted a nearly $4 billion windfall for him.

There are any number of caveats to this figure, including how it’s only a paper profit for now that he’ll have to wait months to monetize, and yet the stock’s surge is a potentially huge financial boost for a billionaire candidate suddenly short on cash.

The type of transaction — known as a de-SPAC or blank-check deal — that would hand Trump this new-found wealth is a complex one that briefly became popular on Wall Street during the stock mania unleashed by pandemic-era stimulus. In this particular deal, Truth Social’s owner would enter the stock market by merging with a publicly traded company called Digital World Acquisition Corp.

Shares of DWAC, as the company is known, have soared 161% this year in anticipation of the merger, which has been green-lit by the Securities and Exchange Commission and is now slated to go to a shareholder vote next month. If it’s approved, Trump will hold a greater than 58% stake. At DWAC’s current price — it closed Tuesday at $45.63 per share — that stake is worth $3.6 billion. Trump could get even more — close to an additional $1.3 billion worth, if the shares meet certain performance targets.

It seems improbable to many analysts that a stake in a money-losing social media company with little revenue and a fraction of its rivals’ user bases could potentially more than double Trump’s net worth. But as Trump began to steamroll his Republican rivals in January, setting up a likely rematch with President Joe Biden in November, retail investors frantically bid DWAC shares up. And when a group on Wall Street known as momentum traders joined the buying frenzy, the conditions for an epic rally were in place. In just six days, the stock jumped 200%.

“This is a meme stock, it’s not the type of thing where you bust out P/E ratios — you can throw that out the window,” said Matthew Tuttle, the chief executive and chief investment officer at Tuttle Capital Management. “DWAC has now become the de facto way to bet on or against Trump,” he added.

But if Trump’s rebound carries him back to the White House — and many polls currently make him the favorite to win — there could be value, in theory, at least, in owning a cut of the mouthpiece that will carry his message.

“The fundamental bull case is that he confines his tweets to the Truth Social platform, which means if you want to see them or interact with them, you need to sign up as well, making advertising all the more profitable,” Tuttle said.

Penalties and Fees

While Trump’s windfall would more than cover the penalties and legal fees he faces — he is appealing New York state’s $454 million civil fraud verdict — he would need to wait at least five months before cashing in shares, unless the company files to expedite that timing.

“He needs the money but he can’t sell too much at once without risking tanking the stock,” said Usha Rodrigues, a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law. “Once the lockup is expired, he could use the shares as collateral for loans in order to access cash without selling the shares.”

And it’s unlikely a bank would lend him a large sum of money against the locked-up shares, according to industry watchers like University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter.

Read More: Trump’s $540 Million Court Loss Tests His ‘King of Debt’ Claim

Representatives for DWAC, Trump Media and the Trump Organization didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Even the so-called earnout would more than cover it. After the deal closes, if the stock trades above $17.50 for 20 of 30 days, Trump Media holders would be entitled to receive as many as an additional 40 million shares filings show — with the majority earmarked for Trump.

A more troubling question for Trump is whether shareholders will keep the faith for more than five months after the merger is complete. As recently as April, Trump assigned the company a $5 million to $25 million value in a financial disclosure filed with the Federal Election Commission, a fraction of its valuation in the SPAC deal terms as well as in the market.

The business has struggled, with Trump Media losing $49 million in the nine months through September while generating just $3.4 million in revenue, according to regulatory filings. As such, the company has warned that it may run out of cash without the merger, filings show.

Trump Media “hasn’t been able to turn the corner and it’s not clear how the company is going to succeed in monetizing its business,” said Ritter.

The deal’s anticipated completion is a feat in itself after more than two years of starts and stops. Skeptics questioned whether Trump Media’s merger could clear a litany of shareholder votes, as well as investigations from the Justice Department and the SEC.

After the completion and during the lockup, the share price – and Trump’s potential windfall – will hinge on how successful he is politically, industry watchers agree. Trump Media has been aiming to “rival the liberal media consortium” and fight against big tech companies like Meta Platforms Inc., Netflix Inc., and Elon Musk’s X.

Shareholders may even choose to hold onto their shares in the hope that because of Trump Media’s alignment with his campaign message, Trump would have a strong incentive not to add Truth Social to the long list of ventures he’s endorsed, then exited from.

“The majority of people who are buying and holding this thing are Trump supporters, “ Tuttle said. “I don’t think it’d be smart for him to entirely blow out of his position and leave them holding the bag.”

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>>> Donald Trump just got the green light to return to Wall Street


Matt Egan

CNN

Feb 15, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-just-got-green-173804022.html?.tsrc=fp_deeplink


Months after leaving the White House, former President Donald Trump began plotting his return to Wall Street. That return, delayed by years of regulatory and legal hurdles, is now on the verge of becoming a reality — and it could make Trump a fortune.

US regulators have finally given the green light to a controversial merger between Truth Social owner Trump Media & Technology Group and a blank-check company. The blessing from the Securities and Exchange Commission removes the last major obstacle holding back the deal.

The merger, if approved by shareholders, would pave the way for Trump Media to become a publicly-traded company — one where Trump will own a dominant stake that could be worth billions.

Digital World Acquisition Corp., the blank-check firm, announced that on Wednesday the SEC signed off on the merger proxy for the deal. A date for a shareholder vote will be set by Friday.

“It does look like this deal is going to reach the finish line now — after more than two years of delays,” said Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida.

Trump stake could be worth $4 billion

Shares of Digital World, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, spiked 15% on the major milestone. The stock has nearly tripled this year, fueled by Trump’s political success in the Republican presidential primary, and now the merger progress.

Ritter estimates the merger could pave the way for about $270 million of cash coming into Trump Media, funds the company could fuel Truth Social’s growth.

Trump is set to hold a dominant position in the newly-combined company, owning roughly 79 million shares, according to new SEC filings.

The former president’s stake would be valued at $4 billion based on Digital World’s current trading price of about $50.

Of course, as Ritter notes, it would be very difficult for Trump to translate that paper wealth into actual cash.

Not only would Trump be subject to a lock-up period that would prevent he and other insiders from selling until six months after the merger, but the new company’s fortunes would be closely associated with the former president. That could make it difficult for Trump to sell even after the lock-up period expires.

‘This is a meme stock’

Moreover, there are major questions about the sky-high valuation being placed on this media company.

“This is a meme stock. The valuation is totally divorced from the fundamental value of the company,” said Ritter.

Digital World’s share price values the company at up to about $8 billion on a fully diluted basis, which includes all shares and options that could be converted to common stock, according to Ritter.

He described that valuation as “crazy” because Trump Media is generating little revenue and burning through cash.

New SEC filings indicate Trump Media’s revenue amounted to just $1.1 million during the third quarter. The company posted a loss of $26 million.

Since the merger was first proposed in October 2021, legal, regulatory and financial questions have swirled about the transaction.

In November, accountants warned that Trump Media was burning cash so rapidly that it might not survive unless the long-delayed merger with Digital World is completed soon.

Shareholder vote looms

Now, Trump execs are cheering the green light from the SEC.

“Truth Social was created to serve as a safe harbor for free expression and to give people their voices back,” Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes, a former Republican congressman, said in a statement. “Moving forward, we aim to accelerate our work to build a free speech highway outside the stifling stranglehold of Big Tech.”

Eric Swider, Digital World’s CEO, described the SEC approval as a “significant milestone” and said executives are “immensely proud of the strides we’ve taken towards advancing” the merger.

One of the final remaining hurdles is for Digital World shareholders to approve the merger in an upcoming vote.

The shareholders have enormous incentive to approve the deal because if the merger fails, the blank-check firm would be forced to liquidate. That would leave shareholders with just $10 a share, compared with $50 in the market today.

“Anyone who holds shares and votes against the merger is crazy,” said Ritter, the professor.

“Then again, I might argue that everyone holding DWAC shares is crazy,” he added, referring to the company’s thin revenue and hefty valuation.

Matthew Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management, said he’s not surprised by the ups and downs surrounding this merger.

“The thing about Trump and anything related to Trump is, love him or hate him, there is going to be drama,” said Tuttle, who purchased options to buy Digital World shares in his personal account. “Really, I would not have expected anything less.”

Going forward, Tuttle said Trump Media’s share price will live and die by how everything plays out for Trump personally — from his legal troubles to his potential return to the White House.

“Anything bullish for Trump is going to be bullish for the stock,” said Tuttle.

Trump is no stranger to Wall Street, where he has a history, one marked by bankruptcies.

Although Trump has never filed for personal bankruptcy, he has filed four business bankruptcies — all of them linked to casinos he used to own in Atlantic City.

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>>> Arm Holdings plc (ARM) architects, develops, and licenses central processing unit products and related technologies for semiconductor companies and original equipment manufacturers rely on to develop products. It offers microprocessors, systems intellectual property (IPs), graphics processing units, physical IP and associated systems IPs, software, tools, and other related services. Its products are used in various markets, such as automotive, computing infrastructure, consumer technologies, and Internet of things. The company operates in the United States, the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, South Korea, and internationally. The company was founded in 1990 and is headquartered in Cambridge, the United Kingdom. Arm Holdings plc operates as a subsidiary of Kronos II LLC.

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DWAC, Rumble - >>> 2 Stocks Surging on Donald Trump's Presidential Bid


Benzinga

by Joey Solitro

January 23, 2024


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2-stocks-surging-donald-trumps-163750792.html


After Donald Trump's decisive win in the Iowa caucus and two opponents dropping out and endorsing him – Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron Desantis – it’s becoming clear who the Republican nominee will be. All the while, two stocks have seen strong rallies on Trump’s chances to make his return to the White House, and they could continue higher following the New Hampshire primary, where Trump is the hands-down favorite.

Let’s take a look at each.

Digital World Acquisition Corp.

Digital World Acquisition Corp. (NASDAQ:DWAC) is a special purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC) that is trying to merge with the former president's Trump Media & Technology Group, which is behind the Truth Social app.

Digital World’s stock has surged over 175% since Trump’s win in Iowa, including a rally of over 88% yesterday. While the valuation of the combined company may be getting a bit rich, there’s no telling where traders could take it going forward, especially if the merger with Truth Social closes.

Rumble Inc.

Rumble Inc. (NASDAQ:RUM) is an online video-sharing platform that has set itself apart from competitors by allowing people to share anything that they believe in without the fear of being restricted or taken down. This has resonated well with conservative voices who said they were removed or shadow-banned on other platforms.

Rumble’s stock has surged more than 60% since Trump’s win in Iowa, including a rally of more than 15% at the start of trading today. Yesterday’s rally of more than 36% was helped by announcement of a partnership with Barstool Sports.

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>>> The Top Upcoming IPOs To Watch


Forbes

by Paul Katzeff, Davon Collins


https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/upcoming-ipos/


Remember IPOs? A cavalcade of companies went public during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 as the stock market soared, driven higher by the proliferation of cheap money and retail investors stuck at home with cash burning a hole in their bank accounts.

Big names, from Airbnb and Coinbase, to Palantir and Rivian, rode a wave of enthusiasm to impressive IPO debuts.

That optimism was turbocharged by retail investors piling into meme stocks and economists’ predictions that the good times would last as governments eased Covid-19 restrictions and shoppers returned to brick-and-mortar stores.

Unfortunately, the good times did not last. The firehose of IPOs dried up along with the easy money that fueled new offerings as the Federal Reserve began its campaign of interest rate hikes to beat down historically high levels of inflation.

“I don’t expect IPOs to rebound while interest rates remain high, amid quantitative tightening and uncertainty about the trajectory of interest rates,” says Jose Torres, senior economist at InteractiveBrokers.

Still, the struggles of IPOs in 2021 and 2022 should not surprise savvy investors who understood the bigger picture. Between 1975 and 2011, over 60% of newly public companies saw negative returns after five years.

When Will the IPO Market Return to Normal?

For now, institutional investors—who would buy blocks of stock in any IPO—remain reticent about plunging cash into IPOs at the prices IPO stock executives are demanding.

“I would say the IPO market will recover in late 2024,” Torres says.

Investors are afraid of the high cost of money due to Fed rate hikes, says Avi Deutsch, a managing director of wealth management firm Robertson Stephens. They’re wary because the central bank does not appear to be done increasing the cost of money. And they’re skittish that still-high inflation poses a risk to the business prospects of any company that would go public.

And that’s not all. Share prices of many companies that went public in recent years have fallen sharply. As a result, many investors have lost money on those deals.

“It left investors with a pretty bad taste in their mouths as far as the future of IPOs goes,” Deutsch says. In turn, that dynamic has made it harder for companies contemplating an IPO to get the share price they want.

“Since companies are not getting the wanted valuation, they are staying private,” says Deutsch.

But that standoff between companies wishing to go public and deep-pocketed investors is bound to end. Inevitably, more and more on both sides will find themselves seeing eye to eye. Supply and demand will reach equilibrium. The price for money that fledgling companies are willing to pay will match the returns investors expect.

“This is already happening slowly,” says Deutsch. “Companies will eventually run out of money. That will lead to them needing to fundraise. In my opinion, the market needs a fresh new private company to pique interest.”

The technology sector has been the most prolific source of IPOs over time. Will that continue? Renewable energy companies will be a big incubator of public offerings in the next IPO craze, Deutsch says.

What To Do When IPOs Proliferate

When the frequency of IPOs picks up from its current tortoise pace, make sure to allocate no more than a small percentage of your portfolio.

This rule applies to investing in any individual stock: Experts recommend that you avoid putting large percentages of your cash in any one company, no matter whether it’s a hot IPO name or has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange for a century.

Diversifying your dollars across many companies, via exchange-traded funds or index funds, helps position your money to grow without putting all of your eggs in any single company’s basket.

That being said, a small bet can win big if you back the right horse. Despite the strange economic climate we find ourselves in now, a few of the soon-to-be public companies will excel over the long haul. The trick is figuring out which ones.

Top Recent IPOs of 2023

Here are key facts about recent debuts on Nasdaq’s IPO calendar. You can get a prospectus at the SEC website or a company’s investor relations page.

Arm Holdings ADR IPO

Ticker: ARM
IPO Date: September 18, 2023
Offering Price Per Share: $51

The debut of Arm Holdings, a prominent U.K. chip designer, was the biggest since 2021. After being priced at $51, Arm opened at $56.10. It rose as much as nearly 25% on its first day. Arm chips are widespread among consumer products, including smartphones and digital televisions. Its chips are also key components in artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing and autonomous driving. Shares soared as high as $69 on September 15. But it has pulled back to the low $50s. An analyst for Bernstein wrote in a note to clients that Arm is expected to benefit from AI growth, but “we believe it is too soon to declare them an AI winner.”

Surf Air Mobility IPO

Ticker: SRFM
IPO Date: July 27, 2023
Offering Price Per Share: $5

Surf Air Mobility is now trading on the NYSE. Surf Air is an electric aviation and regional air travel company. It intends to develop powertrain technology with commercial partners to electrify existing fleets. It fell 37% from its debut price in initial trading. Most recently, it has been trading at under $2.

Better.com IPO

Ticker: BETR
IPO Date: August 24, 2023
Offering Price Per Share: $17.44

Known formally as Better Home & Finance, the online mortgage lender followed through with its long-delayed SPAC tie-up with Aurora Acquisition Corp. by debuting on the Nasdaq stock market—and plunging more than 90% almost immediately after the opening bell. The six-year-old company enjoyed strong growth during the Covid-19 pandemic, driven by surging demand and ultra-low mortgage rates. But it went public at a time of high rates and sinking home sales.

6 Top IPO Prospects of 2023—And Beyond

Headline-grabbing names make some of these companies the most talked-about IPO prospects. They provide a wide range of services, and many are uniquely positioned to thrive in the post-Covid economy.

Please note that the valuations listed below are estimates, and are generally based on previous rounds of venture capital funding or company projections. They will almost certainly change when the companies actually go public.

1. Stripe IPO

Valuation: $50 billion

Life has been better for Stripe, a San Francisco-based payment processing giant. The company raised $6.5 billion from existing and new investors, it said in March 2023. At that time Stripe’s valuation was $50 billion—down nearly 50% from its peak valuation of $95 billion in March 2021.

The cash haul is not needed to fund operations. Instead, Stripe said it would be used for stock buybacks and to cover tax bills related to stock awards.

Many investors hoped that Stripe could be one of the biggest IPOs ever, thanks in large part to rising demand for e-commerce, which went into hyperdrive during the pandemic. Some investors remain highly bullish on a Stripe IPO despite its valuation reduction.

2. Klarna IPO

Valuation: $6.7 billion

The Swedish buy-now-pay-later industry pioneer Klarna has seen its fortunes dim after raising $800 billion in funds in July 2022 at a valuation of $6.7 billion. That represents an 85% decline from a year prior, when private investors thought the company was worth almost $50 billion. That made it Europe’s most valuable startup.

Why has its valuation pulled back? There just isn’t that much demand now for companies that can’t turn profits and are burning through cash.

3. Chime IPO

Valuation: $25 billion

Chime is a no-fee mobile banking platform. Technically speaking, Chime is not a bank but rather a fintech company that uses technology to automate and improve the delivery of financial services. Chime issues debit and credit cards through actual banks that it partners with.

Chime was valued at $1.5 billion in 2019. Its valuation reached $25 billion in the summer of 2021, amid the apex of investor interest in fintech startups. Chime was aiming for a valuation of $35 billion to $45 billion when investors saw it debuting in early 2022. But said it was putting an IPO on hold.

The problem? Jittery backers. Fintech funding around the world rose 55% quarter-over-quarter in Q1. But if you set aside Stripe’s stupendous $6.5 billion round, funding fell 12%, says CB Insights. The number of deals also dropped. It fell for the fourth straight quarter, landing at 983.

4. Databricks IPO

Valuation: $43 billion

Big data has become a big obsession of companies operating in every industry. Databricks has become a leading purveyor of tools designed to simplify database management, implement AI and even just do great data visualization. In brief, the company is a cloud-based provider of AI powered data analytics.

Databricks was valued at $43 billion as of its most recent funding in September 2023. That was up from $33 billion in October 2022. The decrease reflected the tech industry trend of slashing valuation amid economic downturns.

Even as it postpones going public, the company is priming itself to be a major player in the AI data/cloud computing space. It’s developing its own AI to compete with the likes of ChatGPT. It recently signed a deal to take over Okera, an AI-centric data governance platform. Databricks is also beefing up its venture arm by investing in Immuta, a data security platform and software company.

5. Reddit IPO

Valuation: $5.5 billion

Reddit’s IPO has been lingering in the face of a tech IPO bloodbath. It’ll likely wait for a better environment before pulling the trigger.

The company earned a valuation of $10 billion last August after raising more than $400 million in funding from Fidelity and others. But Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund (FBGRX) recently revalued its Reddit holding, down 7.36% from a prior disclosure. The update implies an overall valuation of $5.5 billion for Reddit.

Non-staff moderators of some popular sections of Reddit, including gaming and music, began protests on June 12 against the social network’s plan to start charging some developers for access to its data. The moderators have in effect locked out users. Reddit says it can no longer subsidize businesses that use lots of its data.

Still, Reddit is looking to go public later this year, Reuters said in February. The company wants to capitalize on its big online community of users dedicated to an endless array of interests. That bloc is the source of earlier exuberance for an IPO by the likes of Reddit.

6. Impossible Foods IPO

Valuation: $7 billion

Impossible Foods is becoming a common sight in supermarkets and on menus in America’s biggest restaurants. Burger King patrons, for instance, can sup on the Impossible Whopper. White Castle patrons can dine on the Impossible Slider.

Impossible Foods hopes its plant-based burgers will win fans and reduce meat production in order to help save the climate from catastrophe. Potential investors, though, can only continue to salivate at the idea of an IPO.

In early 2023, CEO Peter McGuinness reportedly said it would happen, but probably not this year. The company is well capitalized, he said, “and it’s not a great macro environment to” go public.

How Recent IPOs Have Performed

Once the afterglow wears off, new public companies go about the hard work of churning out profits and developing new products and services. Here’s a quick recap of how well some recent high-profile IPOs have performed.

But IPOs can be fickle. Of the 100 most recent IPOs tracked by IPOScoop.com, keep in mind that 76 are flat to down since their debut. This is only to say that investing in recent IPOs can be an unpredictable enterprise, which is why experts generally recommend that you keep your portfolio well diversified.

Genelux IPO

Ticker: GNLX
IPO Date: January 26, 2023
Return Since IPO: 312.5%

Genelux (GNLX) shares soared more than 300% through their October 3 compared to their late July offering price of $6, according to IPOScoop.com. Genelux is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, which develops and commercializes next-generation treatments for a broad range of cancers.

Prestige Wealth IPO

Ticker: PWM
IPO Date: July 7, 2023
Return Since IPO: -35%

Wealth manager and asset manager Prestige Wealth (PWN) has fallen 35% since going public at $5 a share in July. Now trading around $3, PWM’s “all-time” intraday high was $30.92 on July 10. Nearly 165-year-old Prestige targets clients with investable assets of $1 million or more.

Atlas Lithium IPO

Ticker: ATLX
IPO Date: January 10, 2023
Return Since IPO: 408.5%

Atlas Lithium is a U.S. mineral exploration and mining company with properties in Brazil. It is among the largest seekers of lithium and other battery minerals in Brazil, which is one of the few countries to have hard-rock lithium, which generally cost less to extract than lithium chemical products from brine does. Atlas went public early in the year at $6 and lately has been trading above $30.

Structure Therapeutics IPO

Ticker: GPCR
IPO Date: February 3, 2023
Return Since IPO: 277%

Structure Therapeutics, formerly known as ShoutTi, creates medicines by using advanced computational and structure-based technologies. Its oral therapeutics treat chronic metabolic and pulmonary diseases. It has operations in the U.S. and China. Its presence in China makes it potentially vulnerable to worsening trade relations between the U.S. and that nation.

Mobileye Global IPO

Ticker: MBLY
IPO Date: October 26, 2022
Return Since IPO: 98%

Based in Israel, Mobileye Global (MBLY) debuted at $21 per share. The Israel-based business develops autonomous driving technologies and advanced driver-assistance systems. Those include cameras, computer chips and software.

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>>> SPAC seeking merger with Trump’s media company agrees to settlement with SEC


by Ramishah Maruf

CNN

July 3, 2023


https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/03/business/trump-spac-sec-settlement-in-principle/index.html


Blank-check firm Digital World Acquisition Corp said it reached an agreement in principle with the Securities and Exchange Commission after the commission began investigating the company’s merger deal with Truth Social owner Trump Media & Technology Group.

Prosecutors charge three investors with insider trading in Trump SPAC deal

The terms are not yet definitive, according to an SEC filing, and the final agreement is subject to approval by the commission.

If it’s approved, the SEC will enter a cease-and-desist order with the company, finding DWAC violated “antifraud provisions” connected to initial public offering filings. Those filings were about “certain statements, agreements and omissions relating to the timing and discussions the Company had” with Trump Media & Technology Group.

Nearly two years ago, former President Donald Trump’s media group agreed to combine with DWAC to bring the company public through what’s known as a SPAC, or a Special Purpose Acquisition Corporation. But the deal has raised eyebrows from legal experts and drawn scrutiny from regulators and prosecutors.

If DWAC amends its IPO filings, it will have to pay the SEC an $18 million civil penalty after the closing of any merger deal.

TMTG is not a party to the settlement, according to the SEC filing, and did not consent to it.

“TMTG may disagree and try to terminate the Merger Agreement,” the SEC filing said.

Neither the SEC nor TMTG could not be immediately reached for comment.

DWAC said in the filing that the settlement in principle is in the best interest of its shareholders and would prevent drawn-out litigation with the SEC.

“DWAC remains ready and willing to consummate a transaction with TMTG to create an alternative media platform and bring value to its shareholders,” the filing said.

Last week, federal prosecutors arrested three investors on insider trading charges related to the deal to take Trump’s media business public. They allegedly made more than $22 million in October 2021 by illegally trading on nonpublic knowledge of the DWAC-TMTG merger.

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>>> Instacart is an American company that operates a grocery delivery and pick-up service in the United States and Canada.[5] The company offers its services via a website and mobile app. The service allows customers to order groceries from participating retailers with the shopping being done by a personal shopper.[6]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instacart


History

2010s

Instacart was founded in 2012 by entrepreneur Apoorva Mehta, a former Amazon.com employee.[7][8][9] Apoorva was born in India and moved with his family to Canada in 2000.[10][11] He studied engineering at the University of Waterloo and graduated in 2008.[12] He was a participant in Y Combinator's Summer 2012 batch, which eventually led to the creation of Instacart.[13] In 2013, Mehta was included on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.[14] Apoorva previously worked at BlackBerry, Qualcomm, and then Amazon as a supply chain engineer, where he developed fulfillment systems to move packages from Amazon's warehouses to customers' homes.[15] He left Amazon in 2010 to attempt to start his own business.[16] Before founding Instacart, Apoorva had tried to start at least 20 other services.[14][7] He tried building an ad network for social gaming companies, and developing a social network specifically for lawyers, among other start-ups.[17]

Instacart originally launched in San Francisco.[18][19][20][21] By April 2015, the firm had about 200 employees. It introduced a new policy around June allowing some shoppers to choose to be part-time employees, starting with Chicago and Boston[22][23] and extending its offer to shoppers in Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, D.C. the following month.[24]

In September 2016, the company announced an expansion to its zone on the north side of Chicago.[25] In October 2016, it announced the expansion of coverage areas in Orange County, California,[26] and Minneapolis.[27] In November 2016, the company changed its policy and removed the option to leave a gratuity in exchange for a service fee that would be used to pay workers instead. Backlash against the policy from customers and some shoppers forced the company to reinstate the option only weeks later with modifications that placed the tip under the service fee section on a separate page.[28][29]

In March 2017, Instacart agreed to pay $4.6 million to settle a class action settlement stemming from the alleged misclassification of its personal shoppers as independent contractors. The suit, filed in March 2015, alleged 18 violations, including improper tip pooling and failure to reimburse workers for business expenses.[30][31] The same year, Instacart raised $400 million in funding at a valuation of $3.4 billion.[32][33] In November 2017, the company expanded to Canada by announcing a partnership with Loblaw Companies to begin delivery from select locations in Toronto and Vancouver.[34][35] That same month, some Instacart workers participated in a strike action, alleging wages as low as $1 an hour. Instacart claimed that the strike had no impact on its operations.[36]

In January 2018, the company acquired Toronto-based Unata, a white-label platform for grocers, for $65 million.[37][38][39] In February 2018, Instacart withheld tips given by customers to shoppers, blaming a software bug. In addition, customers were often charged for service fees that were supposed to be waived.[40] In April 2018, Instacart made a few additional changes to its pay service by instituting a mandatory 5% service fee on all orders. It originally offered an optional 10% service fee that went directly to Instacart that could be turned off. It also returned the gratuity option back to the checkout screen and raised the default value from 0% to 5%.[41] By mid-2018, Instacart was available for use in 11 Canadian markets and was planning expansions for five more markets.[42] Later in 2018, the company raised $200 million at a $4.2 billion valuation in a funding round led by Coatue Management, as well as Glade Brook Capital Partners and existing investors.[43] In October 2018, Instacart raised another $600 million at a $7.6 billion valuation in a funding round led by hedge fund D1 Capital Partners.[44] In the fall of 2018, Instacart announced national expansions with retailers, including Walmart Canada stores, Staples Canada, M&M Food Market,[45] Kroger, Aldi, Sam's Club, Publix, and Costco.[46][47] In November 2018, Instacart announced the national expansion of Instacart Pickup, a grocery click-and-collect service, whereby users pick up their pre-packaged orders at the grocery store.[48] In November and December 2018, Instacart again changed its pay system for its personal shoppers; shoppers claimed this pay system resulted in substantially lower pay and boycotted. Instacart customers complained on social media that their orders were being delayed.[49][50][51] At the end of the year, Instacart raised an additional $271 million from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Comcast Ventures, Thrive Capital, Coatue Management, and Valiant Capital, bringing its latest round of fundraising to $871 million at a $7.87 billion valuation.[52]

In February 2019, an online organizing campaign, including shoppers, provided examples of payments as low as $0.80 per delivery. The company announced that it would revise its pay system and give back pay to some workers.[53][54] Under the revised pay system, tips were no longer factored into the minimum base wages, which were newly set at $7–$10 for a full-service shopping order (based on delivery market) and $5 for delivery only.[55][56] In March 2019, Instacart expanded its same-day alcohol delivery service in the U.S.[57] On April 11, 2019, the company expanded its services to offering an on-demand option for its workers, in order to allow workers to work more flexible schedules.[58] Effective May 2019, Whole Foods Market ended its partnership with Instacart.[59][60] By the end of December 2019, Instacart's alcohol delivery service included over 30 new partners in more than 20 states and Washington, D.C., such as Albertsons, Aldi, Sam's Club, BJ's Wholesale Club, Sprouts Farmers Market, The Fresh Market, and Total Wine & More.[61][62]

2020s

In February 2020, Instacart employees in Skokie, Illinois voted to unionize. Instacart said it "will honor" the vote, pending certification of the results. In the lead-up to the election, high-level Instacart managers distributed anti-union literature at a Skokie grocery store where some of the unionizing workers pick up groceries for delivery.[63] At the time, about 12,000 of Instacart's 142,000 workers were employees with the option of unionizing.[64]

From mid-March to mid-April 2020, Instacart hired an additional 300,000 workers to meet the surge in demand for grocery deliveries during the COVID-19 pandemic.[65][66] Data from Apptopia demonstrated a 218% increase in daily downloads as social distancing measures increased.[67] Instacart also introduced new services in response to the pandemic, including a contactless delivery option, safety kits and guidelines for shoppers, and new sick leave policies and pay for those affected by COVID-19.[68][69]

Instacart workers threatened to strike on March 27, 2020 due to a lack of COVID-19 safety measures. A group called the Gig Workers Collective called for a nationwide walk-out to be held on March 30. They had been asking Instacart to provide workers with hazard pay and protective gear, amongst other demands.[70] In early April, Instacart began providing safety kits to workers, with complaints describing a complicated process to order and wait for the kits to arrive.[71] In May, workers reported being denied sick leave despite quarantining under the advice of a doctor. Instacart required that workers either get a positive Covid-19 test or be under a mandatory quarantine by a public health agency or other government agency.[72][73] By June, Instacart changed its sick leave rules in an agreement reached by it and D.C. Attorney General, Karl Racine. Under the agreement, Instacart would provide paid leave to workers who were clinically diagnosed with Covid-19 by a doctor or other medical profession along with those who had a household member contract Covid-19. The agreement also provided access for workers to telemedicine services.[74][75]

In May 2020, Instacart began a partnership with Rite Aid, offering its service across 2,400 locations in 18 states.[76] In August 2020, Instacart entered its first partnership with Walmart in the U.S. to offer same-day delivery services. The partnership is a pilot program beginning in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and Tulsa.[77][78] Additional partnerships in June included C&S Wholesale Grocers and Staples.[79][80]

In October 2020, Instacart raised $200 million at a valuation of $17.7 billion in a financing round led by Valiant Capital and D1 Capital Partners.[81]

On January 14, 2021, Instacart announced a vaccine support stipend to provide financial assistance to company shoppers who choose to get the COVID-19 vaccine.[82][83]

On January 21, 2021, the company planned to lay off nearly 2,000 employees, including all of its employees who had voted to unionize. Instacart said that the layoffs were due to stores increasingly using Instacart to have consumers place orders, but have their own employees fulfill the order instead of Instacart's workforce, reducing reliance on Instacart's in-store shoppers.[84][85][86]

As of its most recent funding round, in March 2021, Instacart raised $265 million at a valuation of $39 billion from existing venture capital investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia and D1 Capital Partners, as well as existing institutional investors like Fidelity and T. Rowe Price.[87] In March 2022, Instacart slashed its valuation by almost 40% to $24 billion.[88]

On July 8, 2021, Instacart announced that it had appointed Board Member Fidji Simo as CEO, while Apoorva Mehta transitioned to Executive Chairman of the Board.[89]

On February 22, 2022, Instacart started to team up with Delta to give clients more ways to earn miles when they link their SkyMiles and Instacart accounts, with special earning bonuses for Instacart+ members.[90][91]

On March 3, 2022, the platform celebrates women's history month by expanding advertising initiative with new $1 million to support Women-Owned Brands.[92]

On March 16, 2022, in partnership with TikTok, Hearst Magazine and Tasty, Instacart launched Shoppable Recipes with new product integrations that allow food creators to make their recipes shoppable on Instacart.[93]

On March 23, Instacart introduced the Instacart Platform, a program with services for retailers. The platform launched with features for advertising, home delivery, and inventory counting.[94][95]

In May 2022, Instacart announced that it had confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, signalling its intent to go public.[96] Instacart unveiled new partnerships with Canada's top 5 grocers: Metro, Giant Tiger, Galleria Supermarket and more, expanding same-day delivery countrywide.[97]

In June 2022, Instacart+ (formerly Instacart Express) was introduced with new family shopping features, including sharing membership with another family member for free. The membership also allows for shopping-cart collaboration among family members.[98]

In July 2022, Instacart appointed CEO Fidji Simo to succeed Apoorva Mehta as the Board Chair once the company completed its initial public offering.[99] EBT SNAP is now accepted online via the Instacart Platform in 10 additional states- Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming - with launch partners Albertsons Companies and Sprouts Farmers Market.[100]

In September 2022, Instacart announced it would be acquiring Eversight, an AI pricing platform. [101] [102]

Service model

Orders are fulfilled and delivered by a personal shopper, who picks, packs, and delivers the order within the customer's designated time frame—within one hour or up to five days in advance.[103][104] Customers pay with personal debit or credit cards, Google Pay, Apple Pay and EBT cards.[105] The delivery fee is $3.99 for orders of $35 or more and $7.99 under that amount. Regardless of the cost of the order, there is a 5% service fee with a minimum of $2 owed. Instacart offers a membership service called Instacart+, formerly Instacart Express until June 2022, for a monthly fee of about $9.99 or an annual fee of $99. The membership service waives delivery fees on orders over $35, but customers must still pay the service fee for the shopper. Customers are also requested to leave a gratuity.[106] Retailers participating in Instacart's partnership program set the price of individual items on the Instacart marketplace, which are mostly the same prices as in-store.[107] In addition, customers can pick up their pre-made orders from the store through a separate service.[108] For stores that do not participate in Instacart's partnership program, customers can be charged a markup of about 15%-40% per order with individual items ranging from a negative markup to over 50%.[109][110]

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>>> Moolec Science, a Pioneer in Molecular Farming and Food Ingredient Technology, to List on Nasdaq Through
Business Combination with LightJump Acquisition Corp.


https://www.lightjumpcap.com/lightjump-acquisition-corp

https://assets.website-files.com/5f31e8f1c1689c69bfacd91a/62a95642176e1519ace8eb60_Moolec_LightJump_PressRelease.pdf


• Moolec Science Ltd. (“Moolec”) and LightJump Acquisition Corp. (“LightJump”), a special purpose acquisition company, have entered into a definitive business combination agreement. The transaction sets Moolec’s proforma equity value at $504 million, assuming no redemptions from shareholders of LightJump. Upon closing, the combined company is expected to be listed on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “MLEC”.

• Moolec, a science-based food ingredient company, focuses on developing real animal proteins in plants using Molecular Farming, a scalable, affordable, and sustainable technology which is the production of animal proteins using plants as small factories. The company’s product portfolio and pipeline leverages the agronomic efficiency of broadly used target crops, like soybeans and peas. Moolec targets the fast-growing alternative proteins market trend.

• Moolec holds a growing international patent portfolio for its Molecular Farming technology. Its first two products – plant-based dairy ingredient chymosin and nutritional oil GLA, both using safflower as a carrier crop - have achieved regulatory clearance and seed inventory scale-up activities were conducted in 2022, accelerating the development of soy and peabased products designed to replace meat.

• Moolec is backed by Nasdaq-listed Bioceres Crop Solutions Corp. (NASDAQ: BIOX), a fully integrated provider of crop productivity solutions enabling the transition to a carbon neutral agriculture; Theo I, a life sciences venture capital enterprise; and Union Group, a private equity management firm.

• Moolec expects to become the first Molecular Farming FoodTech company to be listed on Nasdaq Exchange as a category creator of the alternative protein landscape focused on this technology. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2022.


United Kingdom – June 15, 2022 – Moolec Science Ltd. (“Moolec Science”, “Moolec”), a sciencebased food ingredient company; and LightJump Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: LJAQ; “LightJump”), a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company, announced today the entry into a definitive agreement for a business combination that would result in Moolec Science SA (the “Company”), a
newly created affiliate of Moolec incorporated in Luxembourg, becoming a publicly listed company.
Pursuant to the transactions contemplated by the business combination agreement, Moolec and LightJump will ultimately become wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Company (the “Combined Company”). The transaction is expected to be completed in the second half of 2022 and upon closing the Company is expected to be listed on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “MLEC”.

Moolec is a Molecular Farming pioneer in the new food industry that uses plants to produce real animal proteins. Molecular Farming enables the synthesis of real animal proteins’ DNA in any seed crop, carefully selecting each protein for its ability to add value in terms of a targeted functionality trait such as clotting, taste, texture, or nutritional value. The resulting proteins can then be used as ingredients in consumer food products providing tastier, more functional, and affordable animal-free protein alternatives.

Molecular Farming is unique in its ability to capitalize on the scale that extensive agriculture entails to achieve affordability. It is also cost efficient because it leverages biology, using plants and their inputs – sun, water, and soil – as small factories for the production of animal proteins. The plants are grown through traditional farming practices that result in economies of scale through high productivity volume production.

The Company´s first two products are Chymosin SPC, a bovine protein expressed in safflower that has curdling applications in the cheese industry, and gamma-linoleic acid (GLA), a nutritional oil technology sourced from Bioceres Crop Solutions. Both products have been cleared by regulatory authorities and the Company is currently ramping up seed inventories. Upon completion of corner stone milestones in these two products, Moolec has accelerated product development efforts to widen its technology reach, by using the two crops that are most broadly used as protein alternatives – soy and peas – to develop actual meat proteins.

In addition, Moolec's Molecular Farming platform has the potential to modify and enhance other plants using animal proteins, which could allow the Company to possibly consider other market opportunities. Such possible market opportunities include milk, egg, chicken and fish replacements, or other alternative biomaterials and cosmetics.

“Moolec Science is a category creator in the alternative protein landscape. Our Molecular Farming technology focuses on providing real animal proteins without using any animals, based on the genetic engineering of seeds to produce proteins the same way animals do,” said Gastón Paladini, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder. “As fourth generation of a family business that is one of the largest meat players in the Southern Cone, I have first-hand knowledge of the challenges faced by the industry. Moolec´s goal is to use science in food to overcome current global food security issues, building a more sustainable, resilient, and equitable food system.”

“LightJump Acquisition Corp. is excited to be partnering with Moolec Science, a FoodTech pioneer in Molecular Farming,” said Robert Bennett, Chief Executive Officer of LightJump Acquisition Corp.“We believe Moolec’s differentiated technology platform will be able to address the worldwide growing demand for animal proteins, while delivering them at a small fraction of the cost and environmental impact of existing approaches. We are committed to working alongside Moolec’s outstanding management team to support its expansion plans and its transition to becoming a
Nasdaq-listed company.”

“Bioceres Crop Solutions’ mission is to develop and bring to market technologies that can help agriculture transition towards carbon neutrality. We want to do this while increasing productivity, so that protecting our planet does not come at a cost to farmers or consumers. In this quest, we have developed unique technologies for drought tolerance and biologically enhanced nutrition, protection, and health for several major crops. Now, this is only part of the answer. Preserving resources is also about doing more with what is currently being produced, and here is where molecular farming is very powerful. Moolec is leading this life sciences’ category by engineering soybeans and other crops to directly produce key animal proteins, getting us a step closer to where we need to be,” said Federico Trucco, Bioceres Crop Solutions’ CEO.

Transaction Overview

The Moolec Science LightJump Acquisition Corp. business combination sets the Company’s proforma equity value at $504 million. As a result of the transaction, the Combined Company is expected to be funded with $138 million cash held in LightJump’s trust account, assuming no LightJump shareholders exercise their redemption rights at closing and before payment of transaction expenses. In addition, LightJump has entered into a backstop agreement with entities affiliated with Moolec to guarantee a minimum of $10 million at closing. Under the terms of the proposed transaction: (i) the current shareholders of Moolec will contribute all of their shares of Moolec to the Company in exchange for ordinary shares of the Company and
(ii) LightJump will merge with a newly formed wholly owned subsidiary of the Company and LightJump’s ordinary shares and warrants will be exchanged for ordinary shares and warrants of the Company. This will result in Moolec and LightJump being wholly owned subsidiaries of the Company. Cash proceeds raised in connection with the transaction will primarily be used to accelerate the
commercialization of late-stage products, Chymosin and GLA; expansion of R&D & Regulatory Approval efforts for the existing product pipeline; funding for team expansion and general corporate expenses; and organic & inorganic growth opportunities. The boards of directors of LightJump and Moolec have approved the proposed transaction. Completion of the proposed transaction is subject to shareholder approval of LightJump and other customary closing conditions, including a registration statement being declared effective by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”). The transaction is expected to be completed in the second half of 2022.

On June 8, 2022, LightJump Acquisition Corp. filed with the SEC a preliminary proxy statement in connection with a proposal to extend the date by which LightJump must consummate a business combination.

Additional information about the proposed transaction, including a copy of the business combination agreement and investor presentation, will be provided in a Current Report on Form 8-K to be filed by LightJump Acquisition Corp. with the SEC and available at www.sec.gov. In addition, LightJump intends to file a proxy statement/registration statement which will form part of the Form F-4 to be filed by the Company with the SEC (the “Form F-4”) and will file other documents regarding
the proposed transaction with the SEC.

Advisors

EarlyBird Capital, a boutique investment bank, acted as financial advisor to LightJump. Linklaters LLP acted as legal counsel to Moolec, and K&L Gates LLP acted as legal counsel to LightJump in the transaction.

Investor Conference Call Information

Moolec Science and LightJump Acquisition Corp. will host a joint investor conference call to discuss the proposed transaction today, June 15, 2022 at 8:30 am ET. To listen to the prepared remarks via webcast, please visit www.lightjumpcap.com/investor-conference-call-video. A replay of the call will be available at the same link as well as on LightJump Acquisition Corp.’s website at www.lightjumpcap.com through September 30, 2022, at 11:59 pm ET.

About LightJump Acquisition Corp.

LightJump is a Delaware blank check company incorporated on July 28, 2020 formed for the purpose of entering into a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, recapitalization, reorganization or other similar business combination with one or more target businesses. For more information, visit www.lightjumpcap.com/lightjump-acquisition-corp.

About Moolec Science

Moolec is a science-based ingredient company focused on producing real animal proteins in plants through Molecular Farming, a disruptive technology in the alternative protein landscape. Its purpose is to upgrade taste, nutrition, and affordability of alternative protein products while building a more sustainable and equitable food system. The company’s technological approach aims to have the cost structure of plant-based solutions with the organoleptic properties and functionality of animal-based ones. Moolec’s technology has been under development for more than a decade and is known for pioneering the production of a bovine protein in a crop for the food industry. Moolec is run by a diverse team of Ph.Ds and Food Insiders, and operates in the United States, Europe, and South America. For more information, visit www.moolecscience.com.

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Circle USDC - >>> BlackRock, Fidelity and others to invest $400M in USDC stablecoin issuer Circle



TechCrunch

by Jacquelyn Melinek

April 12, 2022


https://finance.yahoo.com/blackrock-fidelity-others-invest-400m-141621168.html


Circle, a crypto-focused financial technology firm, has entered an agreement for a $400 million funding round, the company announced. It is expected to close in the second quarter of 2022.

Investors in the round include BlackRock, Fidelity Management and Research, Marshall Wace and Fin Capital.

In 2018, The Centre Consortium issued its USD Coin (USDC), a stablecoin that is pegged to the U.S. dollar on a 1:1 basis. This means every USDC is backed by $1 in reserves. The Centre has two founding members: Circle and the cryptocurrency exchange giant Coinbase.

In addition to the capital raise, BlackRock has entered a strategic partnership with Circle to be its primary asset manager of USDC cash reserves and explore capital market applications for its stablecoin, among other objectives. "Our broader strategic partnership with BlackRock, announced today, will allow us to explore new use cases where USDC may be an efficient resource in the financial services value chain," Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and CEO of Circle, told TechCrunch.

Crypto is altering the investing landscape for even the most disciplined VCs

USDC is the second-largest stablecoin behind USD Tether (USDT) and the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, according to data on CoinMarketCap. Its market capitalization rose about 370% year over year from $10.82 billion to $50.83 billion and about $5 billion in volume was traded in the past 24 hours, up over 39%.

Although USDC ranks in second place for stablecoins, compared to USDT, it has about $32 billion less in market cap and a 24-hour volume that’s roughly $73.6 billion less than the No. 1 stablecoin.

The fresh capital will be used to promote the company’s strategic growth “as demand for dollar digital currency and related financial services continues to scale globally,” Circle said in a statement.

"This is a milestone moment for Circle and part of the “coming of age” of crypto," Allaire said. Circle is focused on continuing to increase mainstream adoption of USDC and blockchain technology for payments, commerce and financial applications, he added.

This funding comes at an interesting inflection point after the firm delayed its SPAC merger and doubled its valuation to $9 billion in February 2022. It was previously valued at $4.5 billion in July 2021. At the time of the delay, Circle terminated its previous agreement with Concord Acquisition Corp., a publicly traded SPAC, only to reach a new deal with the company for a merger.

The original deal had a termination date of April 3, 2022, but the new agreement has been pushed to December 8, 2022, with the potential to be delayed as far as January 31, 2023, under certain circumstances, according to a press release.

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>>> The Ugly Truth About Trump Media Acquirer Digital World’s Shares


Many issues face investors in the company, above and beyond the sharp falloff of interest in Truth Social


The Street

by BRIAN O'CONNELL

MAR 20, 2022


https://www.thestreet.com/investing/the-ugly-truth-about-trump-media-acquirer-digital-worlds-shares?puc=yahoo&cm_ven=YAHOO


The SPAC that’s acquiring former President Donald Trump’s media company is facing a daunting list of negatives as it moves towards closing the transaction.

Real Money Columnist Brad Ginesin outlined the most notable ones recently.

“The problem is that DWAC is trading at an absurd valuation and its stock is highly likely to tank in the coming months,” Ginesin wrote on Real Money. “This is not the right market in which to speculate on an impossible-to-value stock with no earnings, scant revenue, uncertain prospects and buyers solely focused on the company's celebrity appeal,” Ginesin added.

“Yet people foolishly are buying the stock, with a toxic valuation, at precisely the wrong time,” he wrote.

"Last month, Trump Media unveiled its Twitter clone, Truth Social, which was followed by a moment of excitement as the app raced to number one in downloads," Ginesin wrote. "The initial enthusiasm quickly ran its course; now the app's ranking has plummeted, with the media outlet seeing barely any usage. This bodes poorly for the success of Truth Social and anyone invested in Digital World Acquisition.”

Given that Trump's previous media effort 'From the Desk of Donald Trump,' received minimal readership and shut down after 29 days "the status of his appeal is clearly in question,” Ginesin noted.

There’s more.

Since the deal to acquire Trump Media was announced last October, Digital World Acquisition has been highly volatile.

“Part of the enthusiasm stems from the limited number of shares outstanding before the deal closes, which has helped the stock trade at a frothy premium valuation,” Ginesin said. However, “once the deal is consummated, more than five times the current shares will be free to trade, taking the market cap from $3.4 billion to more than $17 billion. Compare that steep valuation to Twitter TWTR, with a $26 billion market cap and more than $5 billion in revenues.”

Hang on, though, there's even more to worry about. "Investors in a PIPE (private investment in public equity) have agreed to buy $1 billion in DWAC shares, free to sell immediately when the deal closes," Ginesin wrote. “The PIPE deal hands these preferred investors a minimum of a 40% discount to the market price with no lock-up agreement. This ought to give pause to any buyer of free-trading stock.”

Oh, and then there's the SEC probe of "possible violations in connection with consummating the deal as well as the trading of the stock." Until the deal does close, "a risk remains that the SEC may uncover an issue that delays or alters the closing process," Ginesin noted.

So, when and if the deal closes "a significant amount of shares will be free to sell with a cost basis far below the current price. Yet investors are buying into nothing more than hope and celebrity appeal – a bad combo as overvaluation and froth are mercilessly rooted out in this market,’ Ginesin said.

In the end, “the stock will likely face significant losses in the coming months.”

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>>> Knightscope IPO taking security robots public


The Robot Report

By Brianna Wessling |

December 6, 2021


https://www.therobotreport.com/knightscope-ipo-taking-security-robots-public/


Knightscope’s security robots can be used in a variety of facilities.


Knightscope, a Mountain View, Calif.-based developer of autonomous security robots, is going public on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol “KSCP.” Knightscope will be offering $40 million of Class A common stock at $10 per share.

Knightscope plans to use the proceeds from the initial public offering (IPO) to continue to scale its fleet of security robots and to invest in new technologies. The company has a line of four security robots, ranging from a stationary robot to an all-terrain one.

“On this important day, I wish to take a moment to thank the absolutely relentless team at Knightscope and our 28,000+ investors for their unwavering support,” said Knightscope chairman and CEO William Santana Li. “We are committed more than ever to our mission of making the United States of America the safest country in the world. We need to provide the brave women and men in uniform, on our own soil, cutting edge technology to help them make smarter, faster and safer decisions. They deserve only the best and so does every community in our great nation, as we work to reimagine public safety, together.”

Knightscope was founded in 2013 and has raised more than $75 million in funding. In 2020, the company gained its first federal purchase order through a General Services Administration (GSA) contract.

The company offers its robots for sale using a robots-as-a-service (RaaS) business model. RaaS is a capital expense heavy business model as the RaaS-provider (KnightScope) doesn’t sell the physical equipment to its customers, it only offers the robots in a subscription model. Thus the robots remain on the books for Knightscope throughout their useful lifetime.

Knightscope first announced its plans to go public at its shareholders meeting in September 2021. There, the company also announced it would be prioritizing its 28,000-plus investors first, allowing them to purchase stock before the rest of the public. You can watch a video of that meeting below.

According to an SEC filing, Knightscope’s revenue for the six months ended June 30, 2021 increased by $141,000 (9%) to $1.8 million. Revenue for the six months ended June 30, 2020 was $1.6 million.

Knightscope’s shares were listed for sale immediately following the closing of the NASDAQ on December 1, 2021.

In April 2020, Knightscope announced new software features that would help to encourage social distancing at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The software enables Knightscope robots to identify tight groupings of people and then play warning messages.

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>>> Rigetti Computing, a Global Leader in Full-Stack Quantum Computing, Announces Plans to Become Publicly Traded via Merger with Supernova Partners Acquisition Company II


https://www.rigetti.com/merger-announcement


Rigetti is on a mission to build the world’s most powerful computers to help solve humanity’s most important and pressing problems. The company has developed the first-of-its-kind scalable approach to building quantum processors.

Transaction values Rigetti at a pro forma equity value of approximately $1.5 billion. The combined company is expected to receive approximately $458 million in gross cash proceeds, which includes a fully committed PIPE in excess of $100 million, direct investment, and $345 million of cash held in the trust account of Supernova II, assuming no redemptions.

PIPE transaction subscribed to by top investors including funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.; Bessemer Venture Partners; Franklin Templeton; and In-Q-Tel.

New strategic partners are Keysight Technologies, Palantir Technologies and Ampere Computing.

Management of Rigetti Computing and Supernova II will host an investor call at 8:30 am ET on Wednesday, October 6, to discuss the proposed transaction. Details are below.

More investor information


BERKELEY, Calif. — Oct. 6, 2021 — Rigetti & Co., Inc. (“Rigetti”), a pioneer in full-stack quantum computing, announced today it has entered into a definitive merger agreement with Supernova Partners Acquisition Company II, Ltd. (“Supernova II”) (NYSE:SNII), a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company. When the transaction closes, the publicly traded company will be named Rigetti Computing, Inc. and its common stock is expected to be listed on the NYSE under the ticker “RGTI.”

Rigetti is a leader in scalable quantum processor technology. Scalability has been among the largest hurdles to bringing quantum computing to market, and Rigetti introduced its scalable superconducting chips in June 2021. Its patented multi-chip architecture is the building block for new generations of quantum processors that are expected to achieve a clear advantage over classical computers.

Quantum computing is one of the most transformative emerging technologies in the world today. Many of the world’s most important problems remain intractable, lying far beyond the capabilities of today’s supercomputers. Quantum computers process information in a fundamentally different way — solving problems simultaneously as opposed to sequentially — which will allow them, when scaled, to tackle problems of staggering computational complexity at unprecedented speed.

Quantum computing could be applied to a range of important uses such as enabling biotech companies to bring more effective therapies to market faster; researchers to develop more affordable clean energy sources; and financial companies to access faster and more accurate market insights to help reduce market volatility.

Rigetti will use the proceeds from the transaction to accelerate development of multiple generations of quantum processors and grow its commercial business. Rigetti expects to scale its quantum computers from 80 qubits in 2021, to 1,000 qubits in 2024, and to 4,000 qubits in 2026.

Rigetti’s distinctive quantum computers work in tandem with existing cloud and high-performance computing infrastructure to unlock powerful new capabilities to solve complex real-world problems. The company sells access to its machines through the Rigetti Quantum Cloud Services platform.

The PIPE transaction is subscribed to by top investors including: funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.; Bessemer Venture Partners; Franklin Templeton; and In-Q-Tel. Strategic investors include Keysight Technologies and Palantir Technologies. Ampere Computing will make a direct investment. These new strategic investors provide strong complementary technologies for advancing Rigetti’s quantum advantage, and build on Rigetti’s existing partnerships and collaborations with customers like Amazon Web Services, Astex Pharmaceuticals, DARPA, NASA, Standard Chartered Bank and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Rigetti CEO Chad Rigetti founded the company in 2013. The company has raised approximately $200 million in venture capital and today employs more than 130 people with offices in the United States, Canada, U.K., and Australia.

Supernova II is led by Michael Clifton, an investor who most recently helped lead global technology investing at The Carlyle Group; Robert Reid, a long-time senior partner at Blackstone; Spencer Rascoff, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Hotwire, Zillow, dot.LA and Pacaso and who led Zillow as CEO for nearly a decade; and Alexander Klabin, founder and CEO of Ancient and former managing partner, co-CIO and co-founder of Senator Investment Group.

Clifton is expected to join the Rigetti Board of Directors after the transaction closes.

Management comments

Chad Rigetti, Rigetti Computing CEO and Founder

“In the next decade one Rigetti quantum computer could be more powerful than today’s entire global cloud. Rigetti is the leading innovator in this space. Our team has solved the most pressing scientific problems associated with bringing quantum computing to market by creating a scalable computer and high-performance integration with existing computing systems. We plan to use this capital to accelerate our product development and accelerate our goal to bring this transformational computing capability to every major industry.”

Michael Clifton, Supernova II

“The widespread adoption of quantum computing will have a significant impact on the economy and humanity in the next decade and beyond, on par with the advent of mobile and cloud technologies. Rigetti systems’ speed and scalability set them apart amongst competitors. With its model of easy integration into existing systems, Rigetti’s technology will be used by businesses, governments and institutions across the globe.”

Transaction Overview

The business combination values the combined entity at a pro forma equity value of approximately $1.5 billion. Upon closing, the combined company will receive approximately $458 million in gross cash proceeds, including a fully committed PIPE in excess of $100 million, direct investment, and $345 million of cash held in the trust account of Supernova II, assuming no redemptions. The proposed transaction has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both Rigetti and Supernova II, and is subject to the approval of the stockholders of Supernova II and other customary closing conditions.

Additional information of the transaction terms and copies of the key transaction agreements will be provided in a current report on Form 8-K to be filed by Supernova II with the SEC and available at www.sec.gov.

Advisors

Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. is serving as exclusive financial advisor to Rigetti. Cooley LLP is serving as legal counsel to Rigetti.

Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC is serving as exclusive financial advisor to Supernova II. Latham & Watkins LLP is serving as legal counsel to Supernova II.

Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC and Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. served as placement agents to Supernova II for the PIPE financing. Sidley Austin LLP served as counsel to the placement agents.

Conference Call

Management of Rigetti and Supernova Partners II will host an investor conference call on Wednesday, October 6, 2021 at 8:30 am ET to discuss the proposed business combination. A webcast of the call can be accessed at www.netroadshow.com/nrs/home/#!/?show=057a3ce4 or by visiting https://www.netroadshow.com/ with the entry code “Romeo9374”.

Alternatively the call can be accessed by dialing [phone] (domestic toll-free number) or [phone] (international) and providing the conference ID 400205. A replay of the call can be accessed by dialing [phone] (domestic toll-free number) or [phone] (international) and providing the conference ID 626929#.

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>>> IonQ Becomes First Publicly Traded, Pure-Play Quantum Computing Company; Closes Business Combination with dMY Technology Group III

10/01/2021


https://investors.ionq.com/news/news-details/2021/IonQ-Becomes-First-Publicly-Traded-Pure-Play-Quantum-Computing-Company-Closes-Business-Combination-with-dMY-Technology-Group-III/default.aspx


IonQ ushers in the era of quantum computing, lists on public market to begin trading on NYSE under ticker “IONQ” today, October 1, 2021

IonQ received gross proceeds of $636 million from transaction to fund growth and accelerate the commercialization of industry-leading quantum computers


COLLEGE PARK, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- IonQ, Inc. (“IonQ” or the “Company”) (NYSE: IONQ), a leader in quantum computing, completed its previously announced business combination with dMY Technology Group, Inc. III (“dMY”) (formerly NYSE: DMYI), a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company, on September 30, 2021. Starting this morning, the common stock and warrants of the combined company, IonQ Inc., will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbols “IONQ” and “IONQ.WS,” respectively.

IonQ is a trailblazer in quantum computing with the world’s most powerful trapped-ion quantum computer, and is the only company with its quantum systems available through the cloud on Amazon Braket, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. This business combination provided IonQ with $636 million in gross proceeds to fund future growth and accelerate the commercialization of its industry-leading quantum computers.

“Quantum is here, and IonQ is leading the industry with our revolutionary trapped-ion technology,” said Peter Chapman, President and CEO of IonQ. “Over the past six years, we have taken this critical technology out of the lab and have developed it into a commercial product. This year, we are proud to have tripled our bookings expectations for 2021, and are further thrilled to have announced collaborations with Goldman Sachs, Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, GE Research and the University of Maryland. We are humbled by the interest in our public listing and are confident in our ability to deliver against our business plan. I’m incredibly grateful to the entire IonQ ecosystem of employees, customers and stakeholders – this is just the beginning.”

Last month, IonQ announced that it had tripled its expectation for 2021 total contract bookings from its previously announced target of $5 million to $15 million. IonQ believes this is a demonstration of the real and rapidly accelerating need for quantum computing among enterprise customers and cements IonQ as a leader in quantum computing.

“IonQ’s listing today marks an incredibly significant milestone for quantum computing – the demand for this technology is real and the path to commercialization and scale is tangible,” said Niccolo de Masi, CEO of dMY Technology group of companies. “We’re thrilled to continue to partner with the IonQ management team and look forward to celebrating the company’s future accomplishments and milestones.”

Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC served as the exclusive financial advisor to IonQ. Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC served as the exclusive financial advisor to dMY III. Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC and Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC also acted as co-lead placement agents on the PIPE. Needham & Company also acted as placement agent on the PIPE. Cooley LLP and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP represented IonQ and dMY III, respectively, as legal counsel.

About IonQ

IonQ, Inc. is a leader in quantum computing, with a proven track record of innovation and deployment. IonQ’s next-generation quantum computer is the world’s most powerful trapped-ion quantum computer, and IonQ has defined what it believes is the best path forward to scale. IonQ is the only company with its quantum systems available through the cloud on Amazon Braket, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as through direct API access. IonQ was founded in 2015 by Christopher Monroe and Jungsang Kim based on 25 years of pioneering research. To learn more, visit www.ionq.com.

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>>> Arteris IP Announces Pricing of Initial Public Offering


Yahoo Finance

October 26, 2021


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/arteris-ip-announces-pricing-initial-033600681.html


CAMPBELL, Calif., Oct. 26, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Arteris IP, a leading provider of system-on-chip (SoC) system intellectual property (IP) consisting of network-on-chip (NoC) interconnect IP and IP deployment software, today announced the pricing of its initial public offering of 5,000,000 shares of its common stock at a price to the public of $14.00 per share. The gross proceeds to Arteris IP from the offering, before deducting the underwriting discounts and commissions and offering expenses, are expected to be $70.0 million. All of the shares are being offered by Arteris IP. In addition, Arteris IP has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 750,000 additional shares of its common stock at the initial public offering price, less underwriting discounts and commissions.

The shares are expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Market on October 27, 2021 under the ticker symbol "AIP," and the offering is expected to close on October 29, 2021, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

Jefferies LLC and Cowen are serving as lead bookrunners and BMO Capital Markets is serving as joint book-running manager for the offering. Northland Capital Markets and Rosenblatt Securities are acting as co-managers for the offering.

A registration statement relating to the sale of these securities has been filed with, and declared effective by, the Securities and Exchange Commission on October 26, 2021. Copies of the registration statement can be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission's website at www.sec.gov. The offering is being made only by means of a written prospectus, forming a part of the effective registration statement. A copy of the final prospectus relating to the offering may be obtained, when available, from: Jefferies LLC, Attention: Equity Syndicate Prospectus Department, 520 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022; by phone at [phone]; or by e-mail at [e-mail]; and Cowen and Company, LLC, c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717, Attn: Prospectus Department, by phone at [phone], or by email at [e-mail].

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

About Arteris IP

Arteris IP is a leading provider of System IP consisting of NoC interconnect and other IP as well as IP Deployment software that accelerate creation of SoC type semiconductors. Our products enable our customers to deliver increasingly complex SoCs that not only process data but are also able to make decisions.

Investor Contacts

Nick Hawkins, VP and CFO
Arteris, Inc.
[e-mail]

Erica Mannion or Mike Funari
Sapphire Investor Relations, LLC
[phone]
[e-mail]

Media Contact

Kurt Shuler
Arteris IP
[phone]
[e-mail]

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>>> Moneyman Behind Trump’s Media Company Runs a Firm in Wuhan


Bloomberg

by Blake Schmidt, Felipe Marques and Heather Perlberg

October 22, 2021


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/moneyman-behind-trump-media-company-233316506.html


(Bloomberg) -- From a WeWork office in Miami, an obscure financier by the name of Patrick Orlando has become an unlikely power behind what is, for a meme-stock minute, the ultimate MAGA stock: the nascent media company of former President Donald J. Trump.

Orlando’s firm is set to be the money behind Trump Media and Technology Group, the former president’s attempt to fight back against Big Tech. Trump says he plans to start with a social network called Truth Social but has broader ambitions to create a conglomerate -- with news, streaming and technology businesses to compete with CNN and Disney+.

The company will go public through a merger with Orlando’s Digital World Acquisition Corp., and if all goes according to plan, it’ll happen before the 2022 mid-term elections, enabling Trump to reach millions of supporters after he was kicked off Twitter and Facebook for inciting insurrection in the Capitol.

The head-snapping news that Trump was seeking to launch his own platform via a special purpose acquisition company sent Digital World’s shares soaring, driven by retail investors piling in. The stock rose more than 350% Thursday, giving it a $1.8 billion valuation, and has already gained 65% in U.S. pre-market trading on Friday.

Whether Trump can successfully pull off his next business venture was, for the moment, almost beside the point. The surge represented the convergence of two powerful forces -- one financial, the other political -- in a markets-meet-social-media craze akin to the wild run in GameStop earlier this year.

The deal brings together an unlikely cast of characters.

Orlando, a former Deutsche Bank AG derivatives trader, started banking firm Benessere Capital almost a decade ago. He’s also co-founded a sugar-trading company and worked for a sugar processor.

Most recently he’s embraced blank check companies. Orlando is also the chief executive officer of Yunhong International, a SPAC incorporated in the Cayman Islands and whose offices are in Wuhan, China. Yunhong raised $60 million last year and was meant to merge with battery manufacturer Giga Carbon Neutrality, but the deal was scrapped in September.

Orlando didn’t reply to calls and an email asking for comment.

Digital World raised $293 million in September from a group of hedge funds including D.E. Shaw, Saba Capital Management, Highbridge Capital Management and Palm Beach, Florida-based Lighthouse Investment Partners.

Saba, run by Boaz Weinstein, told the New York Times his investment firm sold its holdings in Digital World in the first hours of trading on Thursday for a small profit.

“Many investors are grappling with hard questions about how to incorporate their values into their work. For us, this was not a close call,” Weinstein said in a statement to the New York Times.

Unlike most SPACs it doesn’t have PIPE investors, or private investment in public equity. They buttress SPAC mergers by helping enable a deal to go through even when early investors decide to redeem their shares.

Digital World’s board is light with people with media expertise.

Its Chief Financial Officer is Luiz Philippe de Orleans e Braganca, a member of Brazil’s national congress. He’s frequently referred to as a “prince” because of his claim to the defunct Brazilian throne as a descendant of Emperor Pedro II. Braganca, who’s called for a return to the monarchy in Brazil, has worked as a director for Time Warner’s AOL Latin America division.

“This new platform will fight the tyranny of Bigtechs,” Braganca, 52, said in an Instagram post that included a photo of himself and Trump.

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>>> Trump's social media deal ignites 350% gain in SPAC's shares


Yahoo Finance

by Medha Singh and Sinéad Carew

October 21, 2021


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-strikes-spac-deal-social-150352200.html


(Reuters) -Former U.S. President Donald Trump's deal to create a social media app after Twitter Inc and Facebook Inc barred him won an exuberant endorsement from investors, with shares in a shell company backing the plan closing up more than 350% on Thursday after rising more than 400% earlier in the day.

Trump Media and Technology Group and Digital World Acquisition Corp, a Special Purpose Acquisition Vehicle (SPAC), announced on Wednesday https://www.reuters.com/world/us/former-us-president-donald-trump-launches-new-social-media-platform-2021-10-21 they would merge to create a social media app called TRUTH Social. Trump's company said it plans a beta launch - unveiling a trial version - next month and a full roll-out in the first quarter of 2022.

SPACs use money raised through an initial public offering to take a private company public. This deal's announcement lacked the trappings of the detailed business plans Wall Street is accustomed to in SPAC mergers, from naming a leadership team to giving detailed financing earnings and projections.

Even so, shares of Miami-based Digital World closed up 356.8% at $45.50 a share on Nasdaq after soaring more than 400% earlier in the session. At the closing price, its market capitalization stood at $1.47 billion, up from $321 million on Wednesday.

With volume of more than 477 million shares, it was the most actively traded stock on the exchange, drawing chatter on forums such as Reddit, where retail investors have driven so-called meme stocks to values not supported by mainstream financial analysis. On Twitter and Stocktwits, some users cheered the rally with posts displaying rocket ships and GIFs of Trump.

The venture may provide the first real test of the power of right-wing social media https://www.reuters.com/technology/what-is-trumps-new-venture-what-are-its-odds-success-2021-10-21 with the full force of Trump's support. Questions remain about how it plans to make money and avoid the same issues that led major social media platforms to banish him.

Some investors marveled at the rally and wondered whether the gains would last.

"I have never seen anything like this, such share reaction based on hopes and dreams," Kristi Marvin, a former investment banker who founded research firm SPACInsider, told other investors on a Twitter Spaces discussion.

Others said the market reaction reflected support for Trump as well as a bet that a platform with him would draw followers.

"Up to this point there hasn't been a publicly traded vehicle for those that support the former president," said Jake Dollarhide, co-founder of Longbow Asset Management in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Michael O'Rourke, chief market strategist at JonesTrading in Stamford, Connecticut, said not just Trump supporters but also opponents, media and investors would want to get on the platform to keep track of what Trump says.

Still, its future is far from certain. Digital World, led by former investment banker Patrick Orlando, has launched at least four SPACs and plans to launch two more but none of them have completed a deal yet. Orlando did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

DIRECT AND UNFILTERED

People close to the Republican former president, speaking on condition of anonymity, have said Trump has sought to set up his own social media company since leaving the White House. Trump, contemplating another White House run in 2024, has been frustrated that he does not have a direct and unfiltered connection with his millions of followers after Twitter and Facebook barred him, these people said.

Social media giants suspended Trump's accounts after his supporters rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 following an incendiary speech he gave repeating false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him through widespread voting fraud.

Twitter found that Trump posts violated its "glorification of violence" https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension policy. Facebook found that Trump praised violence https://about.fb.com/news/2021/06/facebook-response-to-oversight-board-recommendations-trump in connection with the deadly attack in which rioters sought to block the formal congressional certification of his election loss to President Joe Biden.

In a press release announcing the deal, Trump said, "I'm excited to soon begin sharing my thoughts on TRUTH Social and to fight back against Big Tech."

Facebook shares were up 0.3%. Twitter shares were down 0.6%.

Trump Media said it would receive $293 million in cash that Digital World Acquisition had in a trust if no shareholder of the acquisition firm chooses to cash in their shares.

The soaring share price could increase the likelihood of a deal closing. Investors in the SPAC must eventually choose whether to redeem their shares at the IPO price of $10 per share, which is now much lower than the level at which what many would have bought.

Attempts to float alternatives to Twitter and Facebook have faltered in the past. Parler, a social media app backed by prominent Republican Party donor Rebekah Mercer and popular with U.S. conservatives, had several tech companies cut ties with it https://www.reuters.com/technology/parler-returns-apples-app-store-names-new-ceo-2021-05-17 after the Jan. 6 riot.

GETTR, a Twitter-style platform started by former Trump adviser Jason Miller, claimed more than 1.5 million users in its first 11 days after being launched https://www.reuters.com/world/us/former-trump-aide-miller-launches-social-media-site-gettr-2021-07-01 in July. Miller was unable to get Trump to join the platform.

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[JohnCM]

[Ksweets101]

$RKLB launched a couple days ago. I’m up 30 percent so far and setting target for $140 roughly based on the valuation

It’s around 500 million market cap, they have roughly 800 million in cash plus a valuation (without the cash) of 4.1 billion.
They also just landed a contract with NASA and currently have USA NRO missions under their belt.

[JohnCM]

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>>> Top Recent IPOs: New Investment Opportunities


By Aimee Bohn

Investment U

Aug 5, 2021


https://investmentu.com/recent-ipos/


Knowing about recent IPOs is a great way to stay up to date on the IPO market. Initial public offerings can often provide great investment opportunities – but they don’t always. Below is a short list of some of the top recent IPOs by month.

Top Recent IPOs: July
July IPOs

Sentage Holdings (SNTG)

Sentage Holdings is a Shanghai, China-based financial service provider. The company offers a range of financial services including consumer loan repayment and collection management, loan recommendation and prepaid payment network services.

For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2019, Sentage Holdings reported $3.97 million in cash. At the end of 2020, the company’s reported revenue lowered to $3.6 million. Sentage Holdings’ total assets were $1.83 million in December 2019. By the end of 2020, the company’s total assets rose to $2.78 million. The firm’s total liabilities decreased from $2.6 million in 2019 to $1.93 million in 2020.

The company filed in March and priced on July 8. It issued 4 million shares at $5 per share of SNTG stock. A $20 million profit came from the offering. The company’s market cap at the $5 price per share was $70 million.

You can look at Sentage Holdings’ prospectus here.

First Day Return: 597.8%

Icosavax (ICVX)

Icosavax is a Phase 1 biotech aiming to develop vaccines for respiratory diseases. The company is dedicated to advancing vaccines against severe life-threatening respiratory diseases to protect the most at-risk populations. Icosavax has vaccine candidates for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), human metapneumovirus (hMPV), and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).

In December 2020, the company’s recorded cash was $15.5 million. As of March 31, 2021, Icosavax recorded $125 million in cash. In just three months, the company’s cash flow grew over 700%. In December 2020, Icosavax recorded $16.2 million total assets and $12.8 million in total liabilities. By March 31, 2020, the company’s total assets grew to $125.4 million. Total liabilities lowered to $5.9 million.

Icosavax filed on July 7 and priced on July 28. Shares listed under the ticker ICVX on the Nasdaq exchange. The company priced at the midpoint of its $14 to $16 price range at $15. The company offered 12.1 million shares of common stock for an $182 million offering.

You can look at Icosavax’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 133.1%

Sight Sciences (SGHT)

Sight Sciences ??provides medical and surgical devices for eye diseases. The firm aims to transform treatment paradigms from outdated approaches to improve the quality of patient care. The company’s portfolio includes the OMNI Surgical System and the TearCare System. The marketed products target some of the most prevalent and underserved eye diseases, glaucoma and dry eye disease.

The company saw revenue grow each year since 2018. For the year ended December 31, 2019, the company recorded $23.3 million in revenue. For the same period in 2020, the company’s recorded revenue grew to $27.6 million. Sight Sciences recorded $21.2 million in cash in December 2019. For the same period in 2020, the company’s recorded cash grew to $61.5 million.

Doximity filed on June 23 and went priced on July 14. Shares listed under the ticker SGHT on the Nasdaq exchange.The offering consisted of 10 million shares priced at $24. This was the upper range of its $23 to $24 price range, raising $240 million. The Sight Sciences IPO gave the company a post valuation of about $1 billion.

You can look at Sight Sciences’ prospectus here.

First Day Return: 39.6%

Duolingo (DUOL)

Duolingo is an online language learning service. The platform offers free courses in 40 languages. Users can select from a wide range of languages, from popular choices like French and Spanish to endangered ones like Sottish Gaelic. The company reported 40 million monthly users and 1.8 million paying subscribers as of March 31, 2021.

For the year ended December 31, 2019, Duolingo reported revenue of $70.8 million. It grew to $161.7 million in 2020. For the same period, Duolingo recorded $50 million in gross profit. The company is profitable, with reported gross profit more than doubling to $115.7 million in 2020. The company’s net loss was recorded at $13.6 million in 2019 and $15.8 million in 2020.

Duolingo filed on June 28 and priced July 27. Shares listed under the ticker DUOL on the Nasdaq exchange. The offering consisted of 5.1 million shares priced at $102. This was higher than its proposed $95 to $100 price range. The company raised $521 million in its initial public offering.

You can look at Duolingo’s prospectus here. For more information on the DUOL stock, check out this article for the latest news for the Duolingo IPO.

First Day Return: 36.3%

Absci (ABSI)

Absci is a biotech company that aims to develop protein therapies. The company’s goal is to expand biological possibilities and translate partners’ ideas into patient-ready drugs. Absci built its technology to enable better, faster and smarter biologic drug discovery and cell line development. The firm calls it Integrated Drug Creation™.

The company has seen revenue grow since 2019. For that year, revenue was $2 million. It increased in 2020 to $4.8 million. For the year in 2019, the company’s recorded cash was $13 million. And it increased greatly in March 2021 to $180.8 million. However, the company’s reported total liabilities were $160 million for March 2021. This was much higher than its December 2019 report of $7.9 million in total liabilities.

Absci filed to go public on June 30. Shares were priced shortly after on July 21 at $16 a share. This was the midrange of its $15 to $17 price range. The company offered 12.5 million shares and raised $200 million. This gave the company a post valuation of $2 billion.

You can look at Absci’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 34.9%

Top Recent IPOs: JuneTop Recent June IPO

Pop Culture Group (CPOP)

Pop Culture Group is a Chinese company based in Xiamen. Its platform is dedicated to promoting hip-hop culture. The company’s goal is to “promote hip-hop culture and its values of love, peace, unity, respect, and having fun, and to promote cultural exchange with respect to hip-hop between the United States and China.” The company engages in entertainment events, hip-hop related online programs and other event planning services targeted toward the younger generation.

Entertainment businesses were hit hard in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And the company’s finances reflect it. For the fiscal year ended June 30, 2019, revenue was $19 million. It dropped to $15.7 million for the same period in 2020. In 2019, net income totaled $5.9 million. And it decreased in 2020 to $4.5 million.

The company filed in March and priced on June 29. It issued 6.2 million shares at $6 per share of CPOP stock. A $37 million profit came from the offering. The company offered 0.2 million more shares than anticipated. The company’s market cap after going public was $110 million.

You can look at Pop Culture Group’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 405%

Alzamend Neuro (ALZN)

Alzamend Neuro is a clinical-stage biotech company. It focuses on developing products to treat neurodegenerative diseases and psychiatric disorders. The company aims to bring treatments and cures to market at a reasonable cost as quickly as possible. Its primary target is Alzheimer’s disease. The company has two novel therapeutic drug candidates, AL001 and AL002, that are moving toward clinical development.

As of April 30, 2019, the company recorded $40,000 in cash. By 2020, the company’s recorded cash grew to $90,000. For the same period, Alzamend Neuro recorded $1.8 million in total assets and $1 million in total liabilities. Looking at net loss, the company recorded $4.85 for the year ended April 30, 2019. It decreased to $4.4 million in 2020.

Alzamend Neuro filed on May 10th and priced on June 14. The company offered 2.5 million shares of common stock selling at $5 per share. The Alzamend Neuro IPO gave the company a market cap of $543 million.

You can look at Alzamend Neuro’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 170%

Doximity (DOCS)

Doximity is a San Francisco-based networking platform for medical professionals. The platform has established itself as the LinkedIn for doctors. Over 1.8 million medical professionals use the platform as of March 31, 2021. Doximity’s mission is to help every physician be more productive and provide better care for their patients.

The company saw revenue grow each year since 2019. For the year ended March 31, 2019, the company recorded $85.5 million in revenue. For the same period in 2020, the company’s recorded revenue grew to $116 million. Doximity recorded $74.8 million in gross profit and $101.5 million in 2020. As of March 31, 2021, Doximity has $142.5 million in cash and $251.7 million in total assets.

Doximity filed on May 28th and went public almost a month later on June 23rd. The offering consisted of 23.3 million shares priced at $26. This was higher than the $20 to $23 price range, raising $606 million. The Doximity IPO gave the company a market cap of about $10 billion.

You can look at Doximity’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 103.8%

Xometry (XMTR)

Xometry is an online marketplace for on-demand manufacturing. The company’s vision is to drive efficiency, sustainability and innovation by lowering the barriers to entry to the manufacturing ecosystem. The marketplace is artificial intelligence-enabled to help buyers source manufactured parts and assemblies from various sellers.

For the year ended December 31, 2019, Xometry reported revenue of $80.2 million. It grew to $141.4 million in 2020. For the same period, Xometry recorded $14.7 million in gross profit. The company is profitable, growing to $33.3 million in 2020. The company’s net loss was recorded at $30.9 million in 2019 and 31 million in 2020.

Xometry filed with the SEC on June 4th. It priced its shares a few weeks later on June 29th. The offering consisted of 6.8 million shares priced at $44. This was higher than its proposed $38 to $42 price range. The company raised $303 million in its initial public offering.

You can look at Xometry’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 98.6%

Kanzhun (BZ)

Kanzhun is an online recruitment platform based in Beijing, China. The company is focused on redefining career development by changing the online recruitment industry in its country. Its core product, BOSS Zhipin, connects job seekers and enterprise users to create an efficient and useful experience.

The company has seen revenue grow since 2019. For that year, revenue was $154.3 million. It increased in 2020 to $298 million. For the year in 2019, the company’s recorded cash totaled $62.9 million. And it increased greatly in 2020 to $612.7 million. However, the company reported a net loss of $144 million for 2020. This was much higher than its 2019 net loss of $77.6 million.

Kanzhun filed to go public on May 21, 2020. Shares were priced shortly after on June 10th at $19 a share. This was the high end of its $17 to $19 price range. The company offered 48 million shares and raised $912 million. This gave the company a market cap of $14.78 billion.

You can look at Kanzhun’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 95.8%

Top Recent IPOs: May

E-Home Household Services who provides home and housekeeping services was the top recent IPO for May.

E-Home Household Service Holdings (Nasdaq: EJH)

E-Home is a Chinese household service company. Based in Fuzhou, the company operates its platform across 32 provinces. It provides home appliance and housekeeping services. In order to deliver on-site home appliance services, E-Home partners with more than 2,600 individuals and service stores to provide technicians. For housekeeping, the company works with more than 1,000 independent contractors. E-Home claims its platform allows providers to access a larger customer base while also providing customers with the best home services.

The company provided financial data for the years 2018 and 2019. Total revenue for the year ending June 30, 2018, was $45.8 million. It increased 11.7% to $51.15 million in 2019. Additionally, E-Home was able to decrease its total operating expenses from 2018 to 2019, bringing in a higher income from operations in the latter year. Net income was $9.7 million and $10.2 million in 2018 and 2019, respectively.

The reason E-Home doesn’t have any 2020 or 2021 financial data is that the company filed to IPO back in August 2019. But it didn’t price until May 2021. The offer price was a midrange one, at $4.50 per share. A total of 5.56 million shares were offered for a deal size of $25 million. The recent IPO gave E-Home a market cap of $151 million.

You can look at E-Home Household Service Holdings’ prospectus here.

First Day Return: 1,100%

Jiuzi Holdings (Nasdaq: JZXN)

Jiuzi is a retail franchise. It sells new-energy vehicles in third- and fourth-tier Chinese cities. Vehicles include battery-operated and plug-in electric vehicles. At the time the company’s prospectus was filed in August 2020, it had 18 franchise stores and one company-owned store. Jiuzi sources its new-energy vehicles from more than 20 manufacturers.

For the year ending October 31, 2019, Jiuzi’s total net revenue was $7.98 million. It grew 2.9% to $8.21 million, according to the prospectus. Additionally, Jiuzi was able to decrease cost of revenue. That led to an increase in gross profit from 2019 to 2020. Gross profit came in at $4.86 million and $6 million, respectively, for a growth rate of 23.8%.

Although this recent IPO filed back in 2020, the company priced on May 17, 2021. Shares were priced at $5, the midpoint of their original price range. The offer included 5.2 million shares, for a deal size of $26 million. The IPO gave Jiuzi a market cap of $101 million.

You can look at Jiuzi Holdings’ prospectus here.

First Day Return: 272.4%

Day One Biopharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: DAWN)

Day One is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company. It’s dedicated to developing and commercializing therapies for cancer patients of all ages, but its main focus for clinical efforts is on pediatric patients living with cancer. Day One’s lead product is an oral therapy demonstrating anti-tumor activity in both pediatric and adult populations with specific genetics. The product is in a Phase 2 trial after receiving a “breakthrough therapy” designation from the FDA based on a Phase 1 trial.

Since Day One doesn’t have any commercial products, the company doesn’t have any revenue to report. In 2019, its net loss was $17 million. It grew to $43.85 million in 2020, a negative growth of 158%. For the three months ending on March 31, 2020, net loss was about $2 million. But for the same time period ending March 31, 2021, net loss totaled $16.1 million. However, on the company’s balance sheet, Day One shows cash and equivalents of $154.9 million. This number was expected to grow to $300.5 million after its recent IPO.

Day One filed to go public on May 4, 2021. It priced on May 26. The company sold shares at $16 a share, the top end of its original price range. The offer included 10 million shares for a deal size of $160 million. The recent IPO gave Day One a market cap of $965 million.

You can look at Day One Biopharmaceuticals’ prospectus here.

First Day Return: 61.8%

Flywire (Nasdaq: FLYW)

Flywire is a global payment software company. Its platform is used by clients and customers for payment transactions. Flywire aims to tackle sectors of the global economy it believes are in the early stages of adopting digital processes. It identified education, healthcare, travel and business-to-business payments as opportunities worth $11.7 trillion in total.

The company’s finances show growing revenue. In 2019, revenue was $94.9 million. It increased to $131.8 million in 2020 for a growth of about 39%. For the three months ending March 31, 2020, revenue was $32.7 million, and it grew to $45 million for the same period in 2021. However, Flywire is still reporting net losses. In 2019, its total net loss was $20.1 million. It decreased to $11.1 million in 2020, and the company had a net income of $3.7 million for the first three months of the year. But for the first three months of 2021, Flywire reported a net loss again, totaling $8.65 million.

Flywire filed on May 3, 2021, and priced on May 25. The recent IPO sold 10.44 million shares at $24, the top of its original price range. That led to a deal size of $251 million. The offering gave Flywire a market cap of $2.8 billion.

You can look at Flywire’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 46.3%

The Honest Company (Nasdaq: HNST)

Actress Jessica Alba founded The Honest Company in 2011. It’s a consumer products company. Honest strives to create products and a community for environmentally conscious consumers looking to lead a clean lifestyle. It has three categories of products: Diapers and Wipes, Skin and Personal Care, and Household and Wellness. These represent 63%, 26% and 11% of the company’s 2020 revenue, respectively. Honest uses an omnichannel approach and aims to expand both its digital and retail channels. These include strategic partnerships with Costco, Target and Amazon launched in 2013, 2014 and 2017, respectively.

For the year 2019, Honest’s revenue was $235.6 million. It grew to $300.5 million in 2020, a growth rate of 27.5%. However, the company hasn’t reported any net income to date. In 2019, net loss totaled $31.1 million. Honest was able to decrease its net loss in 2020, though, bringing it down to $14.5 million.

Honest filed on April 9, 2021. The company priced its IPO on May 4. The offer price was $16, just under the top of its original price range. Honest offered 25.8 million shares for a deal size of $413 million. The recent IPO gave Alba’s company a market cap of $1.65 billion.

You can look at The Honest Company’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 43.8%

Recent IPOs: April
April's recent IPOs saw Esports Technologies, a competitive gaming platform for gamers like the one pictured, bring in the highest return on the first day of trading for IPOs that month.

Esports Technologies (Nasdaq: EBET)

Esports Technologies operates a platform for esports and competitive gaming. It also has an online gambling platform, gogawi.com. Esports is the competitive playing of video games by amateurs and professionals in teams or individually. The company claims it offer real money betting on esports events around the world. Some popular titles include Counter-Strike: GO, League of Legends, Rocket League and Warcraft 3.

For the year ended September 30, 2019, Esports Technologies’ revenue was almost $141,000. It went up to nearly $196,000 for 2020. And for the three months ended December 31, 2021, revenue was just under $11,000. Additionally, Esports Technologies now has net loss. In 2019, the company recorded net income of about $24,000. But in 2020, it dropped to a net loss of $573,000. And for December 31, 2021, the company recorded $2.1 million in net loss. However, Esports Technologies had $2.6 million in cash and cash equivalent, which grew to $16.7 million after its recent IPO.

Esports Technologies filed on March 10, 2021. It went public on April 14, 2021. The offering sold 2.4 million shares at $6 per share. The deal raised $14 million for a market cap of $124 million.

You can look at Esports Technologies’ prospectus here.

First Day Return: 507%

Recursion Pharmaceutical

Recursion is a clinical-stage biotechnology company. Its focus is decoding biology with innovations from biology, chemistry, automation, data science and engineering. The goal is to improve patient lives and industrialize drug discovery. Recursion uses the Recursion Operating System, one of the world’s largest biological and chemical datasets. It also has the Recursion Map, a suit of custom software, algorithms and machine learning tools to further explore biology.

Recursion’s revenue is made from grant and operating revenue. In 2019, it totaled $608,000. This grew to $549,000 in 2020. But like most clinical-stage companies, Recursion shows net losses from the last two year. It went from a net loss of about $62,500 in 2019 to $87,000 in 2020. On the other hand, the balance sheet shows $262,000 in cash and cash equivalents as of December 31, 2020. The recent IPO helped bring that to $651,800, according to prospectus estimates.

Recursion filed to go public on March 22, 2021. The company priced on April 15, 2021 at $18, the high end of its range. The offering included 24.2 million shares for a deal price of $436 million. The recent IPO gave Recursion a market cap of $3.3 million.

You can look at Recursion Pharmaceutical’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 73.9%

Privia Health Group

Privia Health is a technology company working with medical groups, health plans and health systems. Its goal is to optimize physician practices, improve patient experiences and reward doctors for giving high-value care. The company also the “Privia Platform” for virtual care settings.

Revenue for the year 2018 was $657.6 million. It grew to $786.4 million in 2019 for a year-over-year growth of 19.5%. For 2020, revenue totaled $817.1 million for a growth of 4%. Looking at net income, Privia Health had a net loss of $4.2 million in 2018. But in 2019, the company managed to record net income of $8.2 million. It increased to $30.9 million in 2020 for a growth of 276.8%. Balance sheet cash went from $84.6 million to $233.4 million after Privia Health’s recent IPO.

Privia Health Group filed on April 7, 2021. It went public two weeks later, pricing on April 28. Shares priced at $23 a share. The offer included 19.5 million shares for a deal size of $449 million. This gave Privia Health a market cap of $2.8 billion.

You can look at Privia Health Group’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 51.1%

KnowBe4

KnowBe4 is the developer of a security awareness platform. It lets organizations asses, monitor and minimize the ongoing cybersecurity threat of social engineering attacks. KnowBe4’s approach uses cloud-based software, machine learning, artificial intelligence, advanced analytics and insights with engaging content. Its three goals are to drive awareness, change human behavior and enable a security-minded culture, effectively reducing risks.

The company saw revenue grow each year since 2018. For that year, revenue was $71.3 million. It increased in 2019 to $120.6 million for a growth rate of 69.1%. And for the year 2020, revenue totaled $174.9 million. That’s a year-over-year growth of 45%. But the company is yet to report net income. In 2018, KnowBe4 had a net loss of $9.25 million. And it increased greatly in 2019 to $124.3 million. However, the company reported a net loss of $2.4 million for 2020.

KnowBe4 filed on March 19, 2021 and went public almost a month later, pricing on April 21. Shares were priced at the low end of the range, selling for $16 a share. The offer included 9.5 million shares for a deal size of $152 million. The recent IPO gave KnowBe4 a market cap of $2.9 billion.

You can look at KnowBe4’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 50.9%

Infobird

Infobird is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider. It offers customer engagement solutions in China. Infobird provides holistic software solutions to help corporate clients deliver and manage customer engagement activities at all stages of the process, including pre-sales, sales and post-sales activity. The company also offers AI-powered cloud-based sales force management software.

For the year 2018, Infobird recorded $18.8 million in revenue. It decreased to $18.25 million in 2019. For the six months ended June 30, 2019, revenue was $9.4 million. It dropped to $6.2 million for the same period in 2020. But the company has net income recorded on their income statement as well. In 2018, net income totaled $2.4 million. And it increased in 2019 to $5.1 million. For the six months ended June 30, 2019, net income was nearly $2 million. It decreased in 2020 to $1.6 million.

Infobird filed on December 9, 2020. It priced on April 19, 2021 at $4 a share. The offering included 6.25 million shares for a deal size of $25 million. Infobird’s recent IPO gave it a market cap of $101 million.

You can look at Infobird’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 50.8%

Recent IPOs: March
In the top recent IPOs of March, Design Therapeutics had the best first day return.

Design Therapeutics (Nasdaq: DSGN)

Design Therapeutics is a biotech company. Its focus is small-molecule therapeutics called gene targeted chimeras (GeneTACs). GeneTACs target and modify the underlying causes of a disease. Design Therapeutics is currently pre-clinical stage. However, it plans to start clinical trials for its lead program by the first half of 2022.

The company doesn’t have any commercial products. Instead, Design Therapeutics’ revenue comes from grants. In 2019, grant revenue was $834,000. And in 2020, it decreased greatly to $226,000. The company’s net loss also took a hit. It went from $2 million in 2019 to $8.3 million in 2020. However, Design Therapeutics’ balance sheet shows cash and cash equivalents at $36.1 million for 2020. That’s up from $77,000 in 2019.

Design Therapeutics filed with the SEC on March 5, 2021. The company priced on March 25. The offering consisted of 12 million shares at a price of $20. This was the high end of the company’s range, raising $240 million. The Design Therapeutics IPO gave a market cap of $1.1 billion.

You can look at Design Therapeutics’ prospectus here.

First Day Return: 107.5%

Ikena Oncology (Nasdaq: IKNA)

Ikena Oncology develops cancer therapies. These therapies target signaling pathways that help drive cancer growth and spread. Additionally, these pathways currently have no treatments. By doing this, Ikena believes it can address a high volume of unmet needs. Since starting operations in 2016, the company has five programs in studies or clinical development. It plans to submit an Investigational New Drug application to the FDA in the second half of 2021.

The company doesn’t have products for sale. Instead, it funds operations through private investments, payments from a collaboration agreement and “related party revenue.” In 2019, this totaled $13.75 million. However, that same year, Ikena’s operating expenses were $18.5 million. The year ended with a net loss of $16.8 million. For 2020, revenue dropped to $9.2 million. And operation expenses increased to $44.5 million. This led to an increased net loss of $44.25 million in 2020.

Ikena filed with the SEC on March 5, 2021. It priced its shares at $16 on March 25. The deal offered 7.8 million shares for a deal size of $125 million. The IPO gave Ikena a market cap of $606 million.

You can look at Ikena’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 100%

Edgewise Therapeutics (Nasdaq: EWTX)

Edgewise Therapeutics goal is to create the world’s leading precision medicine company for muscle disorders. It specializes in muscle biology and biophysics. Its platform uses systems to identify key proteins in muscle tissue. This lets Edgewise create therapies designed to target specific muscles. The company’s leading product is in a Phase 1 clinical trial.

Edgewise doesn’t have revenue. It lists that as one of the top risk factors in its prospectus. So, it’s not surprising Edgewise has increasing net loss. In 2019, operating expenses were $9.9 million. And net loss was $9.7 million after interest income. For 2020, operating expenses increased to $17.2 million for a total net loss of about $17.1 million. However, Edgewise also had a 343% increase in cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet. It went from $23.7 million in 2019 to $104.9 million in 2020.

The company filed on March 5, 2021 and priced on March 25. Edgewise offered 11 million shares at a price of $16 a share, raising $176 million. The IPO gave Edgewise a market cap of $876 million.

You can look at Edgewise Therapeutics’ prospectus here.

First Day Return: 87.5%

Olink Holding (Nasdaq: OLK)

Olink Holding is a biotech company. It focuses on proteomics. According to News Medical…

Proteomics is used to detect protein expression patterns at a given time in response to a specific stimulus, but also to determine functional protein networks that exist at the level of the cell, tissue, or whole organism.

By using proteomics, Olink hopes to provide a platform of products and services to leading biopharmaceutical companies as well as clinical and academic organizations. The company has ten owned subsidiaries across the globe.

During 2019, Olink made an acquisition. As a result, the company provided predecessor, successor and pro forma financial data for the year. We will look at the pro forma data. Olink recorded revenue of $46.3 million in 2019. It had a gross profit of $32 million, but it ended with a net loss of almost $5 million. In 2020, revenue increased 16.8% to %54.1 million. Gross profit also increased to $36.6 million. However, Olink’s net loss also grew, ending 2020 with a $6.8 million loss.

Olink filed to go public on March 3, 2021. It priced on March 24. The company offered 17.65 million shares at a price of $20. The deal raised $353 million for a market cap of nearly $2.4 billion.

You can look at Olink Holding’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 80%

Sun Country Airlines (Nasdaq: SNCY)

Sun Country Airlines is an American airline. The company describes itself as “a new breed of hybrid low-cost air carrier.” Based in Minnesota, the company focuses on leisure travel, such as friends and family visiting each other. It offers flights through the U.S. and to Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, companies like Sun Country were hit hard in 2020. And it shows in the finances. For 2019, revenue was $688.8 million. But in 2020, it was cut almost in half to $359.2 million. Sun Country ended 2019 with a net profit of $46 million. In 2020, it ended with a net loss of $3.9 million. However, investors are hopeful that vaccines and quarantine lifts will result in a large demand for travel in 2021 and 2022.

Sun Country filed on February 8, 2021. It priced over a month later on March 16. The company offered shares at a price of $24, above the original range of $21 to $23. The deal included almost 9.1 million shares for a deal size of $218 million. The IPO gave Sun Country a market cap of $1.5 billion.

You can look at Sun Country Airlines’ prospectus here.

First Day Return: 51.6%

Recent IPOs: February

The recent IPO of Chinese communications software provider Cloopen Holdings was the top offering of February 2021.

Cloopen Group Holding (NYSE: RAAS)

Cloopen is a Chinese cloud-based communications provider. In 2019, it was the largest multi-capable solution provider in China by revenue. Cloopen offers a full suite of products, such as communications platform as a service, cloud-based contact centers, and cloud-based communications and collaborations. The company works across a number of industries, from telecommunications and finance to education and energy.

In 2018, Cloopen recorded $77.5 million in revenue with a gross profit of $29.1 million. The next year, the company’s revenue increased 30% to $100.5 million. Gross profit also increased to $41.3 million, a growth of 42%. For the nine months ended September 2020, Cloopen reported increased revenue, going from $65.9 million in 2019 to $78.7 million. That’s a growth of 19.4%. Gross profit also increased. It grew 14.7%, from $27.2 in 2019 to $31.2 million in 2020. However, Cloopen isn’t yet profitable. In 2018, net loss was $24 million. It increased to a loss of $28.4 million in 2019. And for the nine months ended September 2020, net loss was $31.5 million. That’s greater than Cloopen’s net loss of $20 million for the same time period in 2019.***

Cloopen filed on January 21, 2021. The offering was priced at $16 on February 8, 2021. The company offered 20 million shares, for a deal size of $320 million. This gave Cloopen a market cap of $2.35 billion.

You can look at Cloopen Group Holdings’ prospectus here.

First Day Return: 200%

***Financial data calculated according to the RMB to USD conversion rate on March 4, 2021.

Vor Biopharma (Nasdaq: VOR)

Vor is a biotech company. It focuses on developing therapies for hematological (blood) cancers. The company uses cell technology. It claims traditional treatments aren’t effective against tumor targets on healthy cells. As a result, 40% of patients relapse, with less than 20% survival rates for two years. Vor aims to create a single therapy to remove tumor cells from healthy cells.

Vor has no revenue or income. It’s the first thing the company lists as a risk factor:

Since inception, we have not generated any revenue and have incurred significant operating losses. For the years ended December 31, 2018 and 2019, our net loss was $4.2 million and $10.8 million, respectively. Our net loss for the nine months ended September 30, 2020 was $27.7 million. As of September 30, 2020, we had an accumulated deficit of $45.6 million. We have financed our operations primarily through private placements of our preferred stock. We have devoted all of our efforts to organizing and staffing our company, business and scientific planning, raising capital, acquiring and developing technology, identifying potential product candidates, undertaking research and preclinical studies of potential product candidates, developing manufacturing capabilities and evaluating a clinical path for our pipeline programs. We expect to continue to incur significant expenses and increasing operating losses for the foreseeable future.

Vor Biopharma filed to go public on January 15, 2021. The company priced almost 10 million shares on February 4, 2021 at $18 per share. The deal raised about $177 million. This gave Vor a market cap of $711 million.

You can look at Vor Biopharma’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 108.3%

Viant Technology (Nasdaq: DSP)

Viant is an advertising software company. Its main offering is its demand-side platform, Adelphic. According to Viant, its software allows users to plan, buy and measure advertising campaigns. Additionally, the self-service platform offers advanced forecasting and reporting. It also allows users to buy ads on desktop, mobile, TV and digital billboards, to name a few.

Although the company started in 1999, Viant was reorganizing, giving little financial data. The company offers 2019 numbers and 2020 estimates for the year since bookkeeping wasn’t finished at the time of the prospectus. For the year ended 2019, Viant recorded $164.9 million in revenue. It estimates $163 to $165 million for revenue in 2020. In 2019, net income was $9.9 million. Viant estimates a growth of 107% for a projection of $20 to $21 million in net income for 2020.

Viant filed on January 15, 2021. It priced on February 9, 2021. The company offered 10 million shares at $25 per share. Viant raised $250 million for a market cap of $1.6 billion.

You can look at Viant Technology’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 90.9%

Baosheng Media Group Holdings (Nasdaq: BAOS)

Baosheng is a Chinese online marketing service provider for advertisers and media companies. The company advises on online marketing strategies, offers advertising optimization services and helps deploy online ads. It also helps online media companies get advertisers to buy ad space across multiple channels.

In 2018, Baosheng reported revenue of $16.2 million. It grew almost 10% to $17.85 million in 2019. For the six months ended June 30, 2020, Baosheng recorded $9.8 million in revenue. That’s a decrease in revenue from the same time period in 2019 when revenue was close to $11 million. The company is profitable, however. In 2018, net income was $9.2 million. It grew to $11.2 million in 2019 for a growth rate of 21.7%. And for the six months in 2020, net income fell to $6.2 million from $6.8 million the year before.

Baosheng Media filed on July 10, 2020. It priced seven months later on February 8, 2021. The company sold 6 million shares at an offer price of $5. The deal size was $30 million for a market cap of $132 million.

You can look at Baosheng Media Group Holdings’ prospectus here.

First Day Return: 77.2%

Talis Biomedical (Nasdaq: TLIS)

Talis Biomedical develops diagnostic tests for infectious diseases. It aims to commercialize products for accurate, reliable, lost cost and rapid molecular testing. The company is developing the Talis One platform. It’s a cloud-enabled sample-to-answer platform to diagnose at point-of-care. Talis believes that more accurate testing at the point-of-care leads to better and effective treatment and care. The company is also making a COVID-19 test with the hope it will receive an Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA.

Since Talis doesn’t have any products currently available, the company doesn’t have revenue from sales. Instead, the company lists grant revenue on its financial statements. In 2018, Talis received $2.4 million in grant revenue. It increased to nearly $4 million in 2019. For the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Talis had $10.7 million in grant revenue. This is a big increase from 2019, when it was $2.5 million. Additionally, the company notes it has recurring losses, citing $21.3 million and $27.5 million for 2018 and 2019, respectively. As of September 30, 2020 Talis had an accumulated deficit of $128.7 million.

Talis filed with the SEC on January 22, 2021. It priced on February 11, 2021 at $16 a share. The deal offered 13.8 million shares for a deal size of $221 million. The IPO gave Talis a market cap of $948 million.

You can look at Talis Biomedical’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 73.8%

Recent IPOs: January

The RLX Technologies IPO was the top recent IPO for January 2021.

RLX Technologies (NYSE: RLX)

RLX Technologies is a Chinese e-vapor company. It claims it was the No. 1 brand in terms of retail sales in 2019, taking 48% of the market share of closed-system e-vapor products. And it was ranked first for brand awareness in a survey conducted by China Insights Consultancy in September 2020. Among users of e-vapor products in China, 67.6% recognized the brand.

RLX’s finances show increasing revenue numbers. In 2018, the company recorded about $20.5 million in revenue. Then RLX saw a huge jump in 2019, with $239.8 million in revenue. That’s an increase of more than 1,000%. For the nine months ended September 30, 2019, RLX reported revenue of $176.3 million. And for the same time period in 2020, net revenue was $340.7 million, a growth rate of 93.3%. Additionally, RLX recorded profit for the year ended 2019 and the nine months ended September 30, 2020. Net income was $7.4 million and $16.8 million, respectively.***

RLX filed to go public on December 31, 2020. The RLX IPO date was January 21, 2021. The company offered 116.5 million shares at an offer price of $12 a share. The deal raised nearly $1.4 billion for a market cap of $18.6 billion.

You can look at RLX Technologies’ prospectus here.

First Day Return: 145.9%

***Financial data calculated according to the RMB to USD conversion rate on February 3, 2021.

Poshmark (Nasdaq: POSH)

Poshmark is an e-commerce website. It was founded in 2011 to make buying and selling “simple, social and fun,” according to the company’s preliminary prospectus. In 2019, the company’s active users spent 27 minutes a day on average browsing Poshmark’s market. The company’s categories include apparel, accessories, footwear, home and beauty. Poshmark claims its technology “enables simple transactions, seamless logistics and an engaging experience at scale.” The company had 31.7 million active users, 6.2 million active buyers and 4.5 million active sellers as of September 30, 2020.

Poshmark’s revenue comes from fees charged to marketplace sellers. In 2018, Poshmark recorded $148.3 million in revenue. That increased to $205.2 million in 2019. a growth rate of 38.4%. For the nine months ended September 30, 2019, Poshmark had $150.5 million in revenue. That increased 28.1% to $192.8 million for the same time period in 2020. However, Poshmark isn’t yet profitable. In 2018, net loss was $14.5 million. And in 2019, that grew to $48.7 million. For the nine months ended September 30, 2020, net loss was $20.9 million.

The company filed to go public on December 17, 2020. The Poshmark IPO date was January 13, 2021. Shares were priced at $42. The offering sold 6.6 million shares, for a deal size of $277 million. Poshmark’s post-IPO market cap is almost $3.5 billion.

You can look at Poshmark’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 141.7%

Qilian International Holding (Nasdaq: QLI)

Qilian is a Chinese pharmaceutical and chemical company. It develops, manufactures, markets and sells its products. Its offerings include licorice products, oxytetracycline products, traditional Chinese medicine and fertilizers.

In 2018, Qilian reported $50.4 million in revenue. In 2019, revenue fell 9.3% to $46.1 million. On March 31, 2019, Qilian had $27.2 million in revenue. For the same time period in 2020, Qilian recorded an increase of 2.2%, reaching $27.8 million in revenue. And Qilian is a profitable company. In addition to recording gross profit, Qilian has net income. In 2018, net income was $5.2 million. That grew 13.5% to $5.9 million in 2019. For the six months ended March 31, 2019, net income totaled $$5 million. That fell to $4.2 million for the six months ended March 31, 2020.

Qilian International filed on November 11, 2019, taking more than a year to complete the IPO process. The Qilian IPO date was January 11, 2021. It offered 5 million shares. The offering was priced at $5 a share, for a total deal size of $25 million. Qilian’s post-IPO market cap is $175 million.

You can look at Qilian International Holding’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 100%

Affirm (Nasdaq: AFRM)

PayPal co-founder Max Levchin founded Affirm with Nathan Gettings, Jeffrey Kaditz and Alex Rampell in 2012. Affirm is a technology company. It provides e-commerce solutions. It allows consumers to make purchases in interest-free installments. Additionally, Affirm has an app to help people manage payments or open high-yield savings accounts.

On the one hand, the company has revenue growth. In 2019, net revenue was $264.4 million. For the year ending June 30, 2020, revenue grew 92.7% to $509.5 million. And the trend continued for the three months ending September 30. In 2019, revenue was $87.9 million for this time period. But in 2020, that increased to $174 million, a growth rate of 98%. On the other hand, Affirm isn’t yet profitable. Affirm had a net loss of $120.5 million in 2019. However, the company decreased its net loss to $112.6 million in 2020. And for the three months ended September 30, net loss decreased from $30.8 million in 2019 to $15.3 million in 2020.

Affirm filed on November 18, 2020. The Affirm IPO date was January 12, 2021. It offered 24.6 million shares at $49 a share, up from its original price range of $41 to $44. The total deal size was $1.2 billion, giving Affirm a market cap of almost $14.8 billion.

You can look at Affirm’s prospectus here.

First Day Return: 98.4%

Motorsport Games (Nasdaq: MSGM)

Motorsport Games is a racing game developer, publisher and esports system provider. The company works on games for sports such NASCAR, plus the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race and its associate, the FIA World Endurance Championship. Motorsport Games strives to deliver high-quality and innovative experiences for racers, gamers and fans of all age groups. It is the official developer and publisher of the NASCAR video game racing franchise. NASCAR reached about 475 million homes in 2019 and is only part of the company’s market.

In 2018, Motorsport reported $14.8 million in revenue. This dropped to $11.85 million in 2019. But for the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Motorsport had $16.1 million in revenue. This was a 67.7% increase from the same time period in 2019, when revenue was $9.6 million. However, Motorsport doesn’t have steady profitability yet. For the year ended December 31, 2018, Motorsport’s net loss was $2.6 million. That increased in 2019 to net loss of $3.6 million. And for the nine months ended September 2019, net loss was $2.9 million. However, for the first nine months of 2020, Motorsport recorded net income of more than $875,000.

Motorsport filed on December 18, 2020. The Motorsport Games IPO date was January 12, 2021. The company offered a total of 3 million shares. Priced at the high end of its expected range, shares sold for $20 apiece, for a deal size of $60 million. Motorsport Games market cap is $346 million.

You can look at Motorsport Games’ prospectus here.

First Day Return: 75%

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>>> Atai Life Sciences Announces Pricing of Upsized Initial Public Offering


Yahoo Finance

Atai LIFE SCIENCES

June 17, 2021


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/atai-life-sciences-announces-pricing-032100058.html


BERLIN, June 17, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- atai Life Sciences B.V. (Nasdaq: ATAI) (“atai”), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company aiming to transform the treatment of mental health disorders, today announced the pricing of its upsized initial public offering in the United States of 15,000,000 common shares at a price to the public of $15.00 per share. All common shares are being offered by atai. The gross proceeds of the offering, before deducting underwriting discounts and commissions and other offering expenses payable by atai, are expected to be $225.0 million. In addition, atai has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 2,250,000 common shares at the initial public offering price, less underwriting discounts and commissions. The offering is expected to close on June 22, 2021, subject to customary closing conditions.

atai’s common shares are expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Market on June 18, 2021 under the ticker symbol “ATAI.”

Credit Suisse, Citigroup, Cowen, and Berenberg are acting as book-running managers for the proposed offering. Cantor, RBC Capital Markets and Canaccord Genuity are also acting as book-running managers for the proposed offering.

This offering is being made only by means of a prospectus. Copies of the final prospectus relating to this offering may be obtained, when available, by contacting: Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC, Attention: Prospectus Department, 6933 Louis Stephens Drive, Morrisville, NC 27560, or by telephone at [phone] or by email at [e-mail]; Citigroup Global Markets Inc., c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717, or by telephone at [phone] or by email at [e-mail]; Cowen and Company, LLC, c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, New York 11717, Attention: Prospectus Department, or by telephone at [phone], or by email at

[e-mail]; or, Berenberg Capital Markets LLC, Attention: Investment Banking, 1251 Avenue of the Americas, 53rd Floor, New York, New York 10020, or by telephone at [phone], or by e-mail at [e-mail].

A registration statement relating to the securities being sold in the offering has been declared effective by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) on June 17, 2021. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of such state or jurisdiction.

About atai Life Sciences

atai is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company aiming to transform the treatment of mental health disorders. atai was founded in 2018 as a response to the significant unmet need and lack of innovation in the mental health treatment landscape, as well as the emergence of therapies that previously may have been overlooked or underused, including psychedelic compounds and digital therapeutics. atai is headquartered in Berlin, with offices in New York and London.

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>>> Here’s Which VC-Backed Companies Are Going Public Via SPAC This Year (So Far)


Crunch Base

Sophia Kunthara

July 30, 2021


https://news.crunchbase.com/news/heres-which-vc-backed-companies-are-going-public-via-spac-this-year-so-far/


Going public through a special-purpose acquisition company is officially mainstream. Special-purpose acquisition companies, once looked down upon by Wall Street-types as a less respectable way to go public, have been forming and going public at an unprecedented pace this year.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

While last year was considered a record year for SPACs, this year has already shattered 2020’s record.

And in the past year, the companies going public are no longer the under-the-radar types. Well-capitalized companies with brand-name recognition, like genetic testing company 23AndMe and online real estate buying platform Opendoor, are among the companies that have gone public or announced their intent to go public through a SPAC.

Here at Crunchbase News, we keep a running list of the companies that have gone public this year. In the past, it’s mostly been comprised of IPOs, although there have been direct listings here and there. This year, we began keeping track of SPACs that completed their mergers and started trading.

With SPACs forming and going public every day, it seemed wise to keep track of the companies that had announced they agreed to go public via SPAC as well: The announced SPAC targets, if you will. So, we scoured news reports and press releases and compiled a list of the venture-backed companies that have announced they will be merging with a SPAC. Companies that have been reported to be in talks to go public via SPAC aren’t included in the list.

This article was last updated on July 30, 2021.

SoFi
Date Announced: Jan. 7, 2021
Acquirer: Social Capital Hedosophia Corp. V
Valuation: $8.65 billion, per CNBC
Some Investors: Third Point Ventures, SoftBank

Achronix Semiconductor
Date Announced: Jan. 9, 2021
Acquirer: Ace Convergence Acquisition
Valuation: $2 billion, per Bloomberg
Some Investors: Battery Ventures, New Science Ventures

Bakkt
Date Announced: Jan. 11, 2021
Acquirer: VPC Impact Acquisition Holdings
Valuation: $2.1 billion
Some Investors: Goldfinch Partners, M12

Proterra
Date Announced: Jan. 12, 2021
Acquirer: ArcLight Clean Transition Corp.
Valuation: $1.6 billion
Some Investors: Tao Capital Partners, Daimler

Talkspace
Date Announced: Jan. 13, 2021
Acquirer: Hudson Executive Investment Corp.
Valuation: $1.4 billion
Some Investors: Spark Capital, Norwest Venture Partners

LiveVox
Date Announced: Jan. 14, 2021
Acquirer: Crescent Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $840 million
Some Investors: Lunsford Capital, R&D Bauer Ventures

EVGo
Date Announced: Jan. 22, 2021
Acquirer: Climate Change Crisis Real Impact I Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $2.6 billion
Some Investors: Vision Ridge Capital Partners

Latch
Date Announced: Jan. 25, 2021
Acquirer: TS Innovations Acquisitions Corp.
Valuation: $1.56 billion
Some Investors: Lux Capital, RRE Ventures

Taboola
Date Announced: Jan. 25, 2021
Acquirer: ION Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $2.6 billion
Some Investors: Evergreen Venture Partners, Pitango Venture Capital

Nerdy
Date Announced: Jan. 29, 2021
Acquirer: TPG Pace Tech Opportunities
Valuation: $1.7 billion
Some Investors: TCV, Learn Capital

Playstudios
Date Announced: Feb. 1, 2021
Acquirer: Acies Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $1.1 billion
Some Investors: Jafco Ventures

Otonomo
Date Announced: Feb. 1, 2021
Acquirer: Software Acquisition Group Inc. II
Valuation: $1.4 billion
Some Investors: Bessemer Venture Partners, SK Holdings

Microvast
Date Announced: Feb. 1, 2021
Acquirer: Tuscan Holdings Corp.
Valuation: $3 billion
Some Investors: IFC Venture Capital Group, CITIC Securities

Wheels Up
Date Announced: Feb. 1, 2021
Acquirer: Aspirational Consumer Lifestyle Corp.
Valuation: $2.1 billion
Some Investors: Blue Ivy Ventures, Alpaca VC

Astra
Date Announced: Feb. 2, 2021
Acquirer: Holicity Inc.
Valuation: $2.1 billion
Some Investors: ACME Capital, Airbus Ventures

Payoneer
Date Announced: Feb. 3, 2021
Acquirer: FTAC Olympus Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $3.3 billion
Some Investors: TCV, Viola Ventures

Vintage Wine Estates
Date Announced: Feb. 4, 2021
Acquirer: Bespoke Capital Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $690 million
Some Investors: AGR Partners

23AndMe
Date Announced: Feb. 4, 2021
Acquirer: VG Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $3.5 billion
Some Investors: Sequoia Capital, NextView Capital

Hyzon Motors
Date Announced: Feb. 9, 2021
Acquirer: Decarbonization Plus Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $2.1 billion
Some Investors: Total Carbon Neutrality Ventures

Matterport
Date Announced: Feb. 11, 2021
Acquirer: Gores Holdings VI
Valuation: $2.9 billion
Some Investors: DCM Ventures, Lux Capital

Rover
Date Announced: Feb. 11, 2021
Acquirer: Nebula Caravel Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $1.35 billion
Some Investors: Menlo Ventures, Spark Capital

Sharecare
Date Announced: Feb. 12, 2021
Acquirer: Falcon Capital Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $3.9 billion
Some Investors: Heritage Group, Aflac Corporate Ventures

Owlet Baby Care
Date Announced: Feb. 16, 2021
Acquirer: Sandbridge Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $1 billion
Some Investors: Eclipse Ventures, Formation 8

AEye
Date Announced: Feb. 17, 2021
Acquirer: CF Finance Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $2 billion
Some Investors: BootstrapLabs, Taiwania Capital

Xos
Date Announced: Feb. 22, 2021
Acquirer: NextGen Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $2 billion
Some Investors: Build Capital Group, Proeza Ventures

Enovix
Date Announced: Feb. 22, 2021
Acquirer: Rodgers Silicon Valley Acquisition Corp
Valuation: $1.1 billion
Some Investors: T.J. Rodgers, Emmanuel Hernandez

Lucid Motors
Date Announced: Feb. 22, 2021
Acquirer: Churchill Capital Corp. IV
Valuation: $11.75 billion
Some Investors: Venrock, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund

Berkshire Grey
Date Announced: Feb. 24, 2021
Acquirer: Revolution Acceleration Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $2.7 billion
Some Investors: Khosla Ventures, SoftBank

Joby Aviation
Date Announced: Feb. 24, 2021
Acquirer: Reinvent Technology Partners
Valuation: $6.6 billion
Some Investors: Intel Capital, Capricorn Investment Group

Rocket Lab
Date Announced: March 1, 2021
Acquirer: Vector Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $4.1 billion
Some Investors: Khosla Ventures, DCVC

QOMPLX
Date Announced: March 1, 2021
Acquirer: Tailwind Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $1.4 billion
Some Investors: Exponential Partners, Motive Partners

Doma
Date Announced: March 2, 2021
Acquirer: Capital Investment Corp. V
Valuation: $3 billion
Some Investors: Foundation Capital, Greenspring Associates

Hippo Insurance
Date Announced: March 4, 2021
Acquirer: Reinvent Technology Partners Z
Valuation: $5 billion
Some Investors: Comcast Ventures, Felicis Ventures

IonQ
Date Announced: March 8, 2021
Acquirer: dMY Technology Group Inc. III
Valuation: $2 billion
Some Investors: GV, New Enterprise Associates

Evolv Technology
Date Announced: March 8, 2021
Acquirer: NewHold Investment Corp.
Valuation: $1.25 billion
Some Investors: Stanley Ventures, Lux Capital

Ambulnz (dba DocGo)
Date Announced: March 9, 2021
Acquirer: Motion Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $1.1 billion
Some Investors: N/A.

IronNet
Date Announced: March 15, 2021
Acquirer: LGL Systems Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $1.2 billion
Some Investors: ForgePoint Capital, C5 Capital

Offerpad
Date Announced: March 18, 2021
Acquirer: Supernova Partners Acquisition Co.
Valuation: $3 billion
Some Investors: LL Funds

Rockley Photonics
Date Announced: March 19, 2021
Acquirer: SC Health Corp.
Valuation: $1.2 billion
Some Investors: Kreos Capital, Morningside Venture Investments

IronSource
Date Announced: March 21, 2021
Acquirer: Thoma Bravo Advantage
Valuation: $11.1 billion
Some Investors: Viola Ventures, Access Industries

Velo3D
Date Announced: March 23, 2021
Acquirer: JAWS Spitfire Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $1.6 billion
Some Investors: Khosla Ventures, Piva Capital

WeWork
Date Announced: March 26, 2021
Acquirer: BowX Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $9 billion
Some Investors: SoftBank Vision Fund, Hony Capital

SomaLogic
Date Announced: March 29, 2021
Acquirer: CM Life Sciences II
Valuation: $1.23 billion
Some Investors: Foresite Capital, Fiscus Ventures

Cazoo
Date Announced: March 29, 2021
Acquirer: AJAX I
Valuation: $7 billion
Some Investors: Stride.VC, General Catalyst

Lilium
Date Announced: March 30, 2021
Acquirer: Qell Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $3.3 billion
Some Investors: Tencent Holdings, Freigeist Capital

BetterTherapeutics
Date Announced: April 7, 2021
Acquirer: Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp. II
Valuation: $187 million
Some Investors: Not available.

Tango Therapeutics
Date Announced: April 14, 2021
Acquirer: BCTG Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $353 million
Some Investors: Casdin Capital, Boxer Capital

Vicarious Surgical
Date Announced: April 15
Acquirer: D8 Holdings Corp.
Valuation: $1.1 billion
Some Investors: Khosla Ventures, Gates Frontier Fund

SmartRent
Date Announced: April 22, 2021
Acquirer: Fifth Wall Acquisition Corp. I
Valuation: $2.2 billion
Some Investors: Spark Capital, Fifth Wall

Enjoy Technology
Date Announced: April 28, 2021
Acquirer: Marquee Raine Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $1.2 billion
Some Investors: L Catterton, Highland Capital Partners

ShapeWays
Date Announced: April 28, 2021
Acquirer: Galileo Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $410 million
Some Investors: Lux Capital, Andreessen Horowitz

Sonder
Date Announced: April 30, 2021
Acquirer: Gores Metropoulos II Inc.
Valuation: $2.2 billion
Some Investors: Greylock, Spark Capital

Jasper Therapeutics
Date Announced: May 6, 2021
Acquirer: Amplitude Healthcare Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: N/A
Some Investors: Roche Venture Fund, Qiming Venture Partners USA

Science 37
Date Announced: May 7, 2021
Acquirer: LifeSci Acquisition II Corp.
Valuation: $1.05 billion
Some Investors: Lux Capital, Redmile Group

Benson Hill
Date Announced: May 10, 2021
Acquirer: Star Peak Corp. II
Valuation: $2 billion
Some Investors: GV, Lewis & Clark Ventures

Plus
Date Announced: May 10, 2021
Acquirer: Hennessy Capital Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $3.3 billion
Some Investors: Sequoia Capital China, ClearVUE Partners

Better.com
Date Announced: May 11, 2021
Acquirer: Aurora Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $7.7 billion
Some Investors: SoftBank, L Catterton

Ginkgo Bioworks
Date Announced: May 11, 2021
Acquirer: Soaring Eagle Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $17.5 billion
Some Investors: DCVC, Viking Global Investors

Bird
Date Announced: May 12, 2021
Acquirer: Switchback II
Valuation: $2.3 billion
Some Investors: Sequoia Capital, Craft Ventures

Bright Machines
Date Announced: May 17, 2021
Acquirer: SCVX
Valuation: $1.1 billion
Some Investors: Eclipse Ventures, Lux Capital

Jam City
Date Announced: May 20, 2021
Acquirer: DPCM Capital
Valuation: $1.1 billion
Some Investors: Austin Ventures, Netmarble

Tritium
Date Announced: May 26, 2021
Acquirer: Soaring Eagle Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $1.2 billion
Some Investors: Brian Flannery, Gilbarco Veeder Root

Acorns
Date Announced: May 27, 2021
Acquirer: Pioneer Merger Corp.
Valuation: $2.2 billion
Some Investors: Greycroft, PayPal Ventures

Wejo
Date Announced: May 28, 2021
Acquirer: Virtuoso Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $1.1 billion
Some Investors: General Motors, DIP Capital

Babylon Health
Date Announced: June 3, 2021
Acquirer: Alkuri Global Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $3.6 billion
Some Investors: Hoxton Ventures, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund

Dave
Date Announced: June 7, 2021
Acquirer: VPC Impact Acquisition Holdings III
Valuation: $4 billion
Some Investors: Norwest Venture Partners, Victory Park Capital

NextNav
Date Announced: June 10, 2021
Acquirer: Spartacus Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $1.2 billion
Some Investors: New Enterprise Associates, Fortress Investment Group

Vertical Aerospace
Date Announced: June 10
Acquirer: Broadstone Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $2.2 billion
Some Investors: N/A

Boxed
Date Announced: June 14
Acquirer: Seven Oaks Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $887 million
Some Investors: Greycroft, DST Global

Pear Therapeutics
Date Announced: June 22, 2021
Acquirer: Thimble Point Acquisition
Valuation: $1.6 billion
Some Investors: Temasek Holdings, SoftBank Vision Fund

Quanergy Systems
Date Announced: June 22, 2021
Acquirer: CITIC Capital Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $1.1 billion
Some Investors: Motus Ventures, Rising Tide

Embark
Date Announced: June 23, 2021
Acquirer: Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp. II
Valuation: $5.2 billion
Some Investors: Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital

BuzzFeed
Date Announced: June 24, 2021
Acquirer: 890 Fifth Avenue Partners, Inc.
Valuation: $1.5 billion
Some Investors: Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates

NextDoor
Date Announced: Jul 6, 2021
Acquirer: Khosla Ventures Acquisition Co. II
Valuation: $4.3 billion
Some Investors: Benchmark, Kleiner Perkins

Satellogic
Date Announced: July 6, 2021
Acquirer: CF Acquisition Corp. V
Valuation: $1.1 billion
Some Investors: Tencent, Valor Capital Group

Circle
Date Announced: July 8, 2021
Acquirer: Concord Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $4.5 billion
Some Investors: IDG Capital, Breyer Capital

Planet
Date Announced: July 7, 2021
Acquirer: dMY Technology Group Inc. IV
Valuation: $2.8 billion
Some Investors: DCVC, Prelude Ventures

Aurora
Date Announced: July 15, 2021
Acquirer: Reinvent Technology Partners
Valuation: $11 billion
Some Investors: Sequoia Capital, Greylock

HeartFlow
Date Announced: July 15, 2021
Acquirer: Longview Acquisition Corp. II
Valuation: $2.4 billion
Some Investors: Capricorn Investment Group, Panorama Point Partners

ServiceMax
Date Announced: July 15, 2021
Acquirer: Pathfinder Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $1.4 billion
Some Investors: Emergence, Silver Lake

Kin Insurance
Date Announced: July 19, 2021
Acquirer: Omnichannel Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $1.03 billion
Some Investors: August Capital, Commerce Ventures

AdTheorent
Date Announced: July 27, 2021
Acquirer: MCAP Acquisition Corp.
Valuation: $775 million
Some Investors: Verizon Ventures, H.I.G. Growth Partners

SWVL Technologies
Date Announced: July 28, 2021
Acquirer: Queen’s Gambit Growth Capital
Valuation: $1.5 billion
Some Investors: Careem, BECO Capital

Vacasa
Date Announced: July 29, 2021
Acquirer: TPG Pace Solutions
Valuation: $4.5 billion
Some Investors: Riverwood Capital, Silver Lake

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>>> Palantir Invests in More SPAC Companies, and Buys $51 Million in Gold Bars


Barron's

By Eric J. Savitz

Aug. 16, 2021


https://www.barrons.com/articles/palantir-spac-investment-gold-bars-51629150154


Data-analytics-software firm Palantir disclosed more investments in firms going public through special-purpose acquisition companies, and a large stash of gold bars.

Palantir Technologies has expanded its portfolio of investments in companies going public via SPACs, or special-purpose acquisition companies, to well over $300 million.

As previously reported, Palantir (ticker: PLTR) has started a program of investing in the young companies in return for multi-year commitments to use the company’s software.

In its June quarter financial filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Palantir disclosed $250 million in commitments to a group of 10 companies through June 30. That includes eight identified by name, all previously announced — Lilium, Sarcos Robotics, Roivant Sciences, Celularity (CELU), Wejo, Babylon Health, Boxed, Pear Therapeutics — and two others described only as “mobility company” and “autonomous vehicle company.” Palantir said it has commercial contracts with that group of companies with a potential value of $428 million. All of those transactions were signed in the period from March 30 to June 22, and to date, none have been completed, the filing shows.

A provider of data-analytics software for both commercial and government customers, Palantir also said that since June 30, it has committed an additional $60 million in new investments, including: $20 million for Fast Radius, which offers a “cloud manufacturing platform”; $15 million for Tritium, a developer of electric vehicle chargers; $15 million for AdTheorent, which sells machine-learning driven advertising software; and $10 million for FinAccel, an Asian financial-services company with offices in Singapore and Jakarta.

Palantir also disclosed it has completed equity investments of $25 million in an “electric vehicle company,” $3 million in an “autonomous aerial vehicle company,” and $5 million in Astrocast, which operates a network of nanosatellites. That brings the total investment commitment to more than $330 million.

Palantir also disclosed that it purchased $50.7 million in 100-ounce gold bars. “Such purchase will initially be kept in a secure third-party facility located in the northeastern United States and the company is able to take physical possession of the gold bars stored at the facility at any time with reasonable notice,” Palantir said in the filing.


The company did not provide a reason for the gold purchase.

As of June 30, Palantir had about $2.4 billion in cash.

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[JohnCM]

[JohnCM]

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Singular Genomics Systems - >>> Buy These 3 New Stocks Before They Jump Over 40%, Says Goldman Sachs


Yahoo Finance

June 22, 2021


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/buy-3-stocks-jump-over-141651264.html


Singular Genomics Systems (OMIC)

Last but not least is Singular Genomics, a life sciences company working on next generation sequencing (NGS) and multiomics technologies, the tools that will build the next wave of genetically-based products and medicines. The company has a proprietary sequencing platform, and brings to the table an integrated solution it calls PX. The PX integrated solution makes use of genomics, cell analysis, spatial analysis, and proteomics on an integrated instrument.

The PX Integrated Solution is one of Singular Genomics’ pipeline products, and is scheduled for commercial release in 2023. The company is also working on the G4 Instrument, a benchtop next gen sequencer optimized for fast and accurate results in genetic sequencing tests. The G4 Instrument is packaged with a menu of consumable kits. The project is on track for early access and a commercial launch by the end of this year, with the first units shipping to customers in 1H21.

Singular Genomics held its IPO to raise capital – and it did so successfully. The initial pricing was $22 per share for 10.2 million shares put on the market. As is usually done, the underwriters had an option on additional shares, 1.53 million in this case, at the same price. Singular Genomics is expected to generate pre-expense funds of $224.4 million. They beat that number. The IPO officially brought in $258.1 million, before deductions. The stock shares started on the market on May 27, and the IPO closed on June 1.

Analyst Matthew Sykes, in his report on this stock for Goldman Sachs, points out several factors that indicate strong growth ahead:

“1) Differentiated technology: The OMIC Sequencing Engine incorporates a number of innovations providing a competitive advantage to the incumbent instruments. We see the primary differentiation in the sequencing chemistry OMIC has developed resulting in better performance across a number of metrics relative to the current competition.

“2) Better performance: In internal and external testing environments the G4 has shown to have a performance advantage in cycle time and data output as compared to the incumbent technologies…

“3) Attractive market opportunity: The global NGS market is estimated to grow at a 19% CAGR reaching $18.6bn by 2026... We believe OMIC has a significant opportunity to address the need for an alternate supplier and for additional sequencing capacity in the market.”

Based on the above, Sykes gives OMIC shares a Buy rating to start out with, while his $35 one-year price target implies ~49% upside from current levels. (To watch Sykes’ track record, click here)

Overall, OMIC has picked up 4 reviews in its short time on the market, and they break down 3 to 1 in favor of Buy versus Hold – for a Strong Buy consensus rating. The shares are priced at $23.16 and the average price target of $30.33 implies an upside of ~29% for the coming 12 months.

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Paymentus, Flywire - >>> Buy These 3 New Stocks Before They Jump Over 40%, Says Goldman Sachs


Yahoo Finance

June 22, 2021


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/buy-3-stocks-jump-over-141651264.html


The IPO activity this year continues a heavy momentum built up last year – when despite the corona crisis and the economic dislocations, the market saw record breaking IPO activity, with 407 new public offerings. It’s an example of the stock market’s dynamism, and the confidence of both company managers and investors that stocks are the place to find returns.

This brings us to Goldman Sachs. The banking firm’s stock analysts have been looking for the equities primed to gain in current conditions. And just this week, they’ve tapped three stocks new to the public markets as likely to jump 40% or more in coming months – a solid return that investors should note. We ran them through TipRanks database to see what other Wall Street’s analysts have to say about them.

Paymentus Holdings (PAY)

We’ll start with Paymentus Holdings, a cloud-computing service in the online bill payment niche. The company offers a platform that is widely used in North America – boasting tens of millions of customers, more than 1,300 business clients on the billing end, and nearly 200 million payment transactions last year.

Paymentus provides payment services for billers across a wide range of industries, including utilities, insurance, telecom, healthcare, and government. The company’s IPN, or instant payment network, links the platform to business partners, and allows consumers to handle their bills through a greater range of options: Amazon’s Alex; the PayPal app, in person at Walmart, or even through online banking.

With the growing share of online billing in the world of commerce, Paymentus had to consider upping its profile - and an IPO was a natural move. IPOs by their nature both increase a company’s public visibility and bring in new capital for expansion. Paymentus priced its initial offering at $21 per share, put 10 million shares on the market, and gave the underwriters an option on an additional 1.5 million shares. In the actual event, on May 26, the company sold the offered shares – and easily raised the initially estimated $210 million.

Among the bulls is Goldman Sachs analyst Matthew O’Neill, who is impressed by Paymentus’ application of modern cloud software organization to the complex business of consumer bill-paying.

“Paymentus believes that it has a best-in-class product and can take share from legacy software and processes for billers. Paymentus currently has penetrated less than 1% of the $4.6tn U.S. Bill Payment TAM. We expect Paymentus to gain further share in this market through its tech stack, particularly with its Paypal/Venmo integration and other attractive features for its clients," O’Neill noted.

The analyst added, “Paymentus currently operates across non-discretionary verticals, but there is an opportunity for it to expand into new channels and verticals where there are consistent recurring payments for essential services. The company believes that its modern configurable tech solutions allow it to cost-effectively expand its offerings.”

In line with these comments, O’Neill rates PAY a Buy along with a $54 price target, suggesting ~64% upside potential for the year ahead. (To watch O’Neill’s track record, click here)

Overall, PAY has received 8 recent analyst reviews, breaking down to 6 Buys versus 2 Holds and making the analyst consensus rating a Strong Buy. The stock has current trading price of $32.35 and an average price target of $31.22, indicating ~14% upside potential for the next 12 months. (See PAY stock analysis on TipRanks)


Flywire Corporation (FLYW)

Let’s stick with online payments. Flywire got its start as an online payment service specializing in the educational industry, but it has since branched out to the healthcare and travel sectors, as well. The company’s payment platform offers secure processing for customers around the world, offering both improved collections and localized payment options. The Boston-based company operates on a truly global scale, with over 2,250 client businesses who operate in 240 countries and 130 different currencies.

Flywire moved into the public arena on May 26, in an IPO that saw 10.44 million shares go on the market. The underwriters of the offering had an option on an additional 1.566 million shares. The new stock started trading on the NASDAQ, and the company’s initial pricing put it at $24 per share. The share sale brought in over $366 million on the first day, well above the $250 million the company was aiming for.

"We see opportunity for Flywire to expand within its existing education and healthcare verticals, which have large TAMs. Currently, Flywire has penetrated less than 15% of the cross-border tuition market, and with the addition of domestic payments processing, we believe there is ample runway in education. Flywire is also active in healthcare and travel, with additional opportunity in B2B payments," O’Neill opined.

The analyst added, "We expect Flywire to continue to grow within its verticals due to its software-driven strategy, which strengthens its competitive moat in cross-border payments by delivering convenience and ease of use to clients and their customers."

This company, while new to the public markets, has already made its mark with Wall Street’s analysts – they’ve given FLYW shares a unanimous Strong Buy consensus, based on 9 positive reviews set since the IPO. The shares are priced at $35.52 and the $42.63 average price target indicates room for ~20% share price growth this year. (See FLYW stock analysis on TipRanks)

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[JohnCM]

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>>> First Look: Solid Power, a Ford-Backed QuantumScape Rival, Will Go Public via SPAC

This is more than just another electric vehicle SPAC deal.


Motley Fool

by John Rosevear

Jun 15, 2021


Solid Power, a promising solid-state battery start-up backed by Ford Motor (NYSE:F) and BMW (OTC:BMWYY) (OTC:BAMXF), said that it has agreed to go public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Decarbonization Plus Acquisition III (NASDAQ:DCRC).

The deal values the combined company at about $1.2 billion.

Many investors have been overwhelmed by the number of SPAC deals in the electric-vehicle space over the last year, and some have soured on the space now that a couple of last year's darlings have turned out to be, well, less than they seemed. But if you still believe that electric vehicles are the future (I do), Solid Power is worth a close look. It's a company with real potential, with some big customers ready and waiting for its products, and with technology that's much closer to mass production than that of its most prominent rivals.

What is Solid Power

Colorado-based Solid Power, founded in 2012, is one of several companies working to develop so-called solid-state batteries, which omit the liquid electrolyte used in the lithium-ion batteries that power most electric vehicles today. (Among the others: QuantumScape (NYSE:QS), which drew lots of attention from investors after it went public via its own SPAC deal late last year.)

Solid-state batteries have the potential to offer greater energy density than lithium-ion batteries with less weight, but a design that can be mass-produced at a reasonable cost has eluded researchers for years.

That may soon change.

What makes this a big deal

First and foremost, Solid Power appears to be closer to mass production than its rivals. Most solid-state battery efforts are at least a few years away from production. QuantumScape, for example, is hoping to begin pilot production of its batteries in about three years. But Solid Power is already producing its second-generation 20 ampere-hour (Ah) battery cells on a pilot production line, and it expects to begin pilot production of its full-scale 100 Ah batteries next year.

Second -- again, unlike most competitors -- Solid Power's solid-state battery cells can be manufactured with equipment and processes adapted from lithium-ion battery manufacturing, meaning that existing battery plants can be converted to build Solid Power's cells at relatively low cost.

Finally, as I mentioned above, both Ford and BMW are investors in Solid Power. Both participated in the company's most recent funding round earlier this year, both expect to receive batches of those 100 Ah cells for testing in their own electric vehicles next year, and assuming those tests go well, both will be early customers for the company's mass-produced cells.

What are the terms of the Solid Power SPAC deal

Solid Power's deal to merge with Decarbonization Plus III follows the pattern of other SPAC deals we've seen in the electric vehicle space over the past year, in that it includes a PIPE (for "private investment in public equity") that allows big investors to buy stock in the merged company at an agreed-upon price, adding extra cash to the deal.

Here are the key points of the deal:

Decarbonization Plus III is contributing the cash it holds in trust, about $350 million.

The PIPE will bring another $165 million from investors including Riverstone Energy, Koch Strategic Platforms, and funds advised by Neuberger Berman and VanEck Global.

Together with the $135 million that Solid Power raised in its Series B round last month, the post-merger company will have about $650 million in cash.

The merged company will retain the Solid Power name and will trade on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker symbol "SLDP."

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2021.

What are the risks if I buy DCRC now

As with any SPAC deal involving a company that hasn't yet brought its product to market, there are risks investors should keep in mind:

It's possible that the deal won't close, or that it'll close later than scheduled.

It's possible that the company's technology won't pan out, or that it goes into production later than expected. Investors who are used to tech start-up time frames should note that the pace of progress in the battery space is glacial by comparison. Solid Power has been working on its batteries since 2012, QuantumScape since 2010.

It's possible that one or more competitors will beat Solid Power to market, taking significant share.

It's possible that we'll learn things about Solid Power that make it a less attractive investment. (I have no reason to think this will happen, but all SPAC investors should be mindful of the examples of Nikola and Lordstown Motors, both of which made important claims that were later found to have been exaggerated.)

FORD'S ELECTRIC F-150 LIGHTNING WILL USE CELLS DEVELOPED WITH KOREAN BATTERY MAKER SK INNOVATIONS. BUT THE NEXT GENERATION OF THE TRUCK, EXPECTED LATER THIS DECADE, MIGHT WELL USE SOLID POWER'S CELLS.

Is DCRC a buy

I'm not sure yet, but right now I'm leaning toward "yes." Solid Power's technology is very promising, and executives at Ford think highly of the company's technology and leadership team. As with any battery start-up, the question is when (and whether) the company can bring its batteries to market -- but I think Solid Power will still have good growth potential even if production slips by a year or two.

That said, I'm still working through all of the company's investor materials, and I expect to have more thoughts on Solid Power's valuation and growth potential in a few days. Stay tuned.

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>>> Stock Market’s Million Little Dramas Come Down to a Supply Glut


Bloomberg

By Katherine Greifeld

May 22, 2021


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-22/stock-market-s-million-little-dramas-come-down-to-a-supply-glut?srnd=premium


Over $170 billion raised in IPOs on U.S. exchanges this year

Recent launches trail the broader market after a banner 2020


Angst has been the stock market story of late. It soars, it plunges, and all the while investors fret over sky high valuations and pour over data to figure out when inflation will bring the house of cards crashing down. But sometimes, like now, the problem is far simpler than that: too much supply and not enough demand.

Companies have raised over $170 billion through initial public offerings on U.S. exchanges in 2021, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. IPOs are so hot they’re on track to top last year’s $180 billion haul, the most since at least the 2008 financial crisis.

But while the market voraciously consumed 2020’s debuts, tastes are changing. The Renaissance IPO ETF (ticker IPO), which tracks newly public companies, is down 9.3% this year after soaring 107% in 2020. While the broader market has held up so far, there’s an ever-present threat of a seemingly endless equity supply overwhelming precious demand. Yes, the S&P 500 is up nearly 10% higher year-to-date. But it’s dropped almost 2% from the all-time high it reached earlier this month.

“There is certainly something to the idea that demand for stocks is moderating,” said Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research. “The IPO window is always wide open until it shuts with a bang. That makes it something of a self-correcting part of the market.”

Newly public companies have trailed broader market

Fund flows reflect this waning appetite. While equity exchange-traded funds have taken in $288 billion year-to-date, the biggest -- the $355 billion SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (ticker SPY) -- has shed $12.5 billion.

Even with IPOs coming at a record pace, recent tremors in the stock market tremors are starting to spook some potential issuers. At least two planned listings have been delayed this month because of the volatility. Should that become a trend, or if debuts start getting canceled outright, it would be a troubling sign, Colas said.

“When deals start getting pulled, you’ll know the supply side of the stock market equation is starting to reset,” Colas said.

The bulk of IPO supply is coming from a boom in special purpose acquisition companies. Blank-check listings account for more more than half of this year’s market, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Shares of blank-check firms are sinking

But SPACs have struggled in recent weeks. The IPOX SPAC Index (ticker SPAC), which tracks the performance of a broad group of blank-check firms, has plunged nearly 23% from its mid-February peak.

Beyond the supply-demand imbalance, there’s also a problem with the kinds of companies that are making their market debuts. Many of the recent IPOs have been tech outfits with shaky fundamentals, according to Kim Forrest, chief investment officer of Bokeh Capital Partners.

“The supply-demand problem is real, but it is exacerbated by the majority of the companies being in tech -- and the sort of tech that has ‘not available’ for most of the ratios that investors look at,” Forrest said. “So many of this year’s IPOs have indefinite time periods for profit.”

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>>> Oatly Prices IPO at Top of Range to Raise $1.4 Billion


Yahoo Finance

by Crystal Tse

May 19, 2021

(Bloomberg) -- Oatly Group AB, the vegan food and drink maker, priced its initial public offering at the top of a marketed range to raise more than $1.4 billion.

The company and its investors sold more than 84 million American depositary shares for $17 each on Wednesday, according to a statement. The Swedish company had offered the shares for $15 to $17 each.

The listing gives Oatly a market value of about $10 billion based on the outstanding shares listed in its filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

U.S. markets dropped for the third day in a row, with the S&P 500 index falling 0.3% Wednesday.

The IPO underscores plant-based products’ jump into the mainstream, as environmental and health concerns spur consumers to seek alternatives to traditional meat and dairy products. Investors have been looking for ways to replicate the public-market success of Beyond Meat Inc., whose shares have surged more than 300% since it went public in May 2019.

Oatly was started in 1994 by brothers Rickard and Bjorn Oste. Using technology based on research from Sweden’s Lund University, the company turns fiber-rich oats into liquid food.

In July, Oatly secured $200 million in new capital from investors led by Blackstone Group Inc. The group also included celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Jay-Z, as well as former Starbucks Corp. founder Howard Schultz. The company was valued at about $2 billion in the round.

Oatly’s offering is being led by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Credit Suisse Group AG. The shares are expected to begin trading Thursday on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol OTLY.

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>>> Oatly IPO Prices at $17 a Share, Notching $10 Billion Valuation

The oat-milk maker will be the latest test for the slowing market for initial public offerings


The Wall Street Journal

By Corrie Driebusch

May 19, 2021


https://www.wsj.com/articles/oatly-prepares-to-price-ipo-amid-stock-market-declines-11621456361


Swedish oat-milk maker Oatly Group AB’s initial public offering priced at $17 a share, on the high end of expectations, according to people familiar with the matter.

Oatly’s IPO raised $1.43 billion, and the $17 price tag gave the celebrity-backed company a valuation of roughly $10 billion. Oatly had set its sights on raising between $1.27 billion and $1.43 billion by selling roughly 84.4 million shares at a price of $15 to $17 a share, according to a regulatory filing. The proceeds will go to the company and selling shareholders.

Oatly’s stock will begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market on Thursday under the symbol OTLY.

Pricing at the high end of the range is a positive sign for Oatly, especially because going public has proved tough for several companies recently. The stock market has taken a turn lower on fears of inflation, and investors have increasingly shied away from the types of growth companies that typically go public. The Nasdaq Composite Index, chock-full of growth companies, has fallen 4.8% so far in May.

Last week, at least three companies postponed their IPOs because of volatility in the stock market. On Wednesday, website-development company Squarespace Inc.’s shares made their debut on the New York Stock Exchange at a level far below their last financing round, then proceeded to fall further through the afternoon.

(partial article)

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>>> The SPAC King Is Doing Just Fine Even as the Bubble Starts to Burst


Chamath Palihapitiya—tech billionaire, Golden State Warriors co-owner, and all-around meme lord—has a sure-thing, 100%, can’t-miss investment for you that will definitely, absolutely pay off for him.


Bloomberg

May 13, 2021


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-05-13/spac-king-chamath-palihapitiya-hopes-his-hype-will-keep-mesmerizing-you


One morning last October, as wildfires raged across Northern California, President Donald Trump convalesced from Covid-19, and Congress debated how big of a stimulus bill would be needed to rescue the economy, Chamath Palihapitiya went on TV to pitch investors on the latest stock he was taking public.

In a blue blazer and glasses, and accompanied by a bulletpointed slide deck, the Facebook-executive-turned-venture-capitalist explained how Clover Health Investments Corp. uses powerful machine-learning software to recommend treatments that keep people healthier. He predicted confidently that the insurer’s revenue would triple in two years and that its stock would increase tenfold in a decade. He granted that, yes, he’d received a stake in Clover for setting up the deal to take it public, but he said his interests were aligned with those of other investors, because he and his partners had also put about $171 million into the company themselves. “There is no way that I can win unless the stock goes up,” he told CNBC’s Squawk Box, slicing his hand through the air to punctuate each word. “This is not some get-rich-quick scheme, at least for me.”

What Palihapitiya said was partially true, in that someone who’s already wealthy enough to be part-owner of the Golden State Warriors can’t by definition get rich quick. But the way the deal was structured made it almost impossible for him to lose. Even as investors who bought the stock after watching him on TV would lose 28%, as of May 11, Palihapitiya and his partners would almost double their money, much of which was borrowed to begin with.

This kind of financial virtuosity has made Palihapitiya a billionaire, not to mention a hit on social media. He has 1.5 million Twitter followers, a popular weekly podcast, and an audience of day-trading millennials and zoomers who hang on his every word. He’s 44, cocky, blunt, and seems like the kind of guy who’d take pleasure in calling BS on current stock market hype—if he wasn’t the one behind it.

Instead, Palihapitiya argues that traditional value investors, who say some stocks are massively overpriced, are morons. Markets, he says, are all but guaranteed to go up as long as the Fed keeps printing money, and individual investors who buy popular stocks are outsmarting Wall Street. His take may be questionable, but it’s entertaining as hell.

In late January, when sober-minded financiers warned that the mania around GameStop Corp., the once-beleaguered video game retailer beloved by Reddit users, would end badly, Palihapitiya took the fun side of the bet. He invested in it himself, then criticized the brokerage firm Robinhood Markets Inc. when it temporarily suspended trading, causing the price of the company’s shares to fall. “These motherf---ers should go to jail,” Palihapitiya said on his podcast, All-In, where he and several friends talk about technology, politics, and investment strategies. Their catchphrase—“Wet your beak!”—was once gangster slang for extortion. As used by Palihapitiya it means “make tons of money on the stock market and feel awesome about it.”

Social media influencers of Palihapitiya’s stature and charisma tend to monetize their following by promoting some sort of salable product—say, a detox tea or a line of home goods. Palihapitiya has the SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company; the Clover investment was one of them. When he called for the incarceration of Robinhood’s C-suite, he suggested his fans pull out their money and put it into a competitor, Social Finance Inc., better known as SoFi, which is merging with another one of his SPACs.

Think of a SPAC as a pile of money with a ticker symbol. An investor puts in $10 and gets back one share of publicly traded stock. Then the SPAC’s sponsor uses the stash to merge with a company like Clover, taking a shortcut around the IPO process and turning a private company public. Besides the speed, the structure offers two other important advantages: First, the sponsors get to keep 20% of the stock for themselves as a kind of fee. And second, unlike in a traditional initial public offering, even an unprofitable company can make ambitious projections about all the money it’s about to make. With SPACs, pretty much any amount of boasting goes.

Although they’ve been around for decades, SPACs exploded in popularity in 2020, after Palihapitiya’s first blank-check company—originally known by the ticker symbol IPOA—saw its stock price triple four months after merging with Virgin Galactic, a Richard Branson-founded enterprise that aims to blast tourists into space. Palihapitiya has since started five more SPACs—known as IPOB, IPOC, IPOD, and so on—raising more than $4 billion. He says he’ll eventually do 26 deals, one for every letter of the alphabet.

Today it seems almost every rich, underemployed man with a bit of name recognition has raised, or is raising, a SPAC, seeking to earn a big payday by finding a company to buy. There are SPACs advised by retired athletes (Alex Rodriguez, Shaquille O’Neal), SPACs advised by washed-up politicians (Paul Ryan, John Delaney), and one SPAC advised by a dream team of NBA great David Robinson and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. About 600 SPACs have raised more than $186 billion since the beginning of last year. Some double or triple in price even before announcing any plans as investors trade tips about which electric-truck or flying-taxi startup the SPAC might buy. Palihapitiya “created a template that all SPACers could follow,” says Mark Cuban, the Shark Tank host and fellow NBA owner. “He knew what made them work and created a narrative that new investors could understand.”

Palihapitiya’s ego has seemed to expand along with the market for the hot new investment structure. In November he bought a $75 million Bombardier Global 7500, the longest-range business jet available, according to public records. On Dec. 30, 2020, he tweeted that when the price of Bitcoin—another one of his interests—hit $150,000, he’d buy the Hamptons and turn the whole region into affordable housing. In January, he hinted at a run for governor of California and began funding a campaign to recall current Governor Gavin Newsom. In February, when someone on Twitter praised Jeff Bezos’ physique, Palihapitiya replied with a shirtless selfie. “You’re welcome,” he wrote.

While longtime money managers wince at these antics, Palihapitiya’s fan base has been eating it all up. Arnav Naik, a 17-year-old from Troy, Mich., says he got into SPACs after his high school went remote and his swim season was canceled. He started reading the Reddit day-trading forum WallStreetBets and trading stock options, parlaying about $5,000 in savings into $35,000 within six months by betting on an electric-truck SPAC and GameStop.

After seeing Palihapitiya tweet about Clover, Naik doubled down. In January he put almost all his money into Clover call options—an all-or-nothing bet that the shares would go up. If they climbed to, say, $35 he could turn his savings into $130,000. “When you slap a name like ‘Chamath’ on there, it has a lot of potential to rocket up, like how Tesla did with Elon,” he says. “He’s going to join the WallStreetBets meme god pantheon.”

In 2007, Palihapitiya, who was working as a venture capitalist, sat for an interview with video artist Sylvie Blocher for an installation titled Living Pictures/Men in Gold. “I have not had my revenge yet on the insiders,” he told her. “I’m still working to get inside. And once I get inside, I will do my best to completely explode it from the inside.”

In the years since, even as he’s become a consummate insider, Palihapitiya has cultivated this image further, presenting himself as a brash outsider unafraid to tell harsh truths. His rants have tended to follow a pattern. Some group of people, often one he’d recently belonged to, is actually a craven bunch of hypocrites. His targets over the years include Facebook Inc.: “Ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.” Venture capitalists: “A bunch of soulless cowards” who pump money into “useless, idiotic companies.” Charitable giving: It’s done for “branding” and “validation.” Politicians: “They’re all f---ing puppets.” The startup economy: “An enormous multivariate kind of Ponzi scheme.” The traditional IPO process: “Negative value.” Hedge funds: “Those suck.” Big banks: “No smart person goes and works at Goldman.” Government: “Just a large validation of one’s personal ego.” Consultants: “Useless.”

Presented in opposition is Palihapitiya, who, in his telling, is interested in making money only so he can solve the world’s biggest problems, such as climate change and inequality. “Get the money, get the money, and then let’s get around a table and let’s create new rules,” he told Stanford business students in 2017. “And don’t wrap yourself in all this, like, liberal kind of bullshit about ‘oh, my God, money, blah.’?”

“The person that’s most aligned with what I want to do is me”

Palihapitiya declined to be interviewed, but his story, as he’s often told it, begins in Ottawa in a two-bedroom apartment above a laundromat. The family had immigrated to Canada from Sri Lanka and received refugee status. His parents got by on welfare, and his father struggled with drinking. In high school he worked at Burger King and ran a blackjack game in the cafeteria for cash. (He still hosts high-stakes poker games; poker pro Phil Hellmuth has said Palihapitiya usually wins.)

He went into banking after studying electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo, but quit when he received no bonus, he said on a podcast in December. He dreamed of making the Forbes billionaires list, and at his first tech job, at AOL, according to Josh Felser, who hired him, he’d say he expected to hit that number before he turned 30. “He knew little about tech, yet he had chutzpah and was an in-your-face negotiator, which we needed,” Felser says. He adds that Palihapitiya regularly stole his parking spot.

Palihapitiya joined Facebook in 2007, when it was just starting to expand to users beyond its base of college and high school students, and persuaded the then-23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg to make him head of growth. By the time he left, four years later, the company had added almost a billion users.

His next move was to use the connections he’d made at Facebook and as an angel investor to start his own venture capital firm, Social Capital. As he would later do with SPACs, Palihapitiya said his venture fund would change the world, transforming health care and education and disrupting the investment process by using data to pick companies instead of gut instinct. He called it “activist capitalism” in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek at the time, and said he hand-picked investors who shared his mission. Among them were Zuckerberg and Facebook board member Peter Thiel.

Two former employees, who asked not to be identified because they still work in the industry, say the data project never got beyond the testing stage. And its most successful bets weren’t particularly socially minded. Palihapitiya and his partners backed Slack Technologies early on, and he said he invested in Bitcoin in 2012 (up at least 500 times since then), Amazon.com in 2014 (10 times), and Tesla in 2015 (15 times). His funds have had annual returns that are double those of the S&P 500 before fees, according to his yearend 2019 investor letter. That’s served as a rebuke to critics who portray Palihapitiya as a bigmouth. He may talk a lot, but he has the returns to back it up.

As Palihapitiya got richer, he seemed to lose interest in the day-to-day work of running a venture capital firm. He divorced his wife, who’d been Social Capital’s chief operating officer, and fell in love with a glamorous Italian pharmaceutical executive. When his top partners quit, he said investing wasn’t a team sport. When investors balked, he said he didn’t need them anyway. In September 2018 he announced he wouldn’t raise any more outside funds. “I would rather spend time with the people that are 100% aligned with what I want to do,” he told the tech news site the Information. “And the person that’s most aligned with what I want to do is me.” He later compared his decision to Michael Jordan quitting basketball to try baseball.

Palihapitiya now likes to say the upheaval at Social Capital came from upheaval in his personal life, which he’s gotten over with the help of two therapists. “I realized how emotionally broken I was and incapable of really connecting with people,” he told the Recode Decode podcast in 2019. Whatever the cause, with his firm reduced to a much smaller size, Palihapitiya had more time to work on SPACs. He’d raised $690 million for his first one in 2017, saying he wanted to buy a tech company. In 2019, with an approaching deadline to find an acquisition or return the money, he decided to merge it with Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

The music-mogul-turned-airline-founder had been talking about space tourism since 2004. But Virgin Galactic had suffered two fatal accidents, still had no tourists in orbit, and was down to a few months’ worth of cash. Palihapitiya wasn’t dissuaded, pitching it as a sure thing. The business was “largely now de-risked and ready to commercialize and monetize,” he told CNBC, saying it would be as profitable as a software company. (Virgin Galactic has yet to make a commercial flight.)

Some investors were skeptical—“This isn’t the right stuff,” said the Wall Street Journal—and the stock was volatile, but it was up more than 50% in April 2020, when Palihapitiya raised more than $1 billion for two more SPACs. Much of it came from large hedge funds, who see SPACs as low-risk because the investors are allowed to redeem their shares for the $10 they paid if they don’t like the deal that gets announced, and they’re given valuable stock options to keep either way. Their only concern is that a sponsor might not be able to find a company to buy. But that wasn’t a problem for Palihapitiya. In September, one of the SPACs merged with an online real estate venture. The Clover merger came a month later.

Like Virgin Galactic, Clover wasn’t a startup. Since its founding in 2012 it had been hyped as the next big thing in health care, an insurer that would use the latest technology to hold down costs and improve care. But Clover had burned through the hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital it had raised from Google, Sequoia, and other top investors, churning through a series of executives and continually missing growth targets. Social Capital had invested $500,000 in Clover in 2015, but it passed on investing more recently because of the company’s performance, according to a former partner.

The company struggled, according to the metrics set by the government to determine how much insurers get reimbursed, ranking among the bottom 15% of plans in the U.S.’s star-rating system. An effort to expand outside New Jersey resulted in few new customers. In 2018, Clover set a goal of about 7,500 patients in Georgia, according to a former employee, but signed up just 63. A spokesman said Clover ranks more highly on a metric the government is developing that takes into account that many of its members come from underserved minority or low-income groups. It’s typical for a startup to sometimes miss its aggressive growth targets, he added.

By 2020, after almost a decade in business, Clover could have been accurately described as a small, money-losing insurer that almost exclusively operated in New Jersey and sold Medicare Advantage plans—a privately run, government-funded alternative to traditional Medicare for retirees. The outlook, in other words, wasn’t ideal. But the company had developed a software tool called Clover Assistant, which it said was the culmination of years of research. The tool uses machine learning to scan patients’ records, suggesting medications and offering possible diagnoses, according to Clover President Andrew Toy, who joined from Google in 2018. And because Clover works with a wide network of doctors, he says, it has the potential to grow as quickly as a software company, improving the entire U.S. health-care system. “We believe in software powering primary care,” he says. “Clover Assistant is the basis of our company.”

Clover had already hired JPMorgan Chase & Co. to help it go public. Then, Palihapitiya presented the possibility of merging with his SPAC instead. A deal with him offered the company the ability to enthusiastically talk up the prospects of Clover Assistant rather than dwell on its losses, as it would’ve had to do in an IPO prospectus. “There’s a different dynamic in how you can go out and talk about the company,” Toy says.

As part of its pitch, Clover said 61% of its members see a doctor who’s “contracted” to use Clover Assistant, suggesting the tool had been adopted quickly. But according to former employees, many who signed up don’t use the tool themselves. Businessweek spoke with four doctors or their assistants who were among hundreds tagged on the company’s website as “Clover Preferred,” which it says means they’ve been “recognized for their dedication to using the Clover Assistant tool.” Only one said he used it, adding that he didn’t find it helpful. “I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen it,” said another. “This is the first I’ve heard of it,” said a third. His office manager said she took his notes and copied them into Clover Assistant at the end of each day, then faxed the notes to Clover.

Emily Evans, a managing director at Hedgeye Risk Management LLC, a research firm, says most insurers offer doctors similar tools. “This software system they’re developing—they’re at the starting line, and everyone else is halfway through the marathon,” she says, adding that if Clover Assistant were already working, the company would be spending less on claims. Andy Robinson, a spokesman for Clover, says the company’s data show that only a small minority of doctors are ignorant of the tool. He says doctors are regularly using it, making, for example, 28,900 prescription changes so far based on its recommendations. Doctors who use it have medical cost ratios 11 percentage points lower than those who don’t, he says.

“While some of our doctors might not know ‘Clover Assistant’ from the name, our data clearly shows they are interacting with the product in a meaningful way,” says Mark Spektor, Clover’s chief medical officer.

Around the time of Palihapitiya’s October 2020 CNBC appearance, Nate Anderson, founder of Hindenburg Research, came across a newspaper article about a previous business started by Clover’s co-founder. Anderson is a short seller who bets against publicly traded companies and attempts to persuade the market to take his view. It’s an unpopular business, especially amid an historic bull market. Reddit traders and corporate executives blame short sellers when stocks go down. One of Anderson’s highest-profile compatriots, Andrew Left of Citron Research, quit in January after GameStop investors, angry that he’d bet against the company, hacked his social media accounts and sent obscene texts to his children.

Anderson says the SPAC boom has given the market more frauds to expose than at any time in the past decade. In September, he’d caught Nikola Corp., an electric-truck company that went public in a 2020 SPAC deal, faking a video test drive by rolling one of its trucks down a hill. After his exposé was published, the stock plummeted and the founder resigned. “The strategy with SPAC sponsors has been to take just about any company public regardless of whether it’s complete trash,” he says.

As Anderson and a member of his team dug into Clover, they spotted more red flags. On Feb. 4 he published a report: “Clover Health: How the ‘King of SPACs’ Lured Retail Investors Into a Broken Business Facing an Active, Undisclosed DOJ Investigation.” Anderson decided not to short any Clover shares but said he was releasing the report to prove the value of skeptical research. His report quoted several anonymous doctors saying Clover Assistant was useless or designed to increase billing. It cited news articles showing that Vivek Garipalli, Clover’s co-founder, also ran a hospital chain in New Jersey that had been criticized for price gouging. (The chain has said it charged insurers more so it could cover the uninsured.)

Most important, Anderson’s report included a copy of a letter that some former Clover employees had received from the U.S. Department of Justice seeking information on its sales practices. Hindenburg called it “an existential risk” for a company that gets its revenue from the government.

The stock dropped 12% that day, even as the company said it was aware of the government inquiry and had not violated any rules. Clover also said its lawyers had decided the request for information wasn’t important enough to mention, because regulators are always scrutinizing health plans. Clover Assistant, the company said, is designed to improve care, not increase billing, and often recommends treatments that actually cost Clover more. “We pay more money now in order to decrease costs and patient suffering down the line,” Garipalli said in a post on Medium.

Clover also said that criticism of Garipalli’s hospital chain was irrelevant and that other points Hindenburg had made about its sales practices were wrong. The next day, Palihapitiya wrote on Twitter: “Yesterday’s report was rife with personal attacks, thin facts, and bluster that has been rebuked by the company.” His post didn’t stop the slide. (In an email to Businessweek, Palihapitiya added that Clover “is executing on its mission to leverage its scalable technology to create better health outcomes at lower costs in a rapidly growing market. I am confident in its business and believe that Clover will compound for shareholders over the long term.”)

The SPAC boom turned to a bust not long after the Hindenburg report. Since then, SPAC shares have dropped 17% on average as of May 11, as measured by the IPOX SPAC Index. Palihapitiya’s SPACs, which had climbed quicker, fell faster, too, dropping 50% on average. Virgin Galactic was the worst of the group, crashing 68% as it delayed a planned test flight and Palihapitiya sold $200 million in stock.

As the stocks slid, the same individual investors who’d pushed them higher lost interest. Bank of America Merrill Lynch customers, for example, bought just a couple million dollars’ worth of SPAC shares in the first week of April, after loading up on as much as $120 million a week in January. In April, for the first time in a year, an entire week passed without a new SPAC raising funds in the U.S.

Naik, Palihapitiya’s teenage fan, has lost almost all his money and won’t get it back unless Clover’s stock rebounds. But he doesn’t blame Palihapitiya. “He’s doing the best he can,” Naik says. “It’ll keep growing. I really think I’ll get a huge return.” Regardless of the outcome, he plans to become an investment banker.

Unlike Naik, the hedge funds that invested in the SPAC that merged with Clover made money—filings show most sold and pocketed a quick gain around the time the deal was announced. Palihapitiya and his partners did even better. Because they gave themselves 20.7 million shares for putting the deal together, their $171 million investment has almost doubled to $320 million. A week after the Hindenburg report, Palihapitiya said he controlled a $10 billion to $15 billion fortune, triple what he’d told another interviewer 10 months earlier, and compared himself to Warren Buffett.

“A reminder to myself and others: If it were easy everyone would do it. In reality, it’s hard and most people give up,” he tweeted on March 25. “Good luck to all the players in the arena. Be proud of the dust on your face. Back to the grind?...” The next week, Palihapitiya’s jet left on a trip to Milan and then a Caribbean island. When it returned, Bloomberg News reported Palihapitiya was in talks to merge one of the SPACs he’d raised earlier in the year, known as IPOF, with Equinox Holdings Inc., the fancy gym chain.

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