Was Snowflake’s IPO mispriced or just misunderstood?

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading.  Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. Was Snowflake’s IPO mispriced or just misunderstood? With an ocean of neat stuff to get through below, we’ll be quick today on our thought bubble focused on Snowflake’s IPO. Up front it was a huge success as a fundraising event for the data-focused unicorn. At issue is the mismatch between...

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From Unity to Disrupt, tech has an especially optimistic week

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT). Subscribe here. While TechCrunch was busy producing our first-ever online Disrupt this week, the IPO market got even more exciting than expected — so here’s a quick look. Snowflake, Jfrog, Sumo Logic and Unity each raised price ranges days before IPO, to meet what had seemed like growing enthusiasm from public markets. Yet each still opened higher than its offering price, with cloud data-warehousing company...

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Unity Software has strong opening, gaining 31% after pricing above its raised range

{rss:content:encoded} Unity Software has strong opening, gaining 31% after pricing above its raised range https://ift.tt/33JpRmz https://ift.tt/3kq9XUU September 19, 2020 at 01:25AM Whoever said you can’t make money playing video games clearly hasn’t taken a look at Unity Software’s stock price. On its first official day of trading, the company rose more than 31%, opening at $75 per share before closing the day at $68.35. Unity’s share price gains came after last night’s pricing of the company’s stock at $52 per share, well above the range of $44...

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Unity Software has strong opening, gaining 31% after pricing above its raised range

Whoever said you can’t make money playing video games clearly hasn’t taken a look at Unity Software’s stock price. On its first official day of trading, the company rose more than 31%, opening at $75 per share before closing the day at $68.35. Unity’s share price gains came after last night’s pricing of the company’s stock at $52 per share, well above the range of $44 to $48 which was itself an upward revision of the company’s initial target. Games like “Pokemon Go” and “Iron Man VR” rely on the company’s software as do untold numbers of other...

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Daily Crunch: Partial US TikTok ban is imminent

{rss:content:encoded} Daily Crunch: Partial US TikTok ban is imminent https://ift.tt/32IUE3Z https://ift.tt/2CoAoqu September 19, 2020 at 12:10AM The Trump administration moves forwards with plans to ban TikTok and WeChat (although TikTok gets a partial extension), Unity goes public and we announce the winner of this year’s Startup Battlefield. This is your Daily Crunch for September 18, 2020. The big story: US TikTok ban is imminent The U.S. Commerce Department has released details about how it will be implementing the Trump administration’s domestic...

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And the winner of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt 2020 is… Canix

We started this competition with 20 impressive startups. After five days of fierce pitching in a wholly new virtual Startup Battlefield arena, we have a winner. The startups taking part in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. It was an unprecedented year as we moved all of the nail-biting excitement of our physical contest to a virtual stage. They all presented in front of multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders serving as judges for a chance to win $100,000 and the coveted...

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SaaS Ventures takes the investment road less traveled

Most venture capital firms are based in hubs like Silicon Valley, New York City and Boston. These firms nurture those ecosystems and they’ve done well, but SaaS Ventures decided to go a different route: it went to cities like Chicago, Green Bay, Wisconsin and Lincoln, Nebraska. The firm looks for enterprise-focused entrepreneurs who are trying to solve a different set of problems than you might find in these other centers of capital, issues that require digital solutions but might fall outside a typical computer science graduate’s experience. Saas...

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Are high churn rates depressing earnings for app developers?

{rss:content:encoded} Are high churn rates depressing earnings for app developers? https://ift.tt/2HfbRcX https://ift.tt/2EjB98I September 18, 2020 at 09:16PM Jacob Eiting Contributor Share on Twitter Jacob Eiting is CEO of RevenueCat, a platform for managing cross-platform in-app purchases, products and subscribers and analyzing in-app-purchase data. Ever since Apple opened up subscription monetization to more apps in 2016 — and enticed developers with an 85/15 split on revenue from customers that remain subscribed for more than...

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Are high churn rates depressing earnings for app developers?

Jacob Eiting Contributor Share on Twitter Jacob Eiting is CEO of RevenueCat, a platform for managing cross-platform in-app purchases, products and subscribers and analyzing in-app-purchase data. Ever since Apple opened up subscription monetization to more apps in 2016 — and enticed developers with an 85/15 split on revenue from customers that remain subscribed for more than a year — subscription monetization and retention has felt like the Holy Grail for app developers. So much so that Google quickly followed suit in what appeared...

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Amid layoffs and allegations of fraud, the FBI has arrested NS8’s CEO following its $100+ million summer financing

The tagline from today’s announcement from the United States Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York says it all: “Adam Rogas Allegedly Raised $123 Million from Investors Using Financial Statements that Showed Tens of Millions of Dollars of Revenue and Assets that Did Not Exist”. Rogas, the co-founder and former chief executive and chief financial officer and board member of the Las Vegas-based fraud prevention company, NS8, was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and charged in Manhattan court with securities fraud,...

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The stages of traditional fundraising

John Biggs Contributor Share on Twitter John Biggs is a former TechCrunch editor and is currently the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo. He's started and run a number of startups. More posts by this contributor GBatteries let you charge your car as quickly as visiting the pump The new TAG Heuer Carrera Calibre Tourbillon Nanograph is a lot of buzzwords in a beautiful package Eric Villines Contributor Eric Villines is a communications and fundraising professional. He's currently head of PR at Anker. Funding comes in stages. Understanding...

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Chime adds $485M at a $14.5B valuation, claims EBITDA profitability

In the midst of IPO week we have to add another name to our future debuts’ list, namely Chime, which announced a huge new round of capital today. The $485 million Series F values the consumer fintech giant at $14.5 billion, a huge figure given that Chime was most recently worth $5.8 billion after raising $700 million last December. Even more stark is the company’s $1.5 billion valuation set in early 2019. From $1.5 billion to $14.5 billion in less than two years is quite a run for any startup. Powering the latest round there were a host of familiar...

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Instagram CEO, ACLU slam TikTok and WeChat app bans for putting US freedoms into the balance

As people begin to process the announcement from the U.S. Department of Commerce detailing how it plans, on grounds of national security, to shut down TikTok and WeChat — starting with app downloads and updates for both, plus all of WeChat’s services, on September 20, with TikTok following with a shut down of servers and services on November 12 — the CEO of Instagram and the ACLU are among those that are speaking out against the move. The CEO of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, wasted little time in taking to Twitter to criticize the announcement. His...

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It’s game on as Unity begins trading

Unity Software, which sells a game development toolkit primarily for mobile phone app developers, raised $1.3 billion in its initial public offering. The company, which will begin trading today with the ticker symbol “U”, priced its shares at the top end of its expected range, selling 25 million shares at $52 per share. The company’s final IPO price came in far ahead of what Unity initially anticipated. The company initially expected to price its public offering between $34 and $42 per share, later raising its offering to $44 and $48 per share. The...

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