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While gaming giants Sony and Microsoft have made M&A a critical part of their strategic growth plans, Nintendo has always seemed to be more reluctant to bring outside talent into the fold of its video game empire. Today, the company announced that it will be acquiring the developer behind Luigi’s Mansion 3, Canada-based Next Level Games.

Nintendo’s announcement is the first studio acquisition for the company since their 2007 purchase of Xenoblade Chronicles developer Monolith Soft.

Next Level Games has been working on Nintendo-licensed IP exclusively for the better part of the last decade, crafting a number of titles across some of the company’s second tier of intellectual property including the Super Mario Strikers series as well as mobile iterations of Metroid Prime and Luigi’s Mansion.

The Vancouver-based studio’s recent Luigi’s Mansion 3 title for the Nintendo Switch has been a pretty huge success for the company which has had pretty light offerings of first-party IP since the system’s launch. In a recent earnings report, Nintendo shared that Luigi’s Mansion 3 had sold nearly 8 million copies, earning it a spot as one of the system’s top-selling titles.

Source: Tech Crunch

Today Affirm, a fintech startup that offers payment options to e-commerce customers, released a new S-1/A filing. The new document follows a late-December filing of a similar nature, though that update focused on changing the language of Affirm’s reported results, tweaking its language to remove some adjusted metrics and hewing closer to generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP.

The company’s more recent filing details what could be its first IPO price interval, indicating that Affirm may price its shares between $33 and $38 per share in its IPO. If Affirm raises its estimates, expect that price range to tighten.

Let’s calculate Affirm’s valuation marks at its new price range before digging into what we think of the company’s estimated worth against its most recent performance.

Valuation

There are two ways to calculate a company’s IPO valuation. The first takes into account only shares that will exist after the offering. The second, the so-called diluted valuation, takes into account shares that are available for exercise or conversion, but have yet to be. To avoid choosing sides today, we’ll calculate both.

The first, simple valuation is a doddle to tally:

• Affirm shares outstanding post-IPO, including its underwriters’ option: 246,436,771.
• Affirm IPO price interval: $33 to $38 per share.
• Affirm simple IPO valuation range: $8.1 billion to $9.4 billion.

Affirm’s fully diluted valuation involves a larger share count, so it generates larger results. Doing our own math, here’s how it shakes out (Bloomberg came up with slightly different numbers):

• Affirm fully diluted shares outstanding post-IPO, including its underwriters’ option: 318,865,246¹.
• Affirm IPO price interval: $33 to $38 per share.
• Affirm fully diluted IPO valuation range: $10.5 billion to $12.1 billion.

At the time of its April, 2019 Series F, Affirm was worth $2.9 billion after the capital was raised, according to PitchBook. The company also raised a $500 million Series G in September of 2020. That final round sold shares at $19.93 apiece, along with some convertible notes, per today’s filing; investors in that transaction are set to do very well in under a year.

Those who put money in even earlier will do even better.

Do those numbers make sense?

Source: Tech Crunch

Boat, an electronics and lifestyle startup in India, has raised $100 million in a new financing round that many independent investors termed as the most successful hardware startup story in the world’s second-largest internet market.

An affiliate of Warburg Pincus, a New York-headquartered private equity firm, financed the entire Series B round for the four-year-old Indian startup, which sells low-cost, durable headphones, earphones and other mobile accessories.

The round gives Boat, which had raised about $3 million in equity and debt financing prior to the new round, a post-money valuation of about $300 million, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Executives of Boat declined to comment on the valuation, other than saying that Warburg Pincus had bought a “significant minority stake” in the startup.

An investor who did not want to be named said Boat has grown to be an anomaly case among hardware startups in India. There aren’t many hardware startups in India. Among those that do exist, very few have been able to raise much money. And on top of that, Boat is also profitable — and it has been for several years, said Sameer Mehta, co-founder of the startup, in an interview with TechCrunch.

The secret sauce of Boat, at least in part, is that it has managed to keep the price points of its accessories low while also making them aesthetically appealing. The startup counts the young generation as its target audience, who want good-looking accessories at low prices but also tend to upgrade every few months.

Boat has expanded into several categories in recent years, following the same strategy all along. Its fitness wearable starts at Indian rupees 1,799 ($24.50), smartwatches at $34, charging cables at $3.40, home theatre soundbars at $54, wireless speakers at $13.50, headphones at $5.50 and AirPod-like earbuds at $27.

According to marketing research firm IDC, Boat commands over 30% of the wearable market in India and is the fifth-largest brand globally in the category.

The startup sells through both online and offline retail channels. Its devices are available through Flipkart, Amazon India and Reliance Retail, as well as Tata Stores, Croma and Vijay Sales. Analysts at HDFC bank estimated in a note last month that Boat Lifestyle’s products are available through over 5,000 retail stores across India, and it plans to enter global markets.

“We see a compelling growth story in boAt and believe the company is well-poised to build upon the strong leadership position it has carved out within the industry and stands to benefit from the secular tailwinds of e-commerce growth in India. Warburg Pincus is excited to partner with the management team of boAt led by Aman [the other co-founder] & Sameer in this journey and we look forward to supporting them through the next phase of the company’s growth,” said Vishal Mahadevia, managing director and head of Warburg Pincus India, in a statement.

Mehta said the startup will deploy the fresh capital to shift more of its manufacturing from China to India, and expand to more categories including gaming keyboards.

More to follow…

Source: Tech Crunch

Segment, the startup Twilio bought last fall for $3.2 billion, was just beginning to take off in 2015 when it ran into a scaling problem: It was growing so quickly, the tools it had built to process marketing data on its platform were starting to outgrow the original system design.

Inaction would cause the company to hit a technology wall, managers feared. Every early-stage startup craves growth and Segment was no exception, but it also needed to begin thinking about how to make its data platform more resilient or reach a point where it could no longer handle the data it was moving through the system. It was — in a real sense — an existential crisis for the young business.

Segment’s engineering team began thinking hard about what a more robust and scalable system would look like. As it turned out, their vision would evolve in a number of ways between the end of 2015 and today, and with each iteration, they would take a leap in terms of how efficiently they allocated resources and processed data moving through its systems.

The project that came out of their efforts was called Centrifuge, and its purpose was to move data through Segment’s data pipes to wherever customers needed it quickly and efficiently at the lowest operating cost. This is the story of how that system came together.

Growing pains

The systemic issues became apparent the way they often do — when customers began complaining. When Tido Carriero, Segment’s chief product development officer, came on board at the end of 2015, he was charged with finding a solution. The issue involved the original system design, which like many early iterations from startups was designed to get the product to market with little thought given to future growth and the technical debt payment was coming due.

“We had [designed] our initial integrations architecture in a way that just wasn’t scalable in a number of different ways. We had been experiencing massive growth, and our CEO [Peter Reinhardt] came to me maybe three times within a month and reported various scaling challenges that either customers or partners of ours had alerted him to,” said Carriero.

The good news was that it was attracting customers and partners to the platform at a rapid clip, but it could all have come crashing down if the company didn’t improve the underlying system architecture to support the robust growth. As Carriero reports, that made it a stressful time, but having come from Dropbox, he was actually in a position to understand that it’s possible to completely rearchitect the business’s technology platform and live to tell about it.

“One of the things I learned from my past life [at Dropbox] is when you have a problem that’s just so core to your business, at a certain point you start to realize that you are the only company in the world kind of experiencing this problem at this kind of scale,” he said. For Dropbox that was related to storage, and for Segment it was processing large amounts of data concurrently.

In the build-versus-buy equation, Carriero knew that he had to build his way out of the problem. There was nothing out there that could solve Segment’s unique scaling issues. “Obviously that led us to believe that we really need to think about this a little bit differently, and that was when our Centrifuge V2 architecture was born,” he said.

Building the imperfect beast

The company began measuring system performance, at the time processing 8,442 events per second. When it began building V2 of its architecture, that number had grown to an average of 18,907 events per second.

Source: Tech Crunch

Another week, another email newsletter. This time, the story is Punchbowl, a politics-centric newsletter founded by a crop of recent Politico alums including Jake Sherman, Anna Palmer and John Bresnahan. Ben Smith has the story, as does Maxwell Tani at the Daily Beast with some more juicy details.

Why do we need another newsletter analyzing Beltway politics in a world of Politico Playbook, Axios, The Daily 202 and a hundred others? In fact, why do we need the voluminous output of tech-oriented newsletters covering startups (by my count, there are at least several thousand newsletters covering our industry)? Why, in a media world that was supposed to be all about the long-tail, does it seem that every new media startup is targeting the same single niche over and over again?

That’s where the cauldrons of gold come in. Media is not unlike many startup markets — there may be infinite needs for diverse products, but there are only a handful of those needs that have serious dollars attached to them.

In media, these are beats like DC politics, or investment banking / M&A, or VC coverage in our quaint little world of startups, where the winners get to own massive audiences and, by extension, massive dollars from subscribers and advertisers. There are thousands of other niches, but they are impoverished with limited readership, users and recourse to revenue.

Put another way, these are tournament markets, where the winners can take all and where it is worth the gamble to have a small chance at a massive outcome rather than a good chance at a mediocre one. In medicine, “everyone” wants to cure cancer, not some neglected tropical disease (which might well have millions of people who could benefit from a cure). After all, the Nobel Prizes don’t go to merely good science, they go for the biggest advances of the century that have the right level of notability. In startups, founders want to target the largest business and consumer markets, not the small application that might be useful but won’t become a juggernaut.

Unicorns are not born in small markets.

There are of course hugely negative externalities to this model for many markets. All that competition to dominate the “first-read newsletter” on Capitol Hill or along Sand Hill Road means that we are overwhelmed with identical analyses on the same subjects rather than being able to select from a wide spectrum of different options. We probably should have more coverage of emerging market tech or state capitols than we do today.

In startups, we have way too many entrants in some extremely valuable layers of fintech, for example. There are at least … 50? 100? wealth-management startups and incumbent products that focus on automated investing in ETFs (so-called “roboadvisors”). Yet, there is so much money to be made in some of these layers, that every founder with sense is essentially saying “I’ll take my chances for the reward at the end of that particular road.”

You would sort of think the free market would work itself out in these niches. All that competition for attention in the DC media world or for wealth management users should ultimately lower costs and divide the pie thinly enough that it becomes less attractive for new entrants and makes other niches and markets look far more relatively competitive.

That would be true if the pie did actually subdivide further and further. Experience over the last decade though has proven to me that this is quite often not the case. DC politics is the cauldron of gold for politics coverage, and there are one to three newsletters that will always dominate that beat. M&A coverage on Wall Street is the cauldron of gold of business journalism, and a handful of reporters are going to own that beat by being the switchboards for all the most important sources. And VC coverage is the cauldron of gold for startup media, which is why TechCrunch and a few of our friendly competitors work so hard to cover it every day.

New markets do get invented and old markets expand and contract. There are absolutely startups that sort of come from nowhere and dazzle us with their originality and ability to create whole new categories. Yet, for every unicorn that gets its start that way, there are 10 others that get built in existing major markets and compete for the big reward offered to the winner.

There isn’t anything wrong with investors who want to fund the fifteenth startup in a space. It makes sense — that’s where the rewards are, or at least, where we perceive the rewards to be. What needs to change is how to make some of those other niches offer the same incentives for innovation. How can more markets offer cauldrons of gold? Is that even possible? Or are we destined to read 100 newsletters on McConnell and Schumer’s machinations while getting ads for Marcus?

Source: Tech Crunch

A somewhat nebulous, but high-profile and potentially heavily moneyed joint venture is coming to an end: Haven, the JV created by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, is being “disbanded” according to CNBC, three years after its original formation. One of the main reasons is that each partner in the venture was apparently just pursuing their own very different strategic approach to their respective healthcare challenges, meaning their really wasn’t much “joint” in the joint venture to begin with.

In a statement provided to CNBC, a Haven spokesperson highlighted some of the good results that came out of the partnership over the years, including improving access to primary care, and making insurance benefits packages easier to grasp for employees. Meanwhile, Amazon has made lots of progress on its own with its Amazon Care program, which is its internal healthcare program for employees at its Washington state facilities.

Amazon Care includes provision of both virtual and in-person primary care doctor visits, and prescription delivery. The company is also reported to be considering expansion of this service to other businesses, which signals its intent to turn it into a real business with aims very much in line with what the Haven JV had originally taken as its guiding light.

To be honest, the original announcement about the JV’s founding was light on details and seemed like one of those things that comes together when very rich people talk about their shared problems over a casual afternoon hang at the club with caviar and mineral water distilled from pristine arctic ice or whatever they enjoy during their repasts, so it’s not all that surprising it didn’t materialize into anything more substantial.

Source: Tech Crunch

Aeva, the lidar company started by two former Apple engineers, has raised an additional $200 million in private investment from Hong Kong hedge fund Sylebra Capital ahead of its debut as a publicly traded company.

The Mountain View, California-based startup announced in fall 2020 that it was merging with special purpose acquisition company InterPrivate Acquisition Corp., with a post-deal market valuation of $2.1 billion. The new investment from Sylebra, which is a current holder of InterPrivate common stock, brings the total gross proceeds it will have once it begins trading to more than $560 million, according to the company.

Aeva had previously raised $120 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE, including investments from Adage Capital and Porsche SE. Its combined company gross proceeds, a figure that includes $243 million held in trust by InterPrivate, was at $363 million before Sylebra stepped forward with its additional investment.

Importantly, Sylebra has also entered into a one-year lock-up agreement on the majority of its investment and will vote all eligible shares in favor of the transaction. Aeva said the merger is expected to close in the first quarter of this year.

Aeva co-founder and CEO Soroush Salehian called the investment a “major vote of confidence” in the company’s business model and growth plans. Aeva will use the additional $200 million to further invest into R&D and scale up its programs across key verticals in automotive, consumer electronics and industrial applications, Salehian said in an emailed comment to TechCrunch.

“We’ve seen an increase in customer interest for our unique 4D LiDAR technology across all of these areas in the past few months and the additional resources will allow us to address this increased demand faster,” he said.

Lidar, light detection and ranging radar, measures distance using laser light to generate a highly accurate 3D map of the world around the car. Aeva’s founders Salehian and Mina Rezk developed what they call “4D lidar,” which can measure distance as well as instant velocity without losing range, all while preventing interference from the sun or other sensors. The company’s FMCW technology also uses less power, allowing it to fold in perception software.

Lidar sensors are widely considered critical to the commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles. However, the sensors have numerous other use cases that lidar companies have begun to pursue as the road to commercializing autonomous vehicles has turned out to be longer than expected. In the past two years, automakers have begun to view lidar as an important sensor to be used to boost the capabilities and safety of its advanced driver assistance systems in the new cars, trucks and SUVs available to consumers. Aeva’s technology has been primarily developed for use in autonomous vehicles as well as advanced driving assistance systems, Salehian has said its technology is also piquing the interest of those in consumer electronics.

Aeva is one of a handful of lidar companies to eschew the traditional IPO path and go public via a SPAC merger. Velodyne and Luminar have also merged with SPACs to to become publicly traded companies. Lidar startup Ouster announced in December that it has agreed to go public through a merger with special purpose acquisition company Colonnade Acquisition Corp.

Source: Tech Crunch

Welcome to 2021, a year that could extend 2020’s startup market disruptions and excesses — or change patterns that previously performed well for early-stage tech companies and their investors.

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

As we turn the page, I have a number of questions worth raising as we muck into 2021.

Each relates to a 2020 change that is expected to persist, by either the general market or those bullish on startups. I want to know what would need to change to shake up what became the new normal last year. After all, it’s precisely when it feels like nothing could shake up a downturn (or a boom) that things often do.

Today, let’s discuss seed deals, venture investing cadence, the resulting valuation pressures from rapid-fire bets, current IPO expectations and what happens to software sales when remote work begins to fade.

1. How long can seed deal-making stay hot?

As 2020 came to a close, Natasha Mascarenhas and I reported on seed investing’s strong year and its especially strong second half. How long can that pace keep up?

Nearly all our questions today deal with the endurance of certain conditions, namely: how long the market can keep parts of startup land red-hot.

When it comes to seed deal-making, Q1 and Q2 2020 saw similar levels of investment in the United States. But Q3 proved explosive, with money invested into domestic seed deals rising from around $1.5 to $1.6 billion during the first two quarters to $2.2 billion in the July-September period.

Q4 numbers are yet to fully come in, but it’s clear that private investors were incredibly bullish on early-stage startups in the second half of 2020. How long can that keep up? I think the answer is for a while yet, as investors have shown scant enthusiasm for slowing down their dealmaking cadence.

While cadence remains hot generally, seed deals should stay heated as the number of investors who are willing to invest early has increased.

Which brings us to our second question:

2. How long can investors keep writing such quick checks?

A theme that cropped up in the second half of 2020 was the pace at which investors were conducting venture capital deals. This was for a few reasons. To start, venture capitalists have raised larger funds in recent years, meaning that they need larger returns to make the math work out. This led to many investors putting money to work in younger and younger companies, hoping to get in early on a big win. That setup led to more deal competition and faster deal-making.

How? Two things. Investors who were already on a startup’s cap table — already part-owners, in other words — led preemptive rounds, in part to get ahead of other investors who might want to poach the succeeding deal. Other investors, knowing this, seemed to do the same math and move even faster, and earlier, to get around the defense.

So how long can the trend keep up? Given that many big VC firms raised in 2020, many startups picked up some tailwinds from the COVID-19 economy and exits have been strong, forever? Until something stops things? Think of it as Newton’s First Law of startup investing.

What could be the sudden impact to shake up the current set of conditions boosting the pace at which seed and later deals occur? An asteroid strike is probably too extreme, but inertia is one hell of a drug and markets love to stay happy.

Moving along, all the competition to get money to work in hot startups now has had another effect than the mere speed of deal-making; it has also pushed prices higher.

Source: Tech Crunch

T-Mobile, the third largest cell carrier in the U.S. after completing its recent $26 billion merger with Sprint, ended 2020 by announcing its second data breach of the year.

The cell giant said in a notice buried on its website that it recently discovered unauthorized access to some customers’ account information, including the data that T-Mobile makes and collects on its customers in order to provide cell service.

From the notice: “Our cybersecurity team recently discovered and shut down malicious, unauthorized access to some information related to your T-Mobile account. We immediately started an investigation, with assistance from leading cybersecurity forensics experts, to determine what happened and what information was involved. We also immediately reported this matter to federal law enforcement and are now in the process of notifying impacted customers.”

Known as customer proprietary network information (CPNI), this data can include call records — such as when a call was made, for how long, the caller’s phone number and the destination phone numbers for each call, and other information that might be found on the customer’s bill.

But the company said that the hackers did not access names, home or email addresses, financial data, and account passwords (or PINs).

The notice didn’t say when T-Mobile detected the breach, only that it was now notifying affected customers.

A spokesperson for T-Mobile did not respond to requests for comment, but told one news site that the breach affects about 0.2% of all T-Mobile customers — or approximately 200,000 customers.

It’s the latest security incident to hit the cell giant in recent years.

In 2018, T-Mobile said as many as two million customers may have had their personal information scraped. A year later, the company confirmed hackers accessed records on another million prepaid customers. Just months into 2020, T-Mobile admitted a breach on its email systems that saw hackers access some T-Mobile employee email accounts, exposing some customer data.

Source: Tech Crunch