IPO
Four of the six underwriters of the Alibaba IPO now have even more skin in the game. In a move rarely made by investment banks, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley have extended a $3 billion loan to the Chinese e-commerce giant in anticipation of its mid-September IPO. According to the Wall Street Journal, the loan will be used “for working capital and general corporate purposes.” Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, the IPO’s other lead bookrunners, did not participate. This is not Alibaba’s first multi-billion dollar loan commitment. Last year the company took out an $8 billion loan from 20 banks in order to raise more cash and refinance existing debt.
HubSpot, a developer of software for inbound marketing campaigns, declared its intentions to list publicly on Monday through an SEC filing. The eight year old, 700-person company with MIT founders hopes to raise as much as $100 million after posting a $34 million loss last year. HubSpot has over 10,000 customers in 65 countries, and is backed by General Catalyst Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Sequoia, and Google Ventures, among others. When it does goes public, it will likely do so alongside fellow Boston startup Wayfair, an e-commerce platform for home products that filed for its own IPO on August 15th.
M&A
It turns out that Amazon, not Google, will buy Twitch, the video streaming service with over 50 million active monthly users who use it to broadcast, watch, and chat about video games. Bloomberg reports that Amazon will pay $970 million in cash, although other incentives will likely push the final total to $1.1 billion. Twitch was launched in June 2011 as a spin off of fellow streaming website Justin.tv. The video game market isn’t a new one for Amazon. The company’s in-house video game development department, Amazon Games Studio, launched its first product in 2012. Whether it will be a profitable one remains to be seen.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress, announced Tuesday that it has acquired BruteProtect to enhance its security offerings. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The BruteProtect WordPress plug-in was already being used by 110,000 sites, but as a result of the acquisition, its premium service will now be available for free to all WordPress customers. WordPress is the web’s most popular publishing platform, powering over 75 million sites including The New Yorker, Fortune, and Red Herring.