IPO
Ant Financial, a financial services operation controlled by Alibaba executives, plans to go public on China’s stock exchange within the next two years, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company presides over Alipay, a payments service that executes 80 million transactions a day, including many of those made through Alibaba.
The popular Internet domain registrar GoDaddy updated its registration with the SEC to reflect more details about its upcoming IPO. The company will list on the NYSE and trade under the GDDY ticker when it does eventually go public. The company’s main shareholders include Silver Lake and KKR.
M&A
Just days after Q1 revenue fell flat, in part because of a sharp decline in the performance of its Networking division, Hewlett-Packard is reportedly close to acquiring Aruba Networks, a publicly traded maker of hardware and software products that are used to construct Wi-Fi networks. While neither side is commenting at the moment, Aruba shares jumped 21% on Wednesday to give the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company a market value of around $2.4 billion.
Newly public Box has acquired Airpost, a tool for IT professionals to monitor the security of cloud applications used by other employees. The Airpost service will be shut down on March 1st, with terms of the deal currently undisclosed. “Box is at the forefront of secure content collaboration in the enterprise,” read a statement on the Airpost website, “and we share a common vision for bringing user-driven products that increase productivity securely to the enterprise.”
Apple has snatched up Camel Audio, a U.K.-based developer of audio software. Apple’s current music production suite includes GarageBand and the more sophisticated Logic Pro offering.
Toro, a way for app developers to promote their products on Facebook, has been acquired by Google for an undisclosed amount. Co-founders Amitt Mahajan and Joel Poloney previously sold MyMiniLife, which went on to get acquired by Zynga.
Fast-growing cloud communications company Twilio has acquired Authy, a Y Combinator incubated startup working on two-factor authentication solutions. The Authy API is used by websites like Coinbase and CloudFlare to protect the identity of their users.