IPO
Location-based social networking company, Momo, Inc., will be the latest Chinese technology firm to list on an American publicly traded exchange after filing last Friday with the SEC for a $300 million IPO. When it does, it will trade on Nasdaq under the MOMO ticker symbol, with Morgan Stanley serving as lead underwriter. Chairman, CEO, and one of six co-founders Tang Yan currently owns 39.8% of the company, with other shareholders including Alibaba, Matrix Partners China, and Sequoia Capital. The English version of the Momo app was closed down earlier this year, but the Chinese messaging apps market is ripe, not just because of a growing mobile user base, but because the state recently banned foreign services Viber and Line.
GoPro, the San Mateo, Calif.-based company behind the popular line of mountable video cameras, will hold a secondary public offering before the end of the year to smooth the company’s share price through the expiration of an investor lockup period. Founder and CEO Nick Woodman is expected to unload a number of shares as the company looks to raise $100 million. GoPro has seen its share price more than triple to above $75 since going public in one of the year’s most publicized IPOs.
Six-year old application performance monitoring company New Relic hopes to raise $100 million in its IPO, having filed with the SEC this week. JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley are serving as lead underwriters. Nearly $215 in venture backing has come from Benchmark, Insight Ventures, Fidelity, and Passport Capital, among others.
M&A
AT&T announced late last week that it would be purchasing Iusacell, a Mexican mobile provider with 8.6 million subscribers, for $2.5 billion. The deal includes $800 million of Iusacell’s debt. Iusacell is the third-largest wireless operator in Mexico, but the company has seen its market share slip at the expense of the expansion of market leader Telcel, the Mexican subsidiary of Carlos Slim’s America Movil. AT&T, meanwhile, has not yet received regulatory approval to go through with its $48.5 billion acquisition of DirecTV, which was announced this May.
After weeks of speculation Yahoo confirmed it will pay $640 million in cash to purchase the programmatic video ad platform BrightRoll. CEO Marissa Mayer is hopeful that the acquisition will help Yahoo turn around its struggling ad business. “Video, along with mobile, social, and native, represents a new format of online advertising that has the potential to help us transform and modernize Yahoo’s display business and return it to growth,” she wrote in a blog post published on the Yahoo Tumblr page.
Churchill Downs, the publicly traded owner and operator of the Kentucky Derby, will pay $485 million to acquire Big Fish Games, a Seattle-based mobile game development platform and distribution studio. Performance incentives can reportedly drive the price tag up to $885 million, with $50 million potentially available to Big Fish CEO Paul Thelen based on bookings his company records in the coming years.
It was announced Thursday that Microsoft will pay $200 million to buy Aorato, an Israeli cloud security startup. Aorato, which officially emerged out of stealth mode just earlier year, had received $11 million in venture financing from Accel Partners and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, among others.