With a market cap of $2 billion, Lemonade had traded at about eight times its annual sales. Most traditional insurers, like Allstate and Travelers, trade at around one multiple of the year’s sales. The price-to-sales ratio for Lemonade is seemingly reasonable relative to its growth expectations. Since it went public a couple of years ago,…
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2021 has been momentous for deals. From AT&T’s media businesses merger with Discovery, Kansas City Southern railroad’s takeover and Square acquiring BNPL company Afterpay, global deals are on a roll. Transactions are expected to top $5 trillion this year. All this, while the pandemic is rising again, the global economy is still flaky, and developed…
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When Kleiner Perkins led Stord’s $12.4 million Series A in 2019, its founders were in their early 20s and so passionate about their startup that they each dropped out of their respective schools to focus on growing the business. Fast-forward two years and Stord — an Atlanta-based company that has developed a cloud supply chain —…
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Last year at this time, SpotOn was on the brink of announcing a $60 million Series C funding round at a $625 million valuation. Fast forward to almost exactly one year later, and a lot has changed for the payments and software startup. Today, SpotOn said it has closed on $300 million in Series E…
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Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in insurance are thriving on the back of macro factors – low interest rates, pandemic-related impacts and deepening specialization. For instance, in life and annuities, equity and reinsurance deals are far from abating, with price competition among reinsurers creating a seller’s market. The rush to add digital capabilities in response to…
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Medal.tv, a short-form video clipping service and social network for gamers, is entering the live streaming market with the acquisition of Rawa.tv, a Twitch rival based in Dubai, which had raised around $1 million to date. The seven-figure, all cash deal will see two of Rawa’s founders, Raya Dadah and Phil Jammal, now joining Medal…
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Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone.…
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As firework volleys launched out of New York City harbor last night, a very different celebration was likely taking place just a few blocks down the street at Verizon’s official headquarters in Midtown. The telco, which owns TechCrunch for hopefully just a few more weeks pending the close of the Apollo acquisition of our parent…
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Once heralded as disruptive marketplaces, classifieds are giving way to transactional marketplaces. Yet, some classifieds in the West like eBay have evolved with time, acquiring competition operating both models. In Africa, this occurrence is happening in part, at least for the classifieds businesses that haven’t fizzled out. Jiji, one of the largest marketplaces for classifieds…
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On-demand goods, food and alcohol delivery service Gopuff has acquired fleet management platform rideOS for $115 million, sources familiar with the deal say. This acquisition comes just a few months after the Philadelphia-based startup announced a $1.15 billion funding round at a $8.9 billion valuation, up from $3.9 billion in October. Last fall, the company…
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