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September 18, 2020 Chime, the start-up that delivers banking services through mobile phones, has closed a fundraising that values the company at $14.5 billion, CNBC has learned exclusively. That lofty figure makes Chime the most valuable American fintech start-up serving retail consumers. Investment firms that participated in its latest round include Coatue, Iconiq, Tiger Global, … Continued

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September 15, 2020 Chamath Palihapitiya pioneered taking private unicorns public by reverse merging them into special purpose acquisition companies — an idea he’s called “IPO 2.0.” After his first iteration of doing so last year with space-tourism company Virgin Galactic, he’s found his next target: Opendoor, an online marketplace for buying and selling houses. “These … Continued

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September 15, 2020 Insiders are making a significant commitment of $200 million of the $600 million PIPE. This $200 million commitment includes $100 million from Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder and CEO of SCH, $58 million from Hedosophia, with the remainder invested by existing Opendoor shareholders, Access Industries and Lennar, along with Opendoor management

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May 14, 2020 Access Industries led the financing, which included participation from Andresseen Horowitz (a16z). In a written statement, Access Industries Managing Director Pueo Keffer said his firm remains “extremely impressed” with DigitalOcean and its management. “[We] believe that both are well positioned to transform the cloud space for developers and SMBs in the years … Continued

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May 14, 2020 DigitalOcean, the cloud for developing modern apps, today announced it has closed a $50 million Series C funding round led by Access Industries, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). “We are excited about this investment to support DigitalOcean as it enters its next phase of significant growth,” said Pueo Keffer, managing director … Continued

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January 6, 2020 The US challenger bank Chime quadrupled its valuation over the past nine months, and investors still offered it about $1.8bn when it decided to raise $500m in December, according to one person with direct knowledge of the process.  “The momentum of the business is very strong,” said David Yang, an investor at … Continued

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December 5, 2019 Chime, the digital bank, now boasts a valuation of $5.8 billion, after raising $500 million in a fresh round of fundraising. Among the leaders in this new crop of mobile and digital-only banks, Chime had a valuation of $1.5 billion back in March when it raised $200 million in funding.

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September 9, 2019 Pinduoduo draws shoppers outside China’s big cities with low-priced goods. It trails only Alibaba in number of users, and has a larger market cap than eBay. Its 366 million monthly active users trail only Alibaba, outranking better-known rivals such as JD.com. Last month, Pinduoduo reported that second-quarter revenue had more than doubled … Continued

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September 5, 2019 Opendoor, the nation’s fastest-growing online real estate marketplace that’s simplifying the way people buy and sell homes, announced today that it has acquired OS National, LLC (OSN), a national title and escrow company that has been one of Opendoor’s trusted partners since 2016. OSN will join Opendoor as a wholly-owned subsidiary.

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July 11, 2019 Opendoor and Redfin, two of the nation’s largest technology-powered real estate companies, today announced home sellers in Phoenix and Atlanta can now request an Opendoor offer through Redfin’s site and mobile apps. By coming together, Opendoor and Redfin are giving homeowners more options for selling their home in a simple and convenient … Continued

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June 19, 2019 Business-to-business (B2B) auto parts trading platform Haoqipei today closed US $60 million in Series D financing to continue its rapid growth across China. Access Technology Ventures led the round, adding David Yang to the Haoqipei Board of Directors. Additional participants in the financing included existing investors XVC Venture Capital, Jeneration Capital, DCM … Continued

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June 19, 2019 Armed with loads of cash and the latest in machine learning, investors are reshaping the $26 trillion market for U.S. residential real estate, starting in Phoenix, the petri dish for America’s housing experiments. At the edge of the city’s stucco sprawl, a beige, three-bedroom house with a gravel yard sold last month … Continued

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March 20, 2019 Last month, we reported that Opendoor — the startup that is taking on the real estate industry with its own platform for buying up homes and selling them on to interested buyers — filed to raise $200 million on a $3.7 billion valuation. Now, we can confirm that the round has closed, … Continued

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January 7, 2019 Chinese business to business (B2B) auto parts trading platform Haoqipei announced today that it has secured a US$60 million series C round of financing led by venture capitalist DCM Ventures and Hong Kong-based investor Jeneration Capital.

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December 12, 2018 Tencent Music Entertainment Group popped in its debut on the public markets Wednesday, closing the day up 9.2 percent at $14.19 per share.

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September 27, 2018 Leading online real estate marketplace has now raised more than $1B in equity and $2B in debt financing to build a technology platform for instant home buying, selling and trading-in

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July 26, 2018 HONG KONG—A three-year-old Chinese internet startup earned a $33 billion market valuation in its trading debut in New York, drawing high investor demand ahead of a string of larger internet IPOs from the country in the coming months.

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July 8, 2018 Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s plan to spin off its online-music business and list shares in the U.S. is the latest sign that the long-beleaguered recording industry is staging a comeback.

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June 20, 2018 Former Citrix CEO Mark Templeton has a new job. He’s taking over as chief of DigitalOcean, a trendy start-up that prioritizes developers and teams as it offers cloud infrastructure for hosting applications.

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June 13, 2018 Shares of Dutch fintech firm and PayPal rival Adyen surged nearly 90 percent on their first day of trade Wednesday in Amsterdam, in what is one of Europe’s biggest technology initial public offerings (IPO) in recent times.

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June 13, 2018 Opendoor, a startup that uses computer algorithms to buy and sell homes, has closed a new fundraising round in a bid to supercharge growth.

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June 7, 2018 SHANGHAI/BEIJING (Reuters) – Ant Financial Services Group, operator of China’s biggest online payment platform, on Friday said it raised around $14 billion in what market watchers called the biggest-ever single fundraising globally by a private company.

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April 23, 2018 Can’t get enough of online music-streaming services’ IPOs? Well, in the wake of Spotify’s offering earlier this month, another one is probably on the way: that of Chinese rival Tencent Music.

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April 4, 2018 WHEN Spotify, a music-streaming service, went public on April 3rd, its founder, Daniel Ek, rang no bells on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Rather than the “pomp and circumstance” of an initial public offering, the Swedish firm, which is widely credited with turning round the fortunes of the … Continued

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April 2, 2018 Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is buying full control of the startup Ele.me as it steps up efforts to expand in China’s fast-growing market for local delivery of food and other services.

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March 19, 2018 Alibaba is increasing its control of Lazada, its e-commerce marketplace in Southeast Asia it acquired control of in 2016, after it injected another $2 billion into the business and replaced its CEO with a long-standing Alibaba executive.

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March 12, 2018 Spotify has finally filed to go public, and in doing so the Swedish company has shed light on another huge music company that has been tipped for IPO — Tencent Music — which is now valued at over $12 billion.

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February 28, 2018 Spotify has already won over the music industry, and listeners worldwide, with an online streaming service that makes millions of songs instantly available. Now, it is ready to test its business model on Wall Street.

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January 26, 2018 Lennar Corp. builds homes with 2-by-4s and nail guns. Opendoor uses computer algorithms to buy and sell them. For the past year, the companies have been testing a way to make it easier for Lennar’s customers to offload their houses and trade up to new ones.  

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January 24, 2018 Funds will help expand Opendoor footprint and “trade-in” partnership with Lennar.  A San Francisco-based startup that helps people sell their old homes and simultaneously moves into new ones is partnering with Miami-based homebuilder Lennar Corp., and amassing real estate funding to more than double its footprint nationwide this year.

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October 17, 2017 Opendoor, which is working to upend the way that Americans buy and sell homes, is buying homes at a rate of $1.3 billion a year as it plans expansion to new cities and competition heats up. “That really shows that people are not only willing to sell their homes online, but they love … Continued

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October 17, 2017 Opendoor, a San Francisco-based startup launched three years ago to buy and sell homes online, says that it a $1.3 billion annual purchase rate.

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October 13, 2017 DigitalOcean is a cloud computing startup based in New York, competing with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure by focusing on smaller developers and startups. The company exclusively reveals to BI that it’s on a $175 million annualized run rate (ARR) for 2017.

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August 9, 2017 NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Access Technology Ventures, the venture capital and growth technology investment arm of privately held industrial group Access Industries, today announced its leading $100 million investment in the $300 million funding of Essential Products Inc., the smartphone maker founded by Andy Rubin, the creator of Android.

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June 16, 2017 Amazon agreed to buy the upscale grocery chain Whole Foods for $13.4 billion, in a deal that will instantly transform the company that pioneered online shopping into a merchant with physical outposts in hundreds of neighborhoods across the country.

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April 14, 2017 In January, Alibaba announced a bid to privatize Intime Retail, a leading Chinese department store and mall operator. The proposed privatization did not come as a surprise, as it is consistent with Alibaba’s strategic goal of enhancing its integration with physical stores and developing its “New Retail” concept.

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April 6, 2017 With a licensing deal with Universal Music under its belt — and negotiations said to be ongoing with the two remaining majors — Spotify is reportedly ready to take the plunge and go public, with a twist.

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March 29, 2017 NBCUniversal has reached an advertising deal with Snap for the Winter Olympics that could be worth $50 million to $75 million, sources told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

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March 28, 2017 Hurdles to late-stage deals have begun to clear

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February 2, 2017 Snap Inc. lifted the veil on its highly anticipated initial public offering, revealing a business that is growing at a torrid clip but that also faces challenges keeping users engaged, attracting new ones—and justifying a valuation that could reach $25 billion.

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January 18, 2017 Attractiveness of publicly traded tech stocks led to drop in venture capital fundraising.

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December 20, 2016 DigitalOcean, the cloud for developers, today announced it has been selected as one of the 100 most exciting startups in New York City.

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November 30, 2016 Silicon Valley’s club of unicorn startups hasn’t been growing as fast as it once was, and its newest member is unlike most of is venture-backed peers.

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November 30, 2016 Snap Inc., the parent company of the popular photo-messaging and storytelling app Snapchat, is having a productive autumn. A couple of weeks ago, Snap filed confidential documents for a coming stock offering that could value the firm at $30 billion, which would make it one of the largest initial public offerings in … Continued

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October 14, 2016 The U.K. arm of Spotify bounced back into profitability last year, fueled by strong growth in subscription sales. According to the company’s latest set of financial results, which cover the year 2015, total revenues climbed to £187 million ($228 million), up from £159 million ($194 million) the previous year.

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