IPO
It was another light week in tech-related IPO activity. Perhaps the biggest news was that the peer-to-peer loan platform Lending Club will list on the New York Stock Exchange when it goes public before the end of the year. The seven year old company hopes to raise $500 million and has been working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup in anticipation of its entry into the public market. Lending Club rose to prominence while the big banks who are now leading its underwriting were embroiled in the subprime mortgage crisis. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack both sit on the Lending Club board.
M&A
Good Technology Corp., a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based mobile security solutions company that has spent the past few months preparing for an IPO, announced Tuesday it would acquire Macheen Inc., an enterprise mobile application company with nearly $35 million in venture funding. Deal terms were not disclosed. Macheen, based in Austin, Tx., was founded in 2010 and was backed by Mercury Fund, North Bridge Venture Partners, among others.
EMC has been in the news recently for a proposed merger with HP, its acquisition of Cloudscaling, and pressure from activist (“vulture” in Argentina) hedge fund Elliott Management to spin off its VMWare business. The company announced this week that it would be assuming control of a joint venture known as VCE (for Virtual Computing Environment) that also involves Cisco and Intel. By buying an additional 25% stake in the entity, and reducing Cisco’s interest from 35% to 10%, EMC will now be able to report VCE’s revenues and expenses in its own income statement. The Wall Street Journal reported that there were around $500 million in orders for VCE products during its third quarter. Still, EMC expects the presence of VCE on its P&L to dilute the company’s overall earnings during 2015.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer appears ready to lead another acquisition, this time for a programmatic video advertising company called BrightRoll. Early in the week TechCrunch put the price tag in the $700 million range, but news has died down since then. The San Francisco-based BrightRoll works with traditional advertisers as well as ad technology companies, and has raised over $40 million from investors like Adams Street Partners, True Ventures, Scale Ventures since being founded in 2006.