Business

This is the web version of Term Sheet, a daily newsletter on the biggest deals and dealmakers. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox. 

IPO investors seem to think they’ve found a true match with dating app company Bumble.

The company behind Badoo and the Bumble app raised $2.2 billion in an offering of 50 million shares priced at $43, more shares sold at a higher price than previously anticipated.

Last valued at about $3 billion when Blackstone acquired the business in 2019, it is now valued at about $8.2 billion.

As we all wait for the inevitable fury around the IPO pop or radio silence should shares fall in its first day of trading, here’s the skinny on Bumble’s financial picture:

• The dating app that lets women make the first move posted revenue of about $416.6 million for the first nine months of 2020, surpassing

Match Group (Nasdaq: MTCH), the company that owns dating app Tinder, agreed to acquire Hyperconnect, a South Korean maker of apps aimed at forming friendships, for no small amount: about $1.7 billion in cash and stock for the owner of the Azar and Hakuna Live apps.

“Coronavirus is accelerating existing digital trends” may be a phrase that has become overused at this point—but it still holds water. And there’s perhaps no better proof than this. The effects of loneliness became front and center in the isolating nature of the pandemic. The deal allows Match to expand beyond romantic liaisons and into platonic ones, and also grow in different geographic regions.

“With more than 75% of usage and revenue coming from markets spread across Asia, their product suite and regional footprint squarely complements our own,”  Match Chief Executive Officer Shar Dubey said of Hyperconnect.

The deal also points to a … Read the rest

A friend of mine remarked the other day, wearing a pained expression, that he wished he had bought Dogecoin.

“What? Why?” I asked, struggling to mask my incredulity.

“Because the price has gone up so much. It’s up, like, 1,000% recently,” he said. “Elon Musk is endorsing it.” (Dogecoin’s price has surged 1,600% since the start of the year, as of the time of this newsletter’s writing.)

“Musk isn’t actually endorsing Dogecoin,” I replied in horror. So the mantle of buzzkill had been thrust upon me. “It’s a meme, like a literal joke. It’s funny.”

It was at that moment I realized some people are not in on the joke. Or, they don’t care that it’s a joke and they just want to join the party and make money? Reluctantly, I began my lecture about the inflationary economics of the Dogecoin money supply. Ten thousand new Dogecoins are … Read the rest

A naive part of me hoped for a slow start to Monday. This was not my day .

Let’s kick off the week with a highly debated topic: the move by some venture capitalists to Florida and Texas.

Founders Fund, the venture capital firm founded in part by Peter Thiel, has rented out space in Miami for a new office.

The firm, which has invested in the likes of Airbnb, signed a one-year lease at a space with 2,073 square feet in the city. Joining the outspoken number of investors frustrated by San Francisco’s government, Founders Fund General Partner Keith Rabois recently announced his move to the city in November and acquired a home in the area.

On Twitter, Rabois has been highly vocal about his bullishness towards the city: “It has been easier to recruit people to join our new startup in Miami than to persuade … Read the rest

This is an installment of Startup Year One, a special series of interviews with founders about the major lessons they have learned in the immediate aftermath of their businesses’ first year of operation.

Nydia Shipman and Sarah Renahan started the Worthy Company in 2018. As new moms, they were seeking a better eating experience that delivered plant-based nutrition in a portable format and at a reasonable price.

Their solution: the Worthy Bowl, a plant-based, fruit-forward, travel-friendly bowl made with superfood ingredients. And the Chicago-based, B Corp–certified company just finished launching the reformulated flavors last month.

Fortune recently spoke with cofounders Shipman and Renahan to learn more about their insights and predictions for their business and the plant-based food industry after a year in which grocery shopping was completely upended.

The following interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Fortune: Could … Read the rest

The pandemic forced another 275,000 women out of the U.S. labor force in January, worsening the catastrophic employment crisis for working women.

Women accounted for almost 80% of U.S. adults who stopped working or looking for work last month, according to an analysis of Friday’s jobs report by the National Women’s Law Center. More than 2.3 million women have now left the labor force since last February. (The pandemic has had a lesser impact on men, even though they outnumber women in the U.S. labor force; nearly 1.8 million men have stopped working or looking for work since February 2020, according to the NWLC.)

Working women have now lost more than three decades of labor force gains in less than a year, as we report in the new issue of Fortune. The ongoing employment crisis, which is closely aligned with a widespread caregiving crisis, has especially hurt … Read the rest

This is the web version of Term Sheet, a daily newsletter on the biggest deals and dealmakers. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox. 

It’s the special purpose acquisition craze meeting the GameStop insanity.

On Thursday, Hindenburg Research, the short-selling firm known for flagging issues with electric car company Nikola last year, released a report targeting Chamath Palihapitiya-backed Clover Health and called it a “broken business.”

The insurance startup agreed to go public via merger with Palihapitiya’s Social Capital Hedosophia III in October. “This is one of the most straightforward investments I’ve ever made,” Palihapitiya said at the time of the announcement.

But on Thursday, Hindenburg Research’s report argued Clover Health was not so straightforward: Among other issues, the short-activist group accused the company of fueling sales using misleading marketing to elderly people and alleged that Clover did not disclose a Department of Justice investigation … Read the rest

Peloton was a risky bet even among venture capitalists.

At its core, the company sells a piece of hardware with virtual cycling lessons, a model skeptics say is easily copyable. They aren’t wrong: As Peloton has grown in the pandemic, so have its rivals including NordicTrack and fitness equipment maker Nautilus.

Despite the naysayers, Peloton has managed to soar in the past year, posting profits and ever-growing revenue in recent quarters even while struggling to produce quickly enough to match demand. No doubt its ability to create an obsessed community has been much of its secret sauce to success.

But does the valuation match the hype? The bottom line remains, as my colleague Robert Hackett notes in the magazine: “The math of Peloton’s valuation—it has a market capitalization of $46 billion—is difficult to justify unless one believes the company will become a tech-media titan. Jay Hoag, a venture capitalist … Read the rest

For all the angst and bickering brought about by the market moves of the past week—longs vs. shorts! hedge funds vs. retail investors! Robinhood vs….Congress!?—I am left with one overwhelming feeling: bullish.

After all, consider what made the GameStop short squeeze possible in the first place. Namely, so many individuals had so much money in their pockets that they were willing to employ what’s known as the you-only-live-once investing strategy, as in, “YOLOing entire ROTH IRA balance into GME,” in the words of one Redditor.

Remember the bear market of 2020 that lasted all of a couple weeks? Me neither. But it seems like it was enough of a reset that, after years of worry that the post-2008 bull market was wearing on too long, investors seem to think this new bull is just warming up.

You’ve heard of the K-shaped recovery, … Read the rest

Imagine the life of an advertising executive and a scene from Mad Men is likely to come to mind: Don Draper snake-charming a pair of Kodak marketing executives with a perfectly crafted pitch about the emotional pull of nostalgia (“It’s delicate, but potent…”) in order to win the account for their new slide projector. “This device isn’t a spaceship,” Draper tells the entranced Kodak men of their slide carousel in one famous pitch from the television show. “It’s a time machine.”

Well, it turns out, those days have mostly gone the way of three-martini lunches, skinny ties, smoking in the office, and widely-tolerated workplace sexual harassment. In the digital era, instead of a high-stakes, high-wire act focused on high concepts, advertising has largely been reduced to a volume game. Marketing departments or creative agencies have to churn out dozens or hundreds of variations of digital ads for Facebook, Instagram, … Read the rest