Taxi medallions at risk. Pokémon Go revenue. Apple's quarterly results.
Hola,
So Snap’s numbers came out, and its 160M or so daily active users make it biggish, but not the colossus Facebook already was at the time of its IPO. In fact, at the time, Facebook was about 3x bigger in DAU terms, and was growing those users about as quickly as Snapchat, ~48% a year.
Anyway, as we detail in our post on the IPO, Snap’s likely $20B to $25B valuation does not look crazy. We also look at comps like price-to-user and price-to-sales.
What is also not that pricey? Evan Spiegel’s security detail. A lot of people have pointed out that $900K seems absurd, even if he is engaged to supermodel Miranda Kerr. But it’s not too out of whack with what is being paid for keeping other tech CEOs safe from pie throwers, the criminally deranged, and would-be kidnappers. To be honest if there’s any takeaway here, it’d be that if I was at Apple ($675B market cap) I might recommend they spend a little more.
48%: Snapchat grew its daily active user base by 48% year-over-year to 158M average DAUs in Q4’16, according to its pre-IPO filing this week. For context, Facebook also grew its daily active users by 48% between Q4’10 and Q4’11 when it reached 483 million DAUs, ahead of its May 2012 IPO. Once concern though is Snapchat’s slowed quarterly DAU growth, which was 3.2% in Q4’16, compared to 7% in Q3’16.
$109.9B: The aggregate of Snap’s potential IPO valuation (at the high-end) and the latest private market valuations of WeWork and Uber. All three mega-unicorns originated from Benchmark’s remarkable 2011 fund. Benchmark led both Snap and Uber’s Series A rounds.
$7.2B: Apple reported quarterly results this week and reported $7.17B in revenue from “services,” which includes digital content and media sales, as well as subscriptions like Apple Music and iCloud. That’s more revenue than the company generates from iPad sales, and close to surpassing the $7.44B generated by the Mac line.
18: There were 18 $1B+ tech exits in 2016 including The Dollar Shave Club, Cruise Automation, and Jet, among several others. That’s up over 2015 which saw just 12 tech exits of $1B+. For more M&A and IPO trends, download our 2016 Global Tech Exits report.
23: We updated our research on unicorn hunters. Sequoia Capital remains high on the list as the most active investor in unicorns, but it is now tied for the top spot with two other investors: New York City-based Tiger Global Management and SV Angel. All three investors have 23 unicorns currently in their portfolio.
$3M: AR/VR data visualization company Virtualitics raised a $3M Angel round this past week. Collectively, augmented and virtual reality startups saw $1.8B across 2016, according to our recent AR/VR research. The spike translates to 140% growth over 2015, making it the largest year ever for funding to the space.
81%: Around 81% of the $690M in loans from Capital One for taxi medallions are at risk of default, according to Bloomberg. As ride-hailing apps become increasingly popular, taxi owners are facing the pressures of increased competition. Some medallion prices in top markets, reportedly traded for more than $1M in 2014, are now worth half that amount. We previously looked into the investors in the top 5 ride-hailing companies.
1.75M. Tinder has over 1.75M paying subscribers and $175M in revenue, according to this report, a notable success for what some assumed would be a tough subscription service to sell.
175M: Toutiao, a Buzzfeed-like Chinese news site with ~175 million monthly users, acquired Los Angeles-based app Flipagram for an undisclosed amount this week. Flipagram allowed users to make slideshows based on their videos and photos. The acquisition was reportedly brokered by Sequoia Capital, which backed Flipagram and Toutiao.
$7.25M: Comparably — an HR tech startup that provides salary comparison tools — raised a $7.25M Series B round from investors including Greycroft Partners, Lowercase Capital, Comcast Ventures, and Upfront Ventures. The company joins over 125 HR tech startups helping companies manage HR processes, from recruitment to career development to benefits management, and more.
$152M: Hometrack, a residential property data analytics firm, was acquired by publicly traded British property website Zoopla for $152M. The amount beats Zoopla’s previous acquisition of UK-based Property Software Group for $108M, one of the more notable real estate tech exits of 2016.
$8.90: Japan-based Line Corporation launched Line Works, a workplace chat app that’s a challenger to Slack, in the hopes of reducing the amount of users it has been losing (~3 million in the final quarter of last year). Subscriptions range from $2.70 to $8.90 per month. Line Corporation was previously highlighted in our research for its $6.9B IPO in 2016. Microsoft released its own would-be Slack killer in late 2016.
$1B: Pokémon Go has grossed more than $1B since its launch, according to the latest reporting. The game was released in July and had previously grossed more than $18M in one day. The amount has leveled off since, reaching $1.5M to $2.5M in recent days.
