— Good things come to those who wait. Australian casino operator Crown Resorts today accepted a $6.3 billion acquisition offer from Blackstone, a development that comes nearly a year after the private equity power first made an offer. Our colleague Jonathan Burgos has a closer look at the deal and last year’s bidding war for Crown, which was complicated by ongoing regulatory investigations into Crown’s finances.
— Virtual events platform Hopin cut 12% of its workforce, saying it had hired more people than it needed to during the early pandemic bump. The startup is backed by investors including General Catalyst and DFJ Growth, the company is currently valued at more than $7.5 billion.
— The state-run Life Insurance Corp. of India filed a prospectus for its coming IPO over the weekend, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that the industry giant hopes to raise $8 billion or more. Based on the terms in the prospectus, that would result in a market cap of some $160 billion. The IPO market went wild in India last year, but many debutantes have traded down significantly since their listings. LIC will hope to buck the trend.
— Eight months after the collapse of plans to take the company public, Bain Capital has agreed to sell Parts Holding Europe to D’leteren Group, resulting in an enterprise valuation of €1.7 billion ($1.9 billion) and an equity valuation of €540 million ($610 million). PHE sells spare parts for light vehicles and trucks, while D’leteren is a Belgian holding company that owns noted notebook-maker Moleskine and a handful of automotive brands.
— The hunt for all things streaming continues. Shares of Audioboom closed up more than 10% in London today in the wake of a Sky News report that Amazon and Spotify are considering competing takeover bids for the podcasting company. The stock surge took Audioboom’s market cap to nearly £306 million ($414 million).
— Papier, a British direct-to-consumer startup that sells stationery, notebooks, diaries, cards and a range of other paper products, inked $50 million in new funding to help fuel its expansion into the U.S. and build on its significant growth during the pandemic. French firm Singular was the lead investor, and Lansdowne Partners, Felix Capital and Beringea were among the other backers.
— A SPAC merger is no longer in the cards for Essentium. The provider of industrial 3D printing services canceled its agreement to combine with Atlantic Coastal Acquisition Corp., a deal announced in December that would have valued Essentium at $974 million. Several SPAC deals have been abandoned in recent weeks thanks to a chill in the stock market and poor performance from many companies that completed blank-check mergers in 2021.
— Apax Partners agreed to buy Alcumus from Inflexion, valuing the provider of tech-powered risk management services at more than £600 million ($811 million). Inflexion said it will generate a 5.9x multiple on the sale of the Welsh company, its largest cash return ever on a deal.
— A pair of former Snapchat engineers are moving into the metaverse. Bud Technologies, led by Risa Feng and Shawn Lin, raised $15 million in Series A extension led by Qiming Venture Partners to keep building out its platform, which allows users to create their own 3D worlds. With so many massive corporations embracing the metaverse, expect venture activity in the space to heat up in 2022.
|