Tag: special-purpose acquisition company
Digital lending platform Blend valued at over $4B in its public debut
Mortgages may not be considered sexy, but they are a big business. If you’ve refinanced or purchased a home digitally lately, you may not have noticed the company powering the software behind it — but there’s a good chance that company is Blend. Founded in 2012, the startup has steadily…
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Extra Crunch roundup: NS1 EC-1, Pakistan’s tech ecosystem, SPACs bonanza
Did you see the viral videos of yesterday’s flooding in New York City subways? In one, riders waded through brown, waist-deep water; another video showed a cascade rushing down a flight of stairs to a subway platform where passengers waited for a train. Infrastructure doesn’t attract much attention until it…
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Extra Crunch roundup: Unpacking BuzzFeed’s SPAC, curb your meeting enthusiasm, more
Meetings should have a clear purpose, but instead, they’ve become a way to measure status and reinforce what is colloquially referred to as CYA culture. There’s a kernel of truth in every joke, so whenever someone quips, “This meeting could have been an email!” you can bet that some small…
Read MoreExtra Crunch roundup: Selling SaaS to developers, cracking YC after 13 tries, all about Expensify
Before Twilio had a market cap approaching $56 billion and more than 200,000 customers, the cloud-communications platform developed a secret sauce to fuel its growth: a developer-focused model that dispensed with traditional marketing rules. Software companies that sell directly to end users share a simple framework for managing growth that…
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Why SPACs aren’t targeting African startups
One. That’s the number of African tech companies that have gone public on the NYSE in the last 10 years. Two, if you’re counting local exchanges. The former is African-focused e-commerce company Jumia and the latter is Egyptian fintech company Fawry. As a tech company, Fawry’s listing on the Egyptian…
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Bird reportedly prepares to go public via SPAC, aims for 2023 profitability
Micromobility startups are following the lead of EV companies going public via mergers with special purpose acquisition companies, a financial instrument that came back en vogue in 2020. Bird Rides, the California-born micromobility company that now operates in more than 100 cities across the United States, Europe and the Middle…
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