Ideaforge

Lucid Motors has designed the battery packs in its luxury electric vehicle for two lives. The company, which is already experimenting with energy storage systems for commercial and residential customers, is also eyeing ways to repurpose batteries from its electric vehicles.

While Lucid is still years from having to contend with a large number of used batteries —  its first EV, the luxury Lucid Air sedan, isn’t coming to market until the second half of 2021 — the company is already planning how to give them a second life them in a yet-to-be-launched energy storage business.

The battery-cell modules that power Lucid’s vehicles are identical to the ones that will be used for energy storage, making them well-suited for “second-life” purposes, according to the company. The company has already constructed a prototype of a 300-kilowatt hour stationary battery storage system at its engineering lab, Lucid’s Chief Engineer and Senior VP of Product Eric Bach told TechCrunch. The batteries in that system are new, but there is “no technical limitation” that would prevent Lucid from swapping them out with used batteries, Bach said. While Lucid CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson has previously discussed plans to eventually build energy storage systems like Tesla that uses new batteries, this is the first time the company has talked about second-life applications for the product. 

Batteries typically retain a charging capacity of around 70% once they’re removed from EVs, which means they potentially have another decade of useful life. Automakers like General Motors, Ford Motor, and Audi AG have already initiated second-life pilot projects aimed at extracting that remaining value. 

Bach explained the company will likely retrieve batteries used in Lucid EVs after they reach the end of their useful life through its dedicated service centers or when customers trade in their vehicles. Once batteries are returned to Lucid, the company would need to harvest the modules from the packs and run a quality check on them. Lucid’s vehicles have built-in sensors that provide data on each of its cars from the battery packs down to the module level, Bach said, which will come in handy when determining the health of each module. After physical testing, the modules could be ready to be placed in an outgoing product. 

Storage systems do contain some additional components. In a home system, that may include a DC-to-AC inverter, a cooling system and safety switches. The actual battery will remain consistent across Lucid’s products.   

Lucid hasn’t determined how it will distribute the second-life batteries between home and industrial applications.

“Personally, I feel in an industrial application, using these [second-life] modules would be more appropriate and easier because there, the key metric is really just dollars per kilowatt hour,” Bach said.

In instances where a Lucid vehicle ends up at a car dismantler, Bach suggested there may be an opportunity to incentivize the dismantler to feed the battery packs back to the company. Even if that doesn’t happen, as the price of EV battery raw materials continues to rise, dismantlers will likely make their own business of selling battery packs to companies or recyclers. 

At this point – with no product yet on the market and with an expectation that it will be low- to mid-volume – Lucid has not started branching out into recycling materials itself, he said. For the moment, Lucid is leaving recycling operations to its battery cell suppliers, like South Korea-based LG Chem.

“But in the long run, I mean, we’re just at the start of our journey [. . .] and I can envision that in multiple years we will look into cell manufacturing ourselves as well as the full value chain for everything that’s needed to make the applicable energy storage devices,” Bach said. “So in the future, absolutely it makes a lot of sense as the volume goes up, you need to try to contain more of the supply chain and that goes back into a sustainable method of harvesting the raw materials.”

Bach said the company is laser-focused on the Lucid Air and the public may be a few years out from seeing a Lucid home battery system. Until then, the Lucid Air will come equipped with bidirectional charging capabilities, meaning the customer will be able to feed the power from her car into her house. 

“Essentially, that is the first home battery system that we will have already,” Bach said.

It’s unclear what resources — in terms of people and capital — Lucid is putting towards an energy storage business. Such details are likely to remain scant until after the company officially becomes a publicly traded company. In March, Lucid Motors announced it had reached an agreement to become a publicly traded company through a merger with special-purpose acquisition company Churchill Capital IV Corp., in what was considered the largest deal yet between a blank-check company and an electric vehicle startup.

The combined company, in which Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund will continue to be the largest shareholder, will have a transaction equity value of $11.75 billion. Private investment in the public equity deal is priced at $15 a share, putting the implied pro-forma equity value at $24 billion.

The funding will be used to bring the Lucid Air and an SUV to market as well as to expand its factory in Arizona, Lucid CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson previously told TechCrunch. The company plans to expand the factory over another three phases in the coming years to have the capacity to produce 365,000 units per year at scale. The initial phase of the $700 million factory was completed late last year and will have the capacity to produce 30,000 vehicles a year.

Source: Tech Crunch

Individual solutions to the collective crisis of climate change abound: backup diesel generators, Tesla powerwalls, “prepper” shelters. However, the infrastructure that our modern civilization relies on is interconnected and interdependent — energy, transportation, food, water and waste systems are all vulnerable in climate-driven emergencies. No one solution alone and in isolation will be the salvation to our energy infrastructure crisis.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the California wildfires last year, and the recent deep freeze in Texas, the majority of the American public has not only realized how vulnerable infrastructure is, but also how critical it is to properly regulate it and invest in its resilience.

What is needed now is a mindset shift in how we think about infrastructure. Specifically, how we price risk, how we value maintenance, and how we make policy that is aligned with our climate reality. The extreme cold weather in Texas wreaked havoc on electric and gas infrastructure that was not prepared for unusually cold weather events. If we continue to operate without an urgent (bipartisan?) investment in infrastructure, especially as extreme weather becomes the norm, this tragic trend will only continue (with frontline communities bearing a disproportionately high burden).

A month after Texas’ record-breaking storm, attention is rightly focused on helping the millions of residents putting their lives back together. But as we look toward the near-term future and get a better picture of the electric mobility tipping point on the horizon, past-due action to reform our nation’s energy infrastructure and utilities must take precedence.

Emphasize energy storage

Seventy-five percent of Texas’ electricity is generated from fossil fuels and uranium, and about 80% of the power outages in Texas were caused by these systems. The state and the U.S. are overly dependent on outdated energy generation, transmission and distribution technologies. As the price of energy storage is expected to drop to $75/kWh by 2030, more emphasis needs to be placed on “demand-side management” and distributed energy resources that support the grid, rather than trying to supplant it. By pooling and aggregating small-scale clean energy generation sources and customer-sited storage, 2021 can be the year that “virtual power plants” realize their full potential.

Policymakers would do well to mandate new incentives and rebates to support new and emerging distributed energy resources installed on the customers’ side of the utility meter, such as California’s Self-Generation Incentive Program.

Invest in workforce development

For the energy transition to succeed, workforce development will need to be a central component. As we shift from coal, oil and gas to clean energy sources, businesses and governments — from the federal to the city level — should invest in retraining workers into well-paying jobs across emerging verticals, like solar, electric vehicles and battery storage. In energy efficiency (the lowest-hanging fruit of the energy transition), cities should seize the opportunity to tie equity-based workforce development programs to real estate energy benchmarking requirements.

These policies will not only boost the efficiency of our energy systems and the viability of our aging building stock, creating a more productive economy but will also lead to job growth and expertise in a growth industry of the 21st century. According to analysis from Rewiring America, an aggressive national commitment to decarbonization could yield 25 million good-paying jobs over the next 15 years.

Build microgrids for reliability

Microgrids can connect and disconnect from the grid. By operating on normal “blue-sky” operating days as well as during emergencies, microgrids provide uninterrupted power when the grid goes down — and reduce grid constraints and energy costs when grid-connected. Previously the sole domain of military bases and universities, microgrids are growing 15% annually, reaching an $18 billion market in the U.S. by 2022.

For grid resiliency and reliable power supply, there is no better solution than community-scale microgrids that connect critical infrastructure facilities with nearby residential and commercial loads. Funding feasibility studies and audit-grade designs — so that communities have zero-cost but high-quality pathways to constructable projects, as New York State did with the NY Prize initiative — is a proven way to involve communities in their energy planning and engage the private sector in building low-carbon resilient energy systems.

Unpredictability and complexity are quickening, and technology has its place, but not simply as an individual safeguard or false security blanket. Instead, technology should be used to better calculate risk, increase system resilience, improve infrastructure durability, and strengthen the bonds between people in a community both during and in between emergencies.

Source: Tech Crunch

Multi-asset investing and trading platform and Robinhood competitor eToro announced Tuesday it will go public via a merger with SPAC FinTech Acquisition Corp. V in a massive $10.4 billion deal.

Once the transaction closes sometime in the third quarter, the combined company will operate as eToro Group Ltd. and is expected to be listed on the Nasdaq exchange.

The 14-year-old Israeli company was founded on a “vision of opening up capital markets.” It launched its platform in the U.S. just over two years ago and has seen rapid growth as of late. Last year, eToro said it added over 5 million new registered users and generated gross revenues of $605 million, representing 147% year over year growth. In January alone, the company added over 1.2 million new registered users and executed more than 75 million trades on its platform. That compares to 2019 when monthly registrations averaged 192,000 and 2020, when they grew to 440,000.

eToro said its platform is capitalizing on a number of secular trends such as the rise of digital wealth platforms, growing retail participation and mainstream crypto adoption. The company no doubt benefitted from the recent rise in retail investment interest, and in consumer investment apps and services specifically, which resulted from the so-called ‘meme stock’ activity that began with Redditors trading GameStop stock in order to frustrate institutional short-sellers.

The platform, which spans “social” stock trading and cryptocurrency exchange, in November 2019 acquired Delta, the crypto portfolio tracker app. eToro claims to be one of the first regulated platforms to offer cryptoassets. Its platform is regulated in the U.K., Europe, Australia, the U.S. and Gibraltar.

The transaction includes commitments for a $650 million common share private placement from leading investors including ION Investment Group, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Third Point LLC, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC and Wellington Management. The overall $10.4 billion implied equity value of the merger arrangement includes an implied enterprise value for eToro of $9.6 billion.

eToro currently has over 20 million registered users across 100 countries, and its social community is rapidly expanding due to the growth of its total addressable market, supported in part by secular trends such as the growth of digital wealth platforms and the rise in retail participation.

It expects to receivedapproval from FINRA for a broker dealer license, with plans to launch stocks in the U.S. in the second half of 2021. In a written statement, FinTech V chairman Betsy Cohen said that its sponsor platform Fintech Masala seeks out companies “with outsized growth, effective controls and excellent management teams.”

“eToro meets all three of these criteria,” she added. “In the last few years, eToro has solidified its position as the leading online social trading platform outside the U.S., outlined its plans for the U.S. market, and diversified its income streams. It is now at an inflection point of growth, and we believe eToro is exceptionally positioned to capitalize on this opportunity.”

Source: Tech Crunch

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital adoption in a way that no one could have ever anticipated, and as more people conduct more services online and via mobile devices, businesses have had to work even harder to validate users and security. One company working to serve that need, Socure — which uses AI and machine learning to verify identities — announced Tuesday that it has raised $100 million in a Series D funding round at a $1.3 billion valuation.

Given how much of our lives have shifted online, it’s no surprise that the U.S. digital identity market is projected to increase to over $30 billion by 2023 from just under $15 billion in 2019, according to One World Identity. This has led to skyrocketing demand for the services provided by identity verification companies. 

The founding team set out on a mission to be able to verify 100% of “good IDs” in real-time while “completely eliminating” identity fraud across the internet.

Historically, Socure has been focused on the financial services industry, but it plans to use its new capital to further expand into “every consumer-facing vertical” including online gaming, healthcare, telco, e-commerce and on-demand services.

The startup’s predictive analytics platform applies artificial intelligence and machine-learning techniques with online/offline data intelligence (from email, phone, address, IP, device, velocity and the broader internet) to verify that people are, in fact, who they say they are when applying for various accounts.

Today, Socure has more than 350 customers including three top five banks, six top 10 card issuers, a “top” credit bureau and over 75 fintechs such as Varo Money, Public, Chime and Stash.

In 2020, Socure grew its customer base by over 85% year over year and expanded its workforce by over 50% to about 240 people today.

Accel led Socure’s latest financing, which included participation from existing backers Commerce Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Flint Capital, Citi Ventures, Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, Synchrony, Sorenson, Two Sigma Ventures and others. 

The round comes less than six months after the company raised $35 million in a round led by Sorenson Ventures, and brings the New York-based company’s total raised to $196 million since its 2012 inception.

Socure founder and CEO Johnny Ayers says his company’s identity management products can help B2C enterprises achieve know-your-customer (KYC) auto-approval rates of up to 97%. This means that financial institutions can more easily capture fraud, for example, via Socure’s single API. The company also claims that by more easily verifying thin-file (those without much credit history) and young consumers, it can help reduce the underbanked population.     

The pandemic and resulting shutdowns resulted in a massive demand for trusted digital identity, Ayers believes.

“This growth tracks with a larger trend marked by the broad migration of businesses to accept applications and onboard new customers online, with many companies accelerating their transformation from digital-first to digital-only,” he told TechCrunch.

Overall fraud attempts among Socure’s existing customer base nearly doubled in the second quarter of 2020 — with certain segments seeing rises as high as 150%, according to Ayers.

“These instances did not involve actual fraud but instead were flagged by Socure as suspicious and blocked prior to inflicting damage,” he said.

Looking ahead, the company plans to use its new capital to also enhance its product offering as it continues to develop patents. 

Accel partner Amit Jhawar will join Socure’s board as part of the funding round.

In a blog post, Jhawar described Socure as “a purpose-built solution designed to handle the wave of new online users because its machine learning models have learned from every identity it has already seen.”

As former COO at Braintree and general manager at Venmo, Jhawar knows a thing or two about the importance of identity verification, especially in the financial services space.

He wrote: “I knew immediately that the Socure solution would be a game-changer because the solution can be used in every step of the customer lifecycle, from account creation to login to transaction.”

Socure also has hinted that it has an IPO in its future.

In a written statement, Ayers said: “We are incredibly grateful for the chance to innovate and partner to solve this problem with some of the greatest companies in the world and are energized for the opportunities that lay ahead for Socure, especially as we make our march to a potential IPO.”

Via email, he told TechCrunch that the company will “potentially” look at public markets in 2022 or 2023, when it feels “the time is right for the business.”

The story was updated post-publication with live comments from Socure

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Source: Tech Crunch

Dutchie, a nearly four-year-old, Bend, Oregon company that charges cannabis dispensaries a monthly fee to create and run their websites, process their orders and track what needs to be prepped for pick up, has raised $200 million in Series C funding at a $1.7 billion valuation. That’s roughly eight times the valuation the company was assigned last August, when it closed on $35 million in Series B funding.

Why the massive jump in so short a period? Aside from general frothiness in startup investing, Dutchie just acquired two companies, Greenbits and Leaflogix, that will enable it to become even more of an all-in-one tech platform for its customers. Dutchie isn’t disclosing how, or how much, it paid for either outfit, but the two concerns — which make enterprise resource planning and point-of-sale software, respectively — are being folded into Dutchie along with their collective 150 employees, effectively doubling the size of Dutchie, which now employs 300 people altogether.

Dutchie is also benefiting from some fairly strong tailwinds. In addition to a lockdown that has driven many new users to cannabis, five more states voted to legalize recreational marijuana in the November elections, and the federal government, which still categorizes marijuana as an illegal Schedule I drug and has thus denied cannabis companies access to commercial banking and insurance, appears closer to decriminalizing marijuana than any administration previously.

Given the way the company is evolving, and regulations are evolving, we talked with Dutchie co-founder and CEO Ross Lipson yesterday about whether Dutchie eventually begins to sell directly to consumers, rather than work with dispensaries. Once people no longer have to pay cash to the brick-and-mortar shops to which Dutchie sends them, will those outfits become less necessary?

Lipson insists they will not. While online orders have soared over the last year for obvious reasons and more shoppers grow accustomed to the ease of picking out products virtually, Lipson says that, “Longer term, this is a retail-first model. The nature of this industry lends itself to a hyperlocal model largely because of the way that plants are cultivated and processed, so I believe retail will remain intact and continue to be successful.”

We’ll see. In the meantime, Dutchie has $200 million more dollars from top backers to develop new products — including discovery and education tools —  and to begin to expand internationally, says Lipson.

Tiger Global Management led its newest round, joined by Dragoneer and DFJ Growth, two firms that are just now making their first forays into cannabis-related investing.

Dutchie’s earlier investors Casa Verde Capital, Thrive Capital, Gron Ventures and former Starbucks CEO and founder Howard Schultz also participated.

Asked if becoming publicly traded could be next for Dutchie as investor interest in the industry rises, Lipson says that Dutchie is right now “focused with what’s on our plate.”

As for any discussions with special purpose acquisition companies that might want to take the outfit public through a merger, Lipson says it “isn’t engaged in those talks right now,” but adds that the company will “weigh out the business opportunities as they come. We look at how does this decision bring value to the dispensary and the customer. If it brings value, we’d embark on that decision.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Occasionally, it’s easy for startups to achieve so-called product-market fit, but more often, it’s a struggle. Perhaps no one knows this as well as Sean Lane, co-founder and CEO of Olive, a company whose software completes so many tedious administrative healthcare tasks for hospitals that it is currently valued by investors at $1.5 billion.

Somewhat amazingly, the nearly nine-year-old company raised $380 million of the $445 million it has raised altogether just last year. In fact, Olive is now growing so fast, and clicking along so well, that Lane just raised $50 million in funding last month for a second startup that uses Olive’s same tech platform. He’s CEO of that startup, called Circulo, too.

It’s impressive. It also took Lane around 28 big and small pivots to build the kind of high-growth, fast-scaling businesses that he always wanted to create — moves he’s going to discuss with us at TechCrunch’s upcoming two-day, all-virtual TC Early Stage event coming up April 1 and 2.

The idea: to save other founders from having to undergo the same anguishing twists and turns by sharing what he learned along his own path.

Lane had some help. Specifically, he has long credited one of his early investors, Mark Kvamme of Drive Capital, for helping identify a big opportunity amid of sea of smaller opportunities. As Lane told the outlet Columbus CEO a few year ago, before meeting Kvamme, he had a nice life in Baltimore, with a house on the water with his wife. Lane, who was once a U.S. Air Force and National Security Administration intelligence officer, was angel investing, co-running a tech incubator and had co-founded a company called CrossChx to link fingerprints to electronic medical records.

A chance encounter with Kvamme, a Silicon Valley VC who had moved to Columbus, would change everything. To wit, after Lane talked with him about his endeavors in Baltimore, as well as having bigger ambitions to create an “internet of healthcare,” Kvamme persuaded Lane to abandon his various projects, relocate to Columbus and focus entirely on a newer, better CrossChx.

That’s now looking like a smart bet by Kvamme, who wrote CrossChx — later renamed Olive — its first check. But even with Kvamme’s support, Olive’s success hardly happened overnight. Lane has said he met with plenty of resistance as he tried and scrapped numerous products. As with many growing startups that veer in a new direction, there were painful layoffs. He also eventually parted ways with his co-founder, Brad Mascho, who left the company in late 2017 in an apparent cloud of exhaustion. He’d “worked his butt off for a good four years,” as Lane told Columbus CEO.

It’s many of these tough points in Olive’s trajectory — and particularly those product pivots — that we’ll be talking about in a few short weeks at our upcoming event. Indeed, for those who’ve struggled with their own ambitions, or their own product roadmaps, or who’ve wondered what they could be doing better or smarter or faster to grow their own companies, this is one conversation that should not be missed.

Even better, our talk with Lane is just one part of a two-day event exploring the many aspects of early-stage startups — check out the entire agenda line up here.

It’s coming up fast, so be sure to grab your ticket to TC Early Stage on April 1-2 — and, by the way, you can save $100 or more when you get the dual-event ticket for both our April and July events. The latter is coming up July 8 and 9. You can learn more here.

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Source: Tech Crunch

Kelauni Jasmyn, general partner at the new Black Tech Nation Ventures, can explain her aims for the new firm quite succinctly: “The goal is to get more Black people funded.”

That’s something Jasmyn has been working on already with Black Tech Nation, a Pittsburgh-based organization that supports Black entrepreneurs with education, content, community and more. Now she’s tackling the funding size of the equation more directly by raising a $50 million first fund with her fellow GPs Sean Sebastian and David Motley.

“We’re really at the beginning of something brand new, that I think will be historic and offer a literal economic shift for the Black community in building generational wealth,” Jasmyn said. “We get to be the ones who mold the foundation of that.”

Sebastian is a partner at Birchmere Ventures, a seed fund also based in Pittsburgh, while Motley is co-founder of BlueTree Venture Fund and African American Directors Forum. Sebastian also suggested that he and Motley are involved partly to enable a “transfer of knowledge” that will empower a new generation of Black investors, starting with Jasmyn.

Motley, meanwhile, suggested that this is an effort to take “take the Black Tech Nation platform and combine it with the Birchmere platform.” He recalled speaking to Jasmyn for the first time at Sebastian’s urging and immediately responding, “Sean, this is the real deal.”

All three of BTNV’s partners emphasized that while the fund has a social mission, they’re also focused on financial returns. 

“We are no different than any other fund just because you put a specific community around it,” Jasmyn said. “You shouldn’t expect any less valuable returns. We just happen to have the advantage of untapped potential.”

The fund will make seed and Series A investments, and Motley said they’re focused on software startups — which could be software as a service, B2B or B2B2C. These ideas can be pre-revenue and even pre-product, but they need to be “scalable and lend themselves to significant value creation.”

Sebastian added that although BTVN is based in Pittsburgh, they’ll look at investments across the country, particularly entrepreneurs that come from outside Silicon Valley.

I wondered whether the fund’s financial goals could, at times, conflict with the more inclusive approach of Black Tech Nation, but the partners countered that the for-profit fund and nonprofit organization can actually complement each other. Motley said that Black Tech Nation “gives us more opportunities to say yes,” while Jasmyn suggested that if the venture fund has to turn someone down, she can still tell them, “Scoot over across the street [to Black Tech Nation] and maybe we can revisit this another time.”

Source: Tech Crunch

From distributed homes in Cambridge, Mass. and Cambridge, England, inBalance Research is joining Y Combinator as it looks to accelerate its business as the oracle for independent energy providers, utilities and market makers.

Selling a service it calls Delphi, the very early-stage startup is hoping to provide analysis for power producers and utilities on the demand forecasts of energy markets.

The orchestration of energy load across the grid has become a more pressing issue for utilities around the country after witnessing the disastrous collapse of Texas’ power grid in response to its second “once-in-a-century” storm in the last decade.

“If we want to address the solution long term, it’s a two-part solution,” said inBalance co-founder and chief executive, Thomas Marge. “It’s a combination of hardware and software. You need the right assets online and you need the right software that can ensure that markets operate when there are extreme market shocks.”

Prices for electricity change every 15 minutes, and sometimes those pries can fluctuate wildly. In some places, even without the weather conditions that demolished the Texas grid and drove some companies out of business, prices can double in a matter of hours, according to inBalance.

That’s what makes forecasting tools important, the company said. As prices spike, asset managers of finite responsive resources such as hydro and storage need to decide if they will offer more value to the market now or later. Coming online too early or too late will decrease the revenue for their clean generation and increase peak prices for consumers.

The situation is even worse, according to the company, if storage and intermittent renewables come online at the same time. That can create downward price pressure for both the storage and renewable assets, which, in turn, can lead to increased fossil fuel generation later the same day, once cleaner sources are depleted.

The software to predict those pressures is what inBalance claims to provide. Marge and his fellow co-founders, Rajan Troll and Edwin Fennell have always been interested in the problems associated with big data and energy.

For Marge, that began when he worked on a project to optimize operations for wind farms during a stint in Lexington, Mass.

“Fundamentally we’re a data-science solution,” said Marge. “It’s a combination of knowing what factors influence every single asset on every single market in North America. We have a glimpse into how those assets are going to be working one day before to one hour before in order to do price forecasting.” 

So far, one utility using the company’s software in the Northeast has managed to curb its emissions by 0.2%. With a focus on renewables, inBalance is hoping to roll out larger reductions to the 3,000 market participants that are also using its forecasting tools for other services. Another application is in the work inBalance is conducting with a gas peaker plant to help offset the intermittency of renewable generation sources.

The reduction in emissions in New England is particularly impressive given that the company only began working with the utility there in December. Given its forecasting tools, the company is able to provide a window into which assets might be most valuable at what time — including, potentially, natural gas peaking plants, hydropower, pumped hydropower (basically an energy storage technology), battery or flywheel energy storage projects and demand response technologies that encourage businesses and consumers to reduce consumption in response to price signals, Marge said.

Already, six companies have taken a trip to see the Delphi software and come away as early users. They include a global renewable asset manager and one of the top 10 largest utilities in the U.S., according to Marge.

“We use machine learning to accurately forecast electricity prices from terabytes of public and proprietary data. The solution required for daily power system stability is both hardware — like storage and electric vehicle charging — and the software required to optimally use it. inBalance exists to be that software solution,” the company said in a statement. 

Source: Tech Crunch

It’s a busy day in IPO-land: Olo has raised its IPO range and DigitalOcean is giving us a first look at what it may be worth when it debuts.

That Olo raised its IPO price is not a huge surprise, given the software company’s rapid growth and profits. In the case of DigitalOcean, we have more work to do as its approach to growth is a bit different.

Let’s explore both companies’ pricing intervals through our usual lens of revenue multiples, market comps and general SaaS sass. We’ll do this in alphabetical order, which puts the cloud infra company up first.

DigitalOcean’s IPO price range

According to its S-1/A filing, DigitalOcean expects its IPO to price between $44 and $47 per share. The price range is a coup for the company’s private investors, who as recently as the company’s 2020 Series C paid about $10.59 each for the company’s shares. Andreessen Horowitz is going to do very well, having led the company’s Series A at a per-share price of just more than $2. IA Ventures, which led DigitalOcean’s seed round, according to Crunchbase, paid just $0.26 per share back in the 2012-2013 time frame. That’s going to convert well.

In valuation terms, the company’s simple share count post-IPO will be 105,303,340, or 107,778,340 if its underwriters purchase their option. At $44 to $47 per share, DigitalOcean is worth $4.72 billion to $5.07 billion, including shares designated for its underwriters.

The company’s fully diluted valuation is higher. At midpoint, Renaissance Capital estimates DigitalOcean’s diluted valuation is $5.6 billion. That works out to a little under $5.8 billion at $47 per share.

Taking a look at DigitalOcean’s Q4 2020 revenue of $87.5 million, the company closed last year on a run rate of $350 million. Or a revenue multiple of 14.5x at the upper end of its nondiluted valuation, and around 16.5x at the upper bound of its diluted worth.

Source: Tech Crunch