The big winners of Opendoor’s IPO
Opendoor’s IPO last month crowned CEO Eric Wu a billionaire. It quintupled the value of SoftBank’s stake to $2.3 billion. And it reaped early investor Khosla Ventures a 36x return — on paper.
After merging with a blank-check company last month, the iBuyer’s stock closed at $31.25 per share on its next day of trading, Dec. 21, giving it a market capitalization of close to $19 billion. (The stock closed at $28.13 per share on Jan. 7.)
Opendoor’s largest shareholder is SoftBank, with a 13.5 percent stake, followed by Khosla Ventures (8.5 percent) and Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries (6.4 percent).
A deep dive into regulatory filings confirms the first rule of investing: Betting early yields the biggest returns.
✅ Khosla led Opendoor’s Series A in 2014 and invested $40 million over the next few years, according to regulatory filings. Back-of-the-napkin math values its investment at $1.4 billion.
✅ GGV, which invested in the Series B round in 2015, invested a total of $57.5 million over several rounds, filings show. Their value grew 15-fold.
✅ Access Industries’ investment, totaling $137 million over several rounds, grew to be worth nearly eight times as much.
✅ Fifth Wall Ventures, which invested $82.4 million via the Series D and Series E rounds, had shares worth more than $607 million the day after Opendoor’s IPO. That investment grew 7.4 times.
✅ By comparison, SoftBank — which tends to place huge bets later in the game — invested $450 million. On paper, its investment grew by a factor of 5.
Your blockquote here…
And now, for your weekly SPAC update …
With $1.2 billion under management, Fifth Wall is joining the SPAC craze.
Since 2016, the VC firm has been a prolific investor, backing companies like Opendoor, VTS, States Title and Industrious. It recently hired underwriters for a blank-check company, the size of which wasn’t disclosed, reported Bloomberg.
The big question: Will it take one of its portfolio companies public? Last year, 248 SPACs went public, up from 59 in 2019. Fifth Wall-backed Opendoor went public last month after merging with Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Hedosophia Holdings II.
This week, online lender SoFi said it will go public with another one of Palihapitiya’s SPACs. The deal values SoFi at $8.65 billion.
No more pen-and-paper logbook
iLobby, a startup that lets building owners screen and track visitors, has raised $100 million from PE firm Insight Partners.
It’s the first private funding for the Toronto-based startup, which launched in 2013.
With 1,000 clients, including Pepsi, Nikon and Hershey’s, iLobby had been growing 100 percent year over year. But it got a boost after the pandemic hit, when building owners leaned on it to monitor visitors and employees. “We wanted an investor who could help us scale,” CEO Ariel Mashiyev told Crunchbase News.
In addition to tracking visitors, iLobby created a virus screening questionnaire and contactless sign-in tool.
For CoStar and RentPath, breaking up is hard to do
With its deal to buy Rentpath off the table, CoStar is fighting the bill.
The data giant said it won’t pay a nearly $60 million break-up fee, claiming RentPath was in breach of their agreement.
CoStar agreed to buy RentPath out of bankruptcy in February, but federal regulators sued to block the $585 million deal, which they said would give CoStar too much power over residential listings. RentPath called off the deal on Dec. 29. In court documents, CoStar said RentPath schemed to “undermine the transaction” by failing to support its FTC strategy.
STAT OF THE WEEK
$300B
Projected M&A deals in next two years from SPACs, according to Goldman Sachs
Why take one bailout, when you can get two?
Just before the New Year, Katerra nabbed a second, $200 million investment from SoftBank.
This time, the funds will let the construction startup avoid bankruptcy, reported the Wall Street Journal.
Founded in 2015, Katerra assembles building parts in factories to streamline construction. But it has encountered delays and cost overruns.
SoftBank, which has invested $2 billion, bailed out the firm in May 2020 when it hired CEO Paal Kibsgaard to fix the company’s finances. He told the WSJ Katerra tried to grow too fast. “We underestimated the complexity of executing self-perform projects at a large scale,” he said.
57 million reasons to go camping
It looks like Covid hasn’t hurt one part of the travel industry: camping.
Hipcamp — otherwise known as the “Airbnb of the outdoors” — just raised $57 million to help more people find and book campsites. The round values the company at $300 million, The Information reported.
The San Francisco startup was started by Alyssa Ravasio in 2014 and partners with landowners who rent space to campers. Hipcamp takes a 10 percent commission.
Although Hipcamp’s bookings plunged 80 percent this spring, they’ve bounced back. Between June and August, bookings were up 400 percent from the prior year. The round closed last month, days after Airbnb went public. Shares of Airbnb closed at $151.27 on Jan. 7, up 3.5 percent from its IPO price on Dec. 10.
Small bytes
? Amazon pledged $2B for affordable housing in three major metros.
? VergeSense raised $12M to let businesses monitor how office space is being used.
? Zillow CEO Rich Barton, who has a $2B stake in the company, pledged to give away half his wealth.
? CoStar bought the domain for houses.com.
? Alex Lange will lead luxury listings network Forbes Global Properties, after serving as CEO of UpstreamRE, a national MLS that’s suffered delays and cost overruns.
? The Pocket Listing Service, a whisper listing portal launched by luxury brokerage The Agency, will relaunch as a public-facing site to comply with California law.
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