Name: Roku CEO Cashes Out $270M Stake In 2021
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Roku CEO Cashes Out $270M Stake In 2021

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ShareShareIn what's the latest sign of legacy automakers preparing for a future where electric cars are the norm, the premium and luxury car brand Jaguar has announced that it'll become an all-electric brand by 2025, precisely four years from now. The all-electric push is part of Jaguar's parent company Jaguar Land Rover's plan to become a net-zero carbon business by 2039. Already, Jaguar has a fully-electric car on the market, the  Jaguar I-Pace SUV , and has sold over 40,000 units of the vehicle. However, its sister brand Land Rover currently has no fully-electric vehicle on the market but has now said that it'll produce its first in 2024. Although the Jaguar I-Pace SUV has sold over 40,000 units, it appears to have struggled to thrive in a market with hefty competition from other automakers. Also, the Jaguar I-Pace SUV is actually manufactured by an external contractor and not Jaguar itself, meaning that the luxury brand's just-announced plan to become all-electric sooShareSpencer Rascoff, the co-founder of the online real estate listings giant Zillow, has made his mark as one of the major beneficiaries of the boom of special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). He launched his first SPAC and raised $350 million in October 2020, and then a second aiming to raise $250 million earlier this month. Now, Rascoff is back with a third SPAC seeking to raise $250 million from an initial public offering (IPO). The third SPAC,  Supernova Partners Acquisition Company III , has filed with the US SEC to raise $250 million by selling 25 million shares for $10 each. Each share unit consists of one share of common stock and one-fourth of a warrant, exercisable at $11.50.  As expected, Supernova Partners Acquisition Company III will seek to merge with a technology company. With the expertise of Rascoff in this space as a serial entrepreneur along with that of his two other partners, private equity veterans Michael Clifton and Robert Reid, it's highly probable that tShareThe data mining and analytics company Palantir (NYSE:PLTR) has posted its first annual earnings as a public company for the year 2020, reporting $1.1 billion in revenue and a net loss of $1.17 billion. Revenue for the year was up 47% compared to the previous while losses went up by more than 100% over the year.  2020 was Palantir's first year as a publicly-traded company, as the company debuted on the public markets with a direct listing in September. Palantir began trading at $10 per share and now trades at about $29-per-share, and investors are apparently confident in the company's prospects and bestowed it with a market cap of over $50 billion as a result. By numbers, Palantir isn't profitable with $1.17 billion in losses last year. But actually, most of the company's reported loss is due to stock-based compensation for employees and not hard cash, implying that it has a strong business behind the scenes.  In the fourth and final quarter of 2020, Palantir posted a neShareAs it looks, lidar startups have been major merger targets for special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) over the past year, with a handful of them having sealed deals to go public through SPAC mergers (e.g. Ouster , Luminar , Velodyne, and Aeva ). Now, the latest lidar startup to join that cohort is AEye , a venture-backed lidar maker based in Dublin, California. AEye has sealed a deal to merge with CF Finance Acquisition Corp. III (Nasdaq: CFAC), a SPAC sponsored by the financial services giant Cantor Fitzgerald. The merger is expected to be completed in the second quarter of this year. Under the terms of its merger, AEye will be handed over $230 million in cash held in trust by  CF Finance Acquisition Corp. III, and has also secured a $225 million private-investment-in-public-equity (PIPE) funding round that'll bring its total cash haul to $455 million,  a round that'll see participation from investors including GM Ventures, Intel Capital, and Hella Ventures. FollowingShareThe American automaker General Motors (GM) is surely stepping up its electric vehicle game on the backs of its plan to spend $27 billion on electric and autonomous vehicle development from 2020 through 2025. It's just unveiled two new additions to its growing electric car lineup, a usual hatchback and a new compact SUV from its popular Chevy Bolt brand. The new electric vehicles from GM are 2022 models, meaning they'll go into production later this year. With the lineup, GM dropped a surprise with a new Chevy Bolt electric utility vehicle (EUV), essentially a compact SUV. It's the first compact SUV to come from the Chevy Bolt brand and represents GM's bigger rush into the electric vehicle market, with plans to launch 30 new EVs by 2025. GM 2022 redesigned Bolt EV (left) and Bolt EUV (right). Chevy Bolt EUV The 2022 Chevy Bolt EUV is notably the first vehicle from the Chevrolet brand to feature GM's 'Super Cruise' driver assistance system. It's similarShareThe American private equity giant Carlyle Group Inc has reached a deal to invest $200 million in Kakao Mobility, a South Korean on-demand transport app that's an offshoot of the domestic tech giant Kakao Corp. Kakao Mobility offers services including online taxi-hailing, bus ticketing, and shuttle reservations and is the largest of its kind mobility app in Korea. The $200 million cash infusion is the second funding round that Kakao Mobility has raised since it was formally spun off from its parent Kakao Corp in 2017. The first was a $437 million investment from the American private equity firm TPG in 2017. Carlyle Group's investment in Kakao Mobility values the company at $3.1 billion, with its Kakao bet coming from the firm's  Carlyle Asia Partners V fund. With its new capital, Kakao Mobility says that it'll pursue business growth in its existing markets and also expand into new markets. It'll leverage Carlyle Group's industry knowledge in Korea to do so. CarShareArne Sorenson, the CEO of the hotels and hospitality giant Marriott International, has passed away aged 62, the company has announced . He passed away while still holding the job of President and CEO of Marriott on the 15th of February, 2021, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer two years ago. Marriott had earlier announced that Sorenson would temporarily reduce his schedule as the company's head to facilitate more demanding treatment for his pancreatic cancer. He apparently later succumbed to the ailment and passed away as a result. Sorenson made his mark as Marriott's CEO by expanding the hospitality giant with the $13-billion acquisition of Starwood Hotels & Resorts in 2016. He took up the CEO role at Marriott in 2012 as its first  CEO to not come from the  Marriott family dynasty and the hotel giant's third CEO throughout its nearly ten-decade history. Sorenson first joined Marriott in 1996  after being personally recruited by Bill Marriott, son of Marriott’ShareCrowdStrike, the publicly-traded cybersecurity company, has made a new big acquisition, this time one from the UK startup sector with a deal to buy Humio , a startup that makes software used for log management and monitoring for security purposes. CrowdStrike will pay $400 million for Humio in a deal that's expected to close at the end of Q1 2021. The $400 million price tag for Humio will mostly be paid with cash while equity awards with CrowdStrike stock account for the rest. The exact split between cash and stock for the deal isn't disclosed. A $400 million exit for Humio marks a big and notable one for the UK startup scene, where exits of this size aren't often seen as in the US. More so, Humio is a barely five-year-old startup founded in 2016, making a $400 million sale to CrowdStrike very lucrative given its short period of existence. Humio is a venture-backed startup that's raised some $32 million in outside funding. Its investors include the likes of Accel and DeShareIn December 2020, Salesforce reached a landmark deal to buy the workplace collaboration software company Slack for a whopping $27.7 billion, marking the company's biggest-ever acquisition since its inception. Although agreed to, the Slack purchase hasn't been completed, still subject to customary due diligence and regulatory approval. Now, it appears that US regulators are gazing into Salesforce's mega-deal to buy Slack with deeper eyes, with the United States Justice Department now demanding that both Salesforce and Slack provide "additional information and documentary material" related to their merger. The demand came from the Justice Department's Antitrust division. Demanding for additional information related to a business deal in what's usually referred to as a “Second Request” isn't out of the norm, but usually signals higher-than-normal scrutiny of a deal. Even, with a $27.7 billion acquisition on the table, it's likely to be expected. SaleShare

ShareShareIn what's the latest sign of legacy automakers preparing for a future where electric cars are the norm, the premium and luxury car brand Jaguar has announced that it'll become an all-electric brand by 2025, precisely four years from now. The all-electric push is part of Jaguar's parent company Jaguar Land Rover's plan to become a net-zero carbon business by 2039. Already, Jaguar has a fully-electric car on the market, the  Jaguar I-Pace SUV , and has sold over 40,000 units of the vehicle. However, its sister brand Land Rover currently has no fully-electric vehicle on the market...

Roku CEO Cashes Out $270M Stake In 2021

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