‘Tis The Season For M&A 🎄 🎁

Some big M&A news today: Intuit is in talks to buy Mailchimp in a deal valuing the company at $10 billion.

You probably know Intuit as the TurboTax guys, but Intuit actually makes more money from services for small businesses (SMBs.) Mailchimp would be a big pickup for Intuit, adding a suite of digital marketing tools to Intuit’s finance-centric product suite. 🤖 💰

M&A chats have been dicey lately, but Mailchimp has been looking for a buyer for most of the year. The company reportedly made around $300 million in 2020, according to sources.

Intuit was in the news last year for another big line-item purchase when it bought Credit Karma for $7.1 billion. The company has capitalized on the digital transformation accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks to tools like Quickbooks, Mint, and its online tax services.

$INTU stock fell 0.53% today.

$ETH.X extended its rally today and traded above $3,700 for the first time since May. The second-largest crypto by market value soared on optimism around NFTs and its new deflationary “coin burning” economics. 🔥

Coin burning is a process by which tokens or coins are purposely removed from circulation. Burning reduces the total supply of coins, which theoretically makes an asset more scarce. 

According to crypto intelligence platform OKLink, Ethereum burned 12,000 ETH on Tuesday, a record for coins destroyed since the implementation of the EIP 1559 update on Aug. 5. The EIP 1559 has destroyed nearly 160,000 $ETH.X (about $559 million) since activation.

Source: OkLink

The ongoing NFT hype (which mainly happens on the Ethereum blockchain) has also contributed to Ether’s bullish run. In August, leading NFT marketplace OpenSea hit $3.08 billion in trading volume.

Source: CoinMarketCap

Some analysts believe that $ETH.X got a boost from the launch of Arbitrum One, an Ethereum “layer 2” solution. Layer 2 helps users transact on a chain separate from Ethereum’s core blockchain, making transactions faster and cheaper. Arbitrum’s mainnet went live yesterday and is expected to supplement existing layer 2 scaling chains like Polygon Network.

C3.ai announced a partnership with Google Cloud ahead of its earnings in after-hours today. ☁️ 🤖

The partnership will allow Google Cloud customers to choose from the whole portfolio of C3.ai enterprise AI tools, offering companies and users the best of both worlds. If this is confusing at all, just know the partnership is a huge win for $AI.

C3 and Google will co-optimize their AI offerings for a number of applications, including healthcare, manufacturing, and big data.

The news sent shares of $AI 3.05% higher today, but those gains were erased after its earnings report this evening. The company reported in-line EPS and beat on revenue. The stock fell 7% after hours. 

Twitch is in for two days of pain. 🤕 The streaming service, which was acquired by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million, is now grappling with a boycott and talent poaching. RIP. 

Two of Twitch’s top streamers announced that they’re leaving the platform today after signing exclusive deals with competitor YouTube Gaming. TimtheTatman and DrLupo shared news of their departures just hours apart. YouTube’s CEO, Susan Wojcicki, welcomed the two creators on Twitter.

These two streamers may not be familiar to casual gamers or people who don’t use regularly use Twitch, but their departure represents the ongoing war for talent. The duopoly between Twitch and YouTube Gaming has only heated up since Microsoft’s Mixer exited the space. 

Tomorrow, Twitch will get another slap in the face as millions of users boycott the site. According to organizers, Twitch has failed to intervene in hate campaigns which have targeted minorities and marginalized creators. Hundreds of streamers and thousands of viewers are planning to stay off the site for the day. 🙅

In April, Twitch indicated it would “punish users for certain harmful offline behavior.“ But this rigor has not been applied to scrutinizing bots and stream raiders. 

While it’s unlikely that Amazon will see any material losses from the boycott (the company makes hundreds of billions each quarter), this is certainly a less-than-ideal situation. Twitch still leads the market in streaming, but YouTube’s competitive pocket of cash is cause for concern. 

$AMZN rose 0.24% today.

‘Tis the season for tech M&A — private equity giant Apollo Management completed its acquisition of Yahoo in a deal valued at $5B in cash.

Yahoo (formerly owned by Verizon) will operate as a standalone company under Apollo Global Management. Yahoo CEO Guru Gowrappan shared:

“This is a new era for Yahoo. The close of the deal heralds an exciting time of renewed opportunity for us as a standalone entity. We anticipate that the coming months and years will bring fresh growth and innovation for Yahoo as a business and a brand, and we look forward to creating that future with our new partners.”

Apollo acquired Yahoo and its properties — including TechCrunch, AOL, Engadget, and RYOT. With over 900 million active users each month, Apollo’s acquisition could redirect Yahoo from its rocky history of widespread security issues, acquisition flubs (remember Tumblr?), poor leadership, etc.

Apollo Partner Reed Rayman commented:

“We look forward to partnering with Yahoo’s talented employee base to build on the company’s strong momentum and position the new Yahoo for long-term success as a standalone consumer internet and digital media leader.”

Could the 2020’s welcome another era of Yahoo and AOL? ✉️  😆 Anything can happen.

$APO lifted 1.99% today.