Weekly News of 09th of April
Sega offers $776 mln for Angry Birds maker Rovio
Japan’s Sega Sammy Holdings has agreed to launch an offer for Finland’s Rovio Entertainment, the maker of the Angry Birds mobile game, for 706 million euros ($775.8 million), reports Reuters.
Tokyo-based Sega will offer 9.25 euros per share for Rovio, a 19% premium over Friday’s closing price of 7.775 euros.
Rovio, which has been conducting a strategic review, on Saturday said it was in talks with Sega over a possible tender offer. The Wall Street Journal had reported on Friday that a deal between the two companies was imminent.
Data startup Cybersyn raises $63 mln in Snowflake-led funding round
Data startup Cybersyn said it has raised $62.9 million from investors including Snowflake, Coatue Management and Sequoia Capital, reports Reuters.
The investment marks the first time that Snowflake has led a startup funding round, as the data cloud giant looks to expand its data marketplace for enterprise users to acquire live and ready-to-use dataset.
New York-based Cybersyn was founded in 2022 by Alex Izydorczyk, former head of data science at Coatue. The company aims to sell proprietary economic datasets to investors, governments and other corporate clients
Cybersyn plans to use the capital to expand its eight-person team and acquire more proprietary data to create data products with a focus on macroeconomic trends.
Besides using public data sources, the startup is also working on identifying and partnering with proprietary data sources, including buying aggregated anonymized data from non-data provider corporations.
It has released free and paid datasets on Snowflake, including e-commerce spending data, that could be sold to corporates across industries, including financial services, consumer and pharmaceuticals.
Snowflake Marketplace allows users to access third-party data and pay for specific datasets, and combine it with their own corporate data using its platform. It now has more than 1,800 dataset listings.
“Cybersyn is a company that was built for this era of data sharing and moving with agility. We think of the marketplace as a core part of our offering. If someone is willing to be strategically aligned with us, we’re happy to invest,” said Christian Kleinerman, senior vice president of product at Snowflake.
Kleinerman and Thomas Laffont, co-founder and senior managing director at Coatue, have joined Cybersyn’s board of directors.
AlphaSense valued at $1.8 billion after CapitalG-backed fundraise
AlphaSense said on Tuesday it has raised $100 million in a fresh round of funding backed by Alphabet’s venture capital arm CapitalG that valued the market intelligence platform at $1.8 billion, reports Reuters.
Heightened volatility in the stock markets due to the U.S. Federal Reserve’s monetary tightening have prompted companies to tap private investors as the appetite for public listings remains subdued.
AlphaSense’s existing investors Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Viking Global Investors also participated in the latest funding round.
New York-based AlphaSense said it will use the funds to further its advanced artificial intelligence capabilities.
Last year, the company was valued at $1.7 billion after raising $225 million.
AlphaSense helps its customers extract relevant information from a trove of public and private content such as equity research, earnings calls, company filings and news.
