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Acquco t-shirt for Tesla giveaway
Acquco

Start-ups are raising hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire the top independent sellers on the Amazon Marketplace, creating a gold rush to “roll up” these mostly small businesses into larger entities that have better resources and can pour money into growth.

Competition to acquire these Amazon sellers has gotten so fierce that one player, Acquco, is giving away a Tesla Model Y to anyone who refers a seller that the company ends up buying.

Acquco, founded last year by Raunak Nirmal, has representatives at the annual Prosper Show this week in Las Vegas, where Amazon sellers convene to network and share tips. The company is handing out t-shirts and flyers that say, “Refer a Seller, get a Tesla.”

Nirmal said in an interview that as of Thursday the company had received about 200 referrals in a little over 24 hours since starting the program and launching the promotional web page. He said the company is willing to give away up to $10 million worth of Model Ys, which retail for a starting price of around $50,000.

“There are two options for rewards,” the web page says. “You can either get a Tesla — you will have $49,990 to put towards a Tesla model of your choice.  Alternatively, you can choose to take the cash directly!” 

The reward should be received within 45 days of the closing of the acquisition, the site says, and the recipient will owe income tax on the car or the cash.

The red-hot market for Amazon resellers

Much of Amazon’s dominance in e-commerce has come from its third-party marketplace, which is filled with millions of independent sellers who use the company’s logistics services, shipping, fulfillment centers and mammoth customer base to reach buyers.

Growing a business on Amazon has become increasingly complex in recent years due to a surge in Chinese counterfeits and other bad actors who set out to manipulate reviews and get rivals shut down. Aggregators are using those challenges as an opportunity to buy up promising products and storefronts, while using their scale and operational experience to clean up the marketplace for consumers.

Acquco has raised over $165 million in equity and debt to buy Amazon marketplace retailers, building a business with close to $200 million in revenue from those entities. It’s one of the busiest corners of the start-up market, as companies like Thrasio, which ranked 22nd on the 2021 CNBC Disruptor 50 list, along with Perch, Heyday, Branded and Boosted Commerce have raked in billions of dollars combined to pull together businesses that have grown up on Amazon.

Nirmal said the top sellers are so inundated with pitches that it’s difficult to get meetings with them.

“As a seller, when you get a message from someone about acquiring your business, you think of it as spam and go about your day,” said Nirmal, who previously spent over a year in Amazon’s marketplace business and also started his own brands and consulting businesses. “This is a unique opportunity to connect with friends, family and people that surround the sellers.”

While Nirmal didn’t attend the Prosper show, he sent a few of his 60 full-time employees, including the head of sales, to network and meet sellers. Acquco also had some contractors distributing flyers and handing out merchandise.

Acquco flyer for Tesla giveaway
Acquco

Rivals Thrasio, Heyday and Perch had an even bigger presence at the show, as they were paid exhibitors with floor space and some speaking slots, according to Prosper’s website. It’s a big change from the last conference in 2019, when the rollup market was in its infancy. Thrasio was founded in 2018 and others followed over the next couple years.

Total attendance at Prosper appears to be up about 15% to 20% over the last in-person show in 2019, which attracted over 1,500 people, a conference representative said. The show began on Tuesday and wraps up on Thursday.

How to lure sellers

Casey Gauss, a vice president at Thrasio, attended the show as part of his company’s contingent. He told CNBC that he joined in April 2020 as employee number 26, and that the last time he checked last week, the company had a workforce of 930.

Thrasio has raised $1.75 billion, the most of any company in the space. While it’s not giving away Teslas, the company did host a pricey party Wednesday night at the Bellagio Hotel, called “Feast by the Fountains,” referring to the resort’s outdoor fountain show. Gauss said he expected about 180 people.

“Feast by The Fountains will offer 5-star American cuisine and an open bar of top shelf cocktails inspired by the top supper clubs around the world,” the website for the event said.

Gauss said that the topic of aggregators has been front and center at the show and that companies have to find clever ways to meet sellers.

“We tried to throw a nice event to allow high-end networking,” he said. “It’s a good opportunity, not only for us to hang out with prospective sellers that may want to sell to us and people that have sold to us. But also, we’re pretty intentional about just building good relationships in the community.”

For Acquco, this year’s Prosper is its first big event. The company said it’s trying to get its name out to more people — and the Tesla giveaway program is a way to make a splash.

David Lam, the company’s vice president of growth strategy, said he’s been working with Tesla’s enterprise sales team on the program. The start-up did not get reduced pricing on the Model Ys, but he expects that once the program reaches about 20 cars, a discount will kick in, and then perhaps a steeper discount at the 50th sale.

The new Tesla Model Y is introduced. Tesla has expanded its model range to include an SUV based on the current Model 3.
Hannes Breustedt | picture alliance | Getty Images

Tesla giveaways have become more commonplace among non-profits as a way to raise money and give people a chance to win through online raffles. The overall popularity of the cars is the main reason Tesla says it’s able to keep down marketing, promotional and advertising costs, which were “immaterial” over the past three years, according to its latest annual report.

Acquco says in the giveaway material that it accepts leads for businesses with at least $500,000 in revenue but Nirmal expects to generally buy sellers that have topped $1 million. Nirmal won’t say how many acquisitions he’s completed to date, but said that three deals have been signed this week that will bring in about $40 million in revenue. Those all came prior to the Tesla giveaway.

Nirmal said Acquco started marketing the program at Prosper and will continue this week with ads across social platforms and Google as well as through influencers.

“If there’s a business that looks good and fits into our partner profile, we want to give away these Teslas,” Nirmal said.

— CNBC’s Katie Schoolov and Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

WATCH: Amazon drivers describe pressures

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AI voice startup ElevenLabs pushes global expansion as it gears up for an IPO

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AI voice startup ElevenLabs pushes global expansion as it gears up for an IPO

Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup based in London. It competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.

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LONDON — ElevenLabs, a London-based startup that specializes in generating synthetic voices through artificial intelligence, has revealed plans to be IPO-ready within five years.

The company told CNBC it is targeting major global expansion as it prepares for an initial public offering.

“We expect to build more hubs in Europe, Asia and South America, and just keep scaling,” Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs’ CEO and co-founder, told CNBC in an interview at the firm’s London office.

He identified Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico as potential new locations. London is currently ElevenLabs’ biggest office, followed by New York, Warsaw, San Francisco, Japan, India and Bangalore.

Staniszewski said the eventual aim is to get the company ready for an IPO in the next five years.

“From a commercial standpoint, we would like to be ready for an IPO in that time,” he said. “If the market is right, we would like to create a public company … that’s going to be here for the next generation.”

Undecided on location

Fundraising plans

ElevenLabs was valued at $3.3 billion following a recent $180 million funding round. The company is backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Growth, as well as corporate names like Salesforce and Deutsche Telekom.

Staniszewski said his startup was open to raising more money from VCs, but it would depend on whether it sees a valid business need, like scaling further in other markets. “The way we try to raise is very much like, if there’s a bet we want to take, to accelerate that bet [we will] take the money,” he said.

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.

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The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday. 

“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement

The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China. 

The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.

Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.

S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.

Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.

Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.

While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.

DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.

Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.

New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

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