Becky Lynch, Lita and Trish Status wrestle Damage CTRL during WrestleMania Goes Hollywood at SoFi Stadium on April 01, 2023 in Inglewood, California.
Ronald Martinez | Getty Images Sport | Getty Images
Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment is expanding its partnership with Fanatics, as the growing sports platform will now take over the global event merchandise business for the professional wrestling company.
That means Fanatics will now operate all of the on-site retail at the WWE’s more than 300 events throughout the year, including its premier live events like WrestleMania and the Royale Rumble. The deal will kick off on May 1, ahead of WWE’s Backlash event.
Fanatics became WWE’s global e-commerce partner in 2022, a deal that later grew to include licensed merchandise, memorabilia, trading cards and collectibles.
“We’ve already experienced [Fanatics’] expertise in this category, and when we sat down and thought about how we could approach growing our retail business, we thought this could strengthen that growth,” said Alex Varga, WWE senior vice president and head of corporate development.
WWE has seen its live-event merchandise business grow as the company has returned to a fuller slate of events and shows as the pandemic has waned. In 2022, WWE reported that it had $23.8 million in venue merchandise revenue across 231 live events in 2022, up from $10.1 million the previous year when the company only had 101 live events. In comparison, WWE had $18.6 million in venue merchandise in 2019 across 260 events.
At its WrestleMania event earlier this month, the company said that it broke its all-time merchandise record, an increase of 20% compared to 2022, which was the previous high. It had more than 161,000 people in attendance over the two-night event.
Varga said the expanded relationship with Fanatics will help WWE make a further “connection between our e-commerce channel and our event retail channel,” which could mean ordering something from the merchandise stand that could then be delivered to your home later.
Fanatics’ existing relationships across sports could also further benefit WWE, Varga said. For example, WWE is hosting its SummerSlam event in August at Ford Field in Detroit, where the Detroit Lions play – Fanatics is the retail partner of the Lions, which will allow WWE to potentially use more of the retail spaces and team stores in the stadium.
Team relationships like the Lions and across other sports could be utilized too, Varga said, noting that WWE has found success recently with merchandise that is hyper-localized to the city the event is in – for example, a “Stone Cold” Steve Austin shirt themed to Los Angeles. This expanded partnership could help WWE collaborate on those shirts with local teams as well.
WWE has increased the number of items it also sells since partnering with Fanatics, and Varga said there is likely further room to grow. “As they continue to grow their position in the space, we expect to grow with them,” he said.
Fanatics, a three-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company, now has relationships with more than 900 sports properties across the globe, including nearly every major sports league in the U.S.
This shift in WWE’s business comes after the news that it has agreed to merge with UFC to form a new publicly traded company controlled by Endeavor Group.
Endeavor will own a 51% stake in the new combat sports and entertainment company, while WWE shareholders will have the remaining 49%, according to the terms of the agreement. The deal values WWE at $9.3 billion and UFC, which is owned by Endeavor, at $12.1 billion, the companies said in a press release.
The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2023.
FILE PHOTO: Ariel Cohen during a panel at DLD Munich Conference 2020, Europe’s big innovation conference, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich.
Picture Alliance for DLD | Hubert Burda Media | AP
Navan, a developer of corporate travel and expense software, expects its market cap to be as high as $6.5 billion in its IPO, according to an updated regulatory filing on Friday.
The company said it anticipates selling shares at $24 to $26 each. Its valuation in that range would be about $3 billion less than where private investors valued Navan in 2022, when the company announced a $300 million funding round.
CoreWeave, Circle and Figma have led a resurgence in tech IPOs in 2025 after a drought that lasted about three years. Navan filed its original prospectus on Sept. 19, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN.”
Last week, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that has substantially reduced operations inside of agencies including the SEC. In August, the agency said its electronic filing system, EDGAR, “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”
Cerebras, which makes artificial intelligence chips, withdrew its registration for an IPO days after the shutdown began.
Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and technology chief Ilan Twig started the company under the name TripActions in 2015. It’s based in Palo Alto, California, and had around 3,400 employees at the end of July.
For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year. Competitors include Expensify, Oracle and SAP. Expensify stock closed at $1.64on Friday, down from its $27 IPO price in 2021.
Navan ranked 39th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, after also appearing in 2024.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer during a CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer event at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 7th, 2025.
Kevin Stankiewicz | CNBC
Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following President Donald Trump’s threats for increased tariffs on Chinese goods.
With tech’s trillion-dollar companies occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines send the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.
After market close on Friday, Trump declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and on Nov. 1 it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”
Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about 2% in extended trading following the post.
The president’s latest threats are disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
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In late September, Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline by nearly $229 billion on Friday.
OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only seeing rising demand.
In September it introduced the Sora 2 video creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now boasts over 800 million weekly users. But Microsoft must buy infrastructure to operate its cloud data centers. Microsoft’s market cap dropped by $85 billion on Friday.
The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. It competes with Microsoft to rent out GPUs from its cloud data centers, but it doesn’t have major business with OpenAI. The online retailer is now worth $121 billion less than it was on Thursday.
“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”
Tesla, which introduced lower-priced vehicles on Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.
The automaker reports third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week. Nvidia reports in November.
Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%, respectively.
Govini, a defense tech software startup taking on the likes of Palantir, has blown past $100 million in annual recurring revenue, the company announced Friday.
“We’re growing faster than 100% in a three-year CAGR, and I expect that next year we’ll continue to do the same,” CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview. With how “big this market is, we can keep growing for a long, long time, and that’s really exciting.”
CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate, a measurement of the rate of return.
The Arlington, Virginia-based company also announced a $150 million growth investment from Bain Capital. It plans to use the money to expand its team and product offering to satisfy growing security demands.
In recent years, venture capitalists have poured more money into defense tech startups like Govini to satisfy heightened national security concerns and modernize the military as global conflict ensues.
The group, which includes unicorns like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, Shield AI and artificial intelligence beneficiary Palantir, is taking on legacy giants such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, that have long leaned on contracts from the Pentagon.
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Dougherty, who previously worked at Palantir, said she hopes the company can seize a “vertical slice” of the defense technology space.
The 14-year-old Govini has already secured a string of big wins in recent years, including an over $900-million U.S. government contract and deals with the Department of War.
Govini is known for its flagship AI software Ark, which it says can help modernize the military’s defense tech supply chain by better managing product lifecycles as military needs grow more sophisticated.
“If the United States can get this acquisition system right, it can actually be a decisive advantage for us,” Dougherty said.
Looking ahead, Dougherty told CNBC that she anticipates some setbacks from the government shutdown.
Navy customers could be particularly hard hit, and that could put the U.S. at a major disadvantage.
While the U.S. is maintaining its AI dominance, China is outpacing its shipbuilding capacity and that needs to be taken “very seriously,” she added.