Cloud software developer Twilio has hired Qatalyst Partners, the investment bank founded by Frank Quattrone, to advise on its defense against a group of activist investors, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
Qatalyst, which previously advised Segment when Twilio purchased it for $3.2 billion in 2020, has been working on the activist matter for months, one of the the people said. Qatalyst launched an activist practice the same year as the Segment deal. While Qatalyst has typically worked to help companies sell themselves, this assignment is focused on the activist defense situation, said these people.
Both sources asked not to be named due to confidentiality. Twilio’s technology makes it easier for companies to communicate with customers and employees through mobile devices.
Twilio shares slipped as much as 1.8% in Wednesday morning trading, before paring back losses.
Legion Partners, an activist firm based in Los Angeles, took a stake in Twilio earlier this year and began pushing the company to overhaul its board and strategy. Legion’s engagement was led by Sagar Gupta, who left the firm in October for Anson Funds, where he amassed a similar stake.
Twilio shares have gained 45% this year, but that follows a miserable 2022, during which the company lost more than 80% of its value. The stock is 84% off its record reached in early 2021. Annual revenue growth slipped to just 5% in the most recent quarter down from over 30% in the same period last year and over 60% in the third quarter of 2021.
The activist groups have told Twilio it should at least sell an underperforming unit, its data and applications business, which includes Segment. Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson, who co-founded the company in 2008, said last week that the company would lay off 5% of its employees, with the deepest cuts inside the data and applications unit.
The downsizing followed a corporate reorganization earlier this year that included layoffs amounting to 17% of Twilio’s staff.
Qatalyst is best known for its mergers and acquisitions practice rather than shareholder defense. One of the people familiar with the matter said the bank’s current involvement with Twilio is not a precursor to a sale of the company.
A spokesperson for Twilio declined to comment. Qatalyst did not respond to a request for comment.
Qatalyst was founded in 2008 by Quattrone, who stepped down as CEO in 2016 but remains executive chairman. The firm has advised on some of Silicon Valley’s largest recent deals, including Microsoft’s $28.1 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, Salesforce’s $29.2 billion purchase of Slack and Block’s $22 billion acquisition of Afterpay. Qatalyst also worked on Cisco’s pending $29.6 billion acquisition of Splunk and Adobe’s purchase of Figma, which is awaiting regulatory clearance.
Qatalyst’s activist practice is helmed by Peter Michelsen, who was hired in June 2020 from Goldman Sachs‘ activist advisory group. Michelsen says on his LinkedIn page that he advises “Qatalyst’s clients across all technology sectors on matters including activism defense, proxy fights, contested situations, defense preparedness and complex ESG matters.” ESG stands for environmental, social and corporate governance.
Trust & Will founders, Cody Barbo (CEO), Brian Lamb, and Daniel Goldstein.
Courtesy: Trust & Will
Legal technology company Trust & Will said Tuesday that it has raised $25 million in a Series C funding round. The San Diego-based firm, ranked No. 41 on last year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, has now raised $75 million to date.
Trust & Will aims to shake things up in the arcane estate planning industry and make these key wealth preservation and wealth transfer services more accessible to families. Relying on a mix of technology and human oversight, Trust & Will provides legally valid documents that adhere to state guidelines.
The company says the funding will be used to double down on artificial intelligence.
“AI enables families and advisors to plan with greater clarity and confidence,” co-founder and CEO Cody Barbo said in a statement announcing the funding. “By combining technology with human compassion, we’re transforming how people protect and preserve their legacies.”
The new round was led by Moderne Ventures, and includes Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, UBS Next and Erie Insurance. The most recent publicly available valuation figure for Trust & Will was $169 million, according to PitchBook data as of June 2022. The company told CNBC its valuation is now in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and has increased by more than 5x from its 2020 Series B valuation to its new Series C, but declined to be more specific.
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Trust & Will started when two friends wondered why there weren’t more online options to create a will. Most of their financial lives were already online — banking, taxes, insurance — but wills would require thousands of dollars and talking to a lawyer. Or a barebones online template that doesn’t leave room for customization or questions.
Its closest competitors, LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, focus on a broader variety of services. There’s also FreeWill.com, which offers free templates for people to fill out.
A recent annual report from Trust & Will found that although 83% of Americans believe estate planning is important, only 31% have a will, and 55% have no plan at all. Today, the company says it has helped hundreds of thousands of families create estate plans and settle probate to solve for that problem, and over one million Americans have started their legacy planning on the platform.
The company works directly with individuals and through partnerships with financial institutions. Trust & Will’s partnerships include Bank of America, USAA and Navy Federal. To get the word out to the general public, the company recently hired its first celebrity brand ambassadors, Super Bowl Champion Matthew Stafford and his wife, podcaster Kelly Stafford, to talk about their estate planning experience in a national TV commercial. It also recently became the official estate planning partner to two professional sports teams, the Los Angeles Kings and San Diego Wave.
“Every family deserves access to estate planning, and every professional deserves tools that simplify the process while delivering exceptional results,” Barbo stated in the release. “This Series C funding is more than a company milestone — it’s a step toward transforming estate planning into an essential service that touches every family’s life and legacy.”
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Hinge Health, a provider of digital physical therapy services, filed to go public on Monday, the latest sign that the IPO market is starting to crack open.
Hinge Health uses software to help patients treat musculoskeletal injuries, chronic pain and carry out post-surgery rehabilitation remotely. The company’s revenue last year increased 33% to $390 million, according to its prospectus, and its net loss for the year narrowed to $11.9 million from $108.1 million a year earlier.
The IPO market has been quiet across the tech sector for the past three years, but within digital health it’s been almost completely silent, as companies have struggled to adapt to an environment of muted growth following the Covid-19 pandemic. No digital health companies held IPOs in 2023, according to a report from Rock Health, and last year the only notable offerings were Waystar, a health-care payment software vendor, and Tempus AI, a precision medicine company.
“We have many decades of work ahead,” Hinge Health CEO Daniel Perez said in the filing Monday. “We hope you join us on this journey.”
The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “HNGE.”
Perez and Gabriel Mecklenburg, Hinge Health’s chairman, co-founded the company in 2014 after experiencing personal struggles with physical rehabilitation, according to the company’s website.
Members of Hinge Health can access virtual exercise therapy and an electrical nerve stimulation device called Enso. The company claims its technology can help users improve their pain, reduce the need for surgery and cut down health-care costs.
The San Francisco-based company has raised more than $1 billion from investors including Tiger Global and Coatue Management, and it boasted a $6.2 billion valuation as of October 2021. The biggest outside shareholders are venture firms Insight Partners and Atomico, which own 19% and 15% of the stock, respectively, according to the filing.
Hinge Health’s dual class stock structure gives each share of Class B common stock 15 votes. Almost all of the Class B shares are owned by the founders and top investors.
Employees across more than 2,250 organizations, including Morgan Stanley, Target and General Motors, can access Hinge Health’s offerings. The company had more than 532,000 members as of Dec. 31, and more than 20 million people are eligible to enroll, the filing said.
People wait in line for t-shirts at a pop-up kiosk for the online brokerage Robinhood along Wall Street after the company went public with an IPO earlier in the day on July 29, 2021 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
It was a bad day for tech stocks, and a brutal one for fintech.
As the Nasdaq suffered its steepest decline since 2022, some of the biggest losers were companies that sit at the intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
Stock trading app Robinhood tumbled 20%, bitcoin holder Strategy fell 17% and crypto exchange Coinbase lost 18%. Much of the slide in those three stocks was tied to the drop in bitcoin, which fell almost 5%, continuing its downward trajectory. The price of the leading cryptocurrency is now down 19% in the past month, falling after a big-post election pop in late 2024.
Beyond the crypto trade, online lenders and payments companies also fell more than the broader market. Affirm, which popularized buy now, pay later loans, dropped 11%, as did SoFi, which offers personal loans and mortgages. Shopify, which provides payment technology to online retailers, fell more than 7%.
JPMorgan Chase fintech analysts on Monday highlighted declining consumer confidence as a potential challenge for companies that rely on consumer spending for growth. In late February, the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index slipped to 98.3 for the month, down nearly 7%, the largest monthly drop since August 2021. Walmart recently reported a shift away from discretionary purchases, underscoring the potential trouble.
“Our universe has modestly outperformed the S&P 500 since the election, but sentiment has soured of late on declining consumer confidence and signs of slowing discretionary spend,” the JPMorgan analysts wrote.
The fintech selloff follows a strong rally in the fourth quarter, driven by Fed rate cut expectations and hopes for a more favorable regulatory environment under the Trump administration.