The eToro logo is seen during the 2021 Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal.
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Stock brokerage platform eToro is getting interest from bankers and investors about a public market listing after its scrapped plans to go public via merger with a blank-check company, CEO Yoni Assia told CNBC.
“We definitely are eyeing the public markets,” Assia told CNBC in an exclusive interview last week. “I definitely see us becoming eventually a public company.”
“When is the ideal time to do that? We’re always evaluating the right opportunity at the right time and the right market,” he added.
Assia said that his brokerage company has built good relationships with exchanges, including the Nasdaq stock exchange.
EToro has already put the work in toward becoming a public company, he suggested, and the question of listing is more a matter of when, not if.
“It’s our business, right? Retail investors come to eToro to buy shares of a public company. So we’re happy to engage and build those relationships over time as we scale more.”
Figures shared by eToro with CNBC exclusively show that the firm recorded $630 million in revenue in 2023, more or less matching the $631 million in revenue it attracted in 2022.
But the company reported more than $100 million in EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization), an impressive margin for a retail brokerage business.
The company did not provide a comparable profit figure for 2022.
EToro relies mainly on fees related to trading, like spreads on buy and sell orders, as well as fees for non-trading activities like money withdrawals and currency conversion.
EToro now has 35.5 million registered users, and over 3 million funded accounts. The company crossed $10 billion in total customer assets under administration in 2023, according to its financials.
Assia also disclosed that eToro has purchased a company called Deep, which focuses on content automation.
This is an area the company plans to focus on heavily in 2024.
Assia said eToro has been using AI heavily in its business, particularly in content and marketing. Around 80% of all of eToro’s marketing context, graphics, content, and localization integrates AI, he added.
AI is also serving a use case in investing and trading, according to Assia, with the company focusing heavily on integrating this into the product experience.
AI-related stocks, meanwhile, have generated a great deal of buzz among eToro’s userbase.
“If we think about AI, and what is the holy grail of AI for our customers, it’s obviously generating alpha in the markets,” Assia told CNBC.
AI has become a buzzy area for investors following the explosion of interest surrounding ChatGPT, the AI chatbot developed by Microsoft-backed company OpenAI.
Learnings from the SPAC process
EToro, which lets users buy and sell stocks via an online platform, was originally meant to go public through a combination with the special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, FinTech Acquisition Corp — which belonged to Bancorp founder Betsy Cohen.
A SPAC is effectively a listed shell company that’s set up with the aim of taking another target company public. The trend was immensely popular during a boom in such listings in 2020 and 2021 that saw companies from Virgin Orbit to Cazoo go public in much-hyped deals. The hype has since faded.
But eToro shelved these plans, which would have given the company a valuation of $8.8 billion.
Assia, who claims to have begun his trading journey from an early age, said eToro has learned a lot from the experience, which saw FinTech Acquisition Corp plummet and eventually dissolve and liquidate.
“We’ve learned a lot from the experience, looking at public markets in the U.S. and seeing sort of the bubble burst,” Assia told CNBC.
“We said 2022 is the year of education for customers to understand that the markets don’t always go up,” Assia said. “And I think 2023 is probably an educational year around the globe.”
“When everybody’s pessimistic is when markets actually do go up.”
Since its shelved listing plans, eToro in March 2023 raised $250 million at a $3.5 billion valuation in a deal backed by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, ION Investment Group, and Velvet Sea Ventures.
Financial technology companies have had a tough time over the last couple of years following a spike in interest rates, which have clobbered some risk assets. More recently, companies have seen a better time in the public markets, with shares of Affirm and Coinbase up 172% and 165%, respectively.
That hasn’t yet translated into private markets which, on the whole, remain depressed from levels reached during the height of the 2020 and 2021 fintech boom.
Assia noted that retail investors aren’t quite yet back in full in the stock market, and are still facing challenges given the higher cost of living.
However, he expects things to improve in 2024 with the expectation that interest rates will be lowered by the U.S. Federal Reserve.
Assia said eToro was focused heavily on product in 2023, prioritizing things like a better advanced trading experience and technical analysis features for its more hardcore user base.
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
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The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
Elon Musk meets with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Blair House in Washington DC, USA on February 13, 2025.
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Tesla will open a showroom in Mumbai, India next week, marking the U.S. electric carmakers first official foray into the country.
The one and a half hour launch event for the Tesla “Experience Center” will take place on July 15 at the Maker Maxity Mall in Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai, according to an event invitation seen by CNBC.
Along with the showroom display, which will feature the company’s cars, Tesla is also likely to officially launch direct sales to Indian customers.
The automaker has had its eye on India for a while and now appears to have stepped up efforts to launch locally.
In April, Tesla boss Elon Musk spoke with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss collaboration in areas including technology and innovation. That same month, the EV-maker’s finance chief said the company has been “very careful” in trying to figure out when to enter the market.
Tesla has no manufacturing operations in India, even though the country’s government is likely keen for the company to establish a factory. Instead the cars sold in India will need to be imported from Tesla’s other manufacturing locations in places like Shanghai, China, and Berlin, Germany.
As Tesla begins sales in India, it will come up against challenges from long-time Chinese rival BYD, as well as local player Tata Motors.
One potential challenge for Tesla comes by way of India’s import duties on electric vehicles, which stand at around 70%. India has tried to entice investment in the country by offering companies a reduced duty of 15% if they commit to invest $500 million and set up manufacturing locally.
HD Kumaraswamy, India’s minister for heavy industries, told reporters in June that Tesla is “not interested” in manufacturing in the country, according to a Reuters report.
Tesla is looking to recruit roles in Mumbai, job listings posted on LinkedIn . These include advisors working in showrooms, security, vehicle operators to collect data for its Autopilot feature and service technicians.
There are also roles being advertised in the Indian capital of New Delhi, including for store managers. It’s unclear if Tesla is planning to launch a showroom in the city.