Nasdaq Jeff Thomas Senior Vice President and Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe Co-Founder & CEO pose with an opening ceremony gift before the remote ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell at the headquarters of DNA tech company 23andMe in Sunnyvale, California, U.S., June 17, 2021.
Peter DaSilva | Reuters
Once worth $6 billion, 23andMe has lost 98% of its value and is on the verge of being delisted from the Nasdaq after all of its independent board members resigned in September. So what happened?
Founded in 2006, 23andMe set out to revolutionize the once very exclusive genetic testing business with a direct-to-consumer model. Thanks to capital from high-profile backers and celebrity endorsements, the company was able to market its test kits at affordable prices.
Unlike competitors like Ancestry.com, 23andMe sought to leverage its database for drug discovery. The company went public in 2021 and was valued around $3.5 billion. The funding allowed 23andMe to develop its drug research team and spearhead partnerships with pharmaceutical companies.
“We’re really at a point in time where I’m ready to explode,” 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki told CNBC in 2021. “There’s huge opportunities in therapeutics and huge opportunities in our consumer business.”
Shortly after debuting on the Nasdaq, rising interest rates made it more difficult to raise funding, and sales began to fall. The company introduced a premium subscription product in 2020 that it hoped would make up for the lack of recurring revenue from its test kits, but that strategy failed to pan out. The company reported a $312 million net loss in the 2023 fiscal year, and by September 2023, 23andMe’s share price slid below $1.
Besides the financial concerns surrounding 23andMe, privacy concerns around the company’s genetic database have also ramped up. In October 2023, hackers accessed the information of nearly 7 million customers.
Asked by CNBC what would happen to 23andMe’s database if the company is sold or taken private, a company spokesperson said that Wojcicki has publicly shared that she intends to take the company private and is not open to considering third-party takeover proposals.
“Anne also expressed her strong commitment to customer privacy, and pledged to maintain the company’s current privacy policy, including following the intended completion of the acquisition she is pursuing,” the spokesperson said in an email.
Wojcicki submitted a proposal to take the company private in July, but it was rejected by a special committee formed by the company’s directors because the proposal did not provide a premium to the closing price of 40 cents per share at the time.
When 23andMe’s independent directors resigned in September, they cited frustration with Wojcicki’s “strategic differences” in her vision for the company.
Now, 23andMe faces a Nov. 4 deadline to keep its share price above $1 and locate new board members in order to remain listed on the Nasdaq. Watch the video above to learn more.
In this photo illustration, the Spotify music app is seen on a phone on June 04, 2024 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
Spotify is minting music millionaires.
Nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify in 2024, the company said Wednesday in its annual Loud and Clear Report.
Spotify said more than 80% of the artists in that pool didn’t have a song reach the app’s Global Daily Top 50 chart.
“Spotify has helped level the playing field for artists at every stage of their careers,” read a portion of the report. “Success in the streaming era doesn’t require a decade-spanning catalog nor a chart-topping hit.”
The news comes about a month after the company reported a fourth-quarter earnings beat that saw the Swedish music streamer record its first full year of profitability. The company said it paid an all-time high of $10 billion in royalties to the music industry for the year.
Marc Benioff, Chairman & CEO of Salesforce, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 22nd, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Salesforce on Wednesday announced plans to invest $1 billion in Singapore over the next five years.
The cloud software giant said the investment is designed to accelerate the country’s digital transformation and the adoption of Salesforce’s flagship AI offering Agentforce.
Salesforce is among the many technology companies hoping to boost revenue with generative AI features.
The company launched the newest version of Agentforce last month. It has previously described the system — which it says can tackle sophisticated questions in Salesforce’s Slack communications app, based on all available data — as the first digital AI platform for enterprises.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is scheduled to speak at CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE at around 9:25 a.m. Singapore time (9:25 p.m. ET) on Wednesday.
“We are in an incredible new era of digital labor where every business will be transformed by autonomous agents that augment the work of humans, revolutionizing productivity and enabling every company to scale without limits,” Benioff said in a statement.
“Singapore is at the forefront of this shift, and as the world’s largest provider of digital labor through our Agentforce platform,” he added.
Salesforce said Agentforce can help Singapore to “rapidly expand” its labor force in several key service and public sector roles at a time when the country is grappling with an aging population and declining birth rates.
Jermaine Loy, managing director of the Singapore Economic Development Board, welcomed Salesforce’s investment, saying it will help to boost the country’s efforts “to build a vibrant hub for AI innovation.”
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman stands on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) after ringing a bell on the floor setting the share price at $47 in its initial public offering (IPO) on March 21, 2024 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Reddit shares rose more than 10% on Tuesday, reversing a three-day slump that coincided with a broader decline among technology companies.
Despite Tuesday’s gains, Reddit shares are still roughly 30% below the close on Wednesday.
Reddit’s stock market upswing was likely bolstered by a Loop Capital analyst note published Tuesday that reiterated a buy rating and characterized the company’s shares as “extremely attractive.” The analyst note said that Reddit’s 50% drop on Wall Street in the past month “is excessive,” and that the social media company “has the biggest upside potential relative to Street estimates in our coverage universe.”
The company’s shares dropped more than 15% in February after the company reported weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter user numbers as a result of a Googlesearch change that temporarily hurt its search-derived traffic. Although Reddit said at the time that it had recovered from the algorithmic shift, the user number miss spooked investors.
Loop Capital managing director Alan Gould acknowledged in the note that investors are operating in a “risk-off market environment,” but he contended that Reddit “has been one of the top performing stocks over the past year,” aside from its most recent dip.
“RDDT wildly exceeded ours and Street estimates for 2024, which explains why the stock increased almost 7-fold from a $34 IPO price to a peak of $230 in less than a year,” Gould wrote, noting Reddit’s growing revenue and improved advertising tools, among other positive developments.
Reddit’s fourth-quarter sales grew 71% year over year to $428 million, which represents the fastest growth rate for any quarter since 2022.
“In our view, RDDT deserves the revaluation it had experiencing based on the growth it has shown in the recent earnings reports and future projected growth driven by the ability to narrow the ARPU gap, and data licensing possibilities,” Gould wrote.