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Air travelers walk toward a Lyft pickup area at Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles on Aug. 20, 2020.

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Lyft shares initially soared in extended trading on Tuesday but pulled way back after the company’s finance chief acknowledged on an earnings call that the release included a major error.

Here’s how the company did compared to estimates from analysts according to LSEG, formerly known as Refinitiv:

  • Earnings per share: 18 cents adjusted vs. 8 cents expected
  • Revenue: $1.22 billion vs. $1.22 billion expected

Lyft Chief Financial Officer Erin Brewer said on the earnings call that the company had misstated its margin expansion in the press release. Rather than 500 basis points, or 5%, of growth for 2024, as the company initially indicated, the actual increase will be 50 basis points, or 0.5%, Brewer said.

“This is actually a correction for the press release,” Brewer said.

The adjusted profit margin as a percentage of bookings will be 2.1%, up from 1.6% in 2023, Brewer added.

Lyft’s stock soared more than 60% minutes after the earnings release hit and is now up about 16%. The swift drop represents a market cap decline of well over $2 billion for a company that closed the day valued at less than $5 billion.

Revenue increased 4% from $1.175 billion a year earlier, Lyft said.

Gross bookings for the first quarter will be $3.5 billion to $3.6 billion, topping analysts’ estimates of $3.46 billion, according to StreetAccount.

“Given these factors, along with our plans for slightly lower capital expenditures for 2024 relative to 2023, we anticipate that Lyft will generate positive Free Cash Flow for the full-year for the first time,” Lyft said.

The company has struggled since its initial public offering in 2019, as it has bled cash to pay for drivers and compete with larger rival Uber. Even with Tuesday’s after-hours pop, the stock is still more than 80% off its debut price.

CEO David Risher, who took the helm in March of last year, said the company reached a record number of annual riders. The number of rides increased 26% from a year earlier to 191 million in the fourth quarter, and active riders rose 10% to 22.4 million.

Gross bookings for the year increased 14% to $13.8 billion, while bookings for the quarter rose 17% to $3.7 billion.

Prior to Tuesday’s report, Lyft shares were down 19% to start 2024. Uber shares are up 12%.

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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.

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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.

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Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

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