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The eToro logo is seen during the 2021 Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal.

Pedro Fiúza | Nurphoto | Getty Images

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.

Then, in a deal reported exclusively by CNBC, eToro let early employees and investors sell $120 million worth of stock to existing shareholders in a secondary share sale.

That deal valued it slightly below $3.5 billion.

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.

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Here’s how fusion energy could power your home or an AI data center

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Here's how fusion energy could power your home or an AI data center

Clean Start: Fusion energy gets new look from startup Type One Energy

The artificial intelligence boom has sent energy demand soaring. Some of the supercomputers sucking up all that power are helping to find new energy sources.

Fusion energy is the process of forcing two hydrogen atoms to combine and form one helium atom, which releases huge amounts of power. It uses a stellarator, a type of fusion reactor invented in the 1950’s that produces heat.

Until now, the technology was too difficult to deploy commercially.

But this old concept has brand new potential. Type One Energy, a startup based in Tennessee, claims to have proven that fusion energy will be able to produce electricity in the next decade.

“It’s going to create heat that’s going to boil water, make steam, run a turbine and put fusion electrons on the power grid on a 24/7 reliable basis,” said Type One Christofer Mowry.

AI has made it all practical.

“Things have really accelerated remarkably over the last five or six years,” Mowry said. “The supercomputers have allowed industry, academia and large institutions to develop now and actually test at large scale the science machines that demonstrate the process.”

Dozens of other companies are working on different approaches to fusion energy, but Mowry said Type One is so far the only one with the proven stellarator technology to implement at existing power plants. It will soon be tested with the Tennessee Valley Authority.

TDK Ventures is betting that Mowry is right.

“With Type One Energy solutions, we expect outsized return potential,” said Nicola Sauvage, president of TDK Ventures. “Fusion is no longer science fiction, and Type One Energy’s technology is catching up fast to the vision of this low-cost, continuous green energy.”

Type One is also backed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Centaurus Capital, GD1, Foxglove Capital, and SeaX Ventures, and has raised a total of $82.4 million.

Fusion energy is different from nuclear power, and there’s no risk of a nuclear accident. The power source has no long-term radioactive waste, and, according to Mowry, can’t be weaponized.

But for handling AI, it could be a critical solution. Fusion energy can be deployed anywhere, whether it’s next to a data center or near a large industrial park that needs clean, reliable energy.

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CoreWeave shares soar 19% after $2 billion debt offering

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CoreWeave shares soar 19% after  billion debt offering

Michael Intrator, Founder & CEO of CoreWeave, Inc., Nvidia-backed cloud services provider, gestures during the company’s IPO at the Nasdaq Market, in New York City, U.S., March 28, 2025. 

Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters

CoreWeave shares popped 19% after announcing a $2 billion debt offering.

The renter of artificial intelligence data centers powered by Nvidia chips said it had priced the notes at 9.25%, with a June 2030 maturity date. The deal represents a $500 million increase from its initial announcement.

CoreWeave said it plans to use the capital to pay off outstanding debt. The company confirmed to CNBC that the debt offering was five times oversubscribed.

In its first-quarter earnings report last week, CoreWeave said that it raised a total of $17.2 billion in equity and debt “to support its strategy to drive the next generation of cloud computing for the future of AI.” The company topped revenues expectations but posted wider-than-expected net loss and said it plans to spend big on capital expenditures to support infrastructure demand.

Read more CNBC tech news

During an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” last week, CEO Michael Intrator defended CoreWeave’s spending plans after some investors cast doubt on its debt, and demand durability. He said the company is meeting “demand signals” from some of its major clients.

In a call with analysts, CoreWeave said it has no debt maturities until 2028 other than payments related to vendor financing and “self-amortizing debt through committed contract payments.” The company said it had about $3.8 billion in current debt and $4.9 billion in non-current debt at the end of the quarter.

A year ago, CoreWeave announced that it had raised $7.5 billion in debt, led by Blackstone and Magnetar, to more heavily invest in its cloud data centers. CoreWeave said in its IPO prospectus that it was “one of the largest private debt financings in history and signals the confidence that debt investors have in funding our company to build and scale the next generation AI cloud.”

CoreWeave counts Nvidia and Microsoft among its biggest customers and has signed two seperate deals with OpenAI, totaling nearly $16 billion.

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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says tariffs haven’t dented consumer spending

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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says tariffs haven't dented consumer spending

Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, speaks during an unveiling event in New York on Feb. 26, 2025.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Wednesday that the company hasn’t seen any signs of consumers tightening their wallets in the face of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs.

Jassy’s comments came during Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting, which was held virtually on Wednesday.

“We have not seen any attenuation of demand at this point,” Jassy said during a question-and-answer portion of the meeting. “We also haven’t yet seen any meaningful average selling price increases.”

Amazon and other retailers continue to digest the impact of Trump’s tariffs. Rival retailer Walmart warned last week that consumers could start seeing price hikes from tariffs later this month and in June. Within days, that sparked the ire of Trump, who urged the company to “EAT THE TARIFFS.”

Read more CNBC Amazon coverage

Target said Wednesday it will likely need to hike prices on some items, while Home Depot said it expects to maintain its current pricing levels.

Jassy said last month the company made some “strategic forward inventory buys” to stock up on goods and is “pretty maniacally focused” on keeping prices low for shoppers.

Some third-party sellers, which account for roughly 60% of products sold, have increased prices on certain items, while others have opted to keep prices steady, Jassy said on Wednesday.

“I think that the diversity and the size of our marketplace really helps customers have the best selection of the best prices,” Jassy said.

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