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Nextdoor’s decision to go public through a special purpose acquisition company was largely the result of favorable pricing compared with a traditional IPO, said Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark and an early investor in the neighborhood social network.

Gurley has been among the most vocal supporters of direct listings, another IPO alternative in which companies go public without selling shares at a steep discount to new investors. He said the average IPO in 2020 came with a 57% cost of capital.

“SPACs are remarkably cheap compared to mispriced IPOs,” Gurley told CNBC’s “TechCheck” on Friday.

Nextdoor announced plans earlier this week to pursue a SPAC sponsored by an affiliate of Khosla Ventures, Vinod Khosla’s investment firm. In a SPAC, a so-called blank check company raises capital through a public offering and then shops around for a potential target, which becomes the operating entity after the transaction closes.

The pace of new SPACs slowed earlier this year after smashing a record in 2020 and setting a new high in the first quarter of this year. The pullback came after the SEC issued accounting guidance that would classify SPAC warrants as liabilities instead of equity instruments.

However, activity has resumed. In addition to Nextdoor, fintech company Circle, space companies Planet Labs and Satellogic and solar power firm Heliogen all announced deals this week. Still, the proprietary CNBC SPAC Post Deal Index, which is composed of the largest SPACs that have announced a target or those that have already completed a SPAC merger within the last two years, is down 3.8% in 2021, after tumbling in February and March.

Nextdoor’s transaction will bring in $686 million and value the company at $4.3 billion. Benchmark first invested in 2011 at a post-money valuation of just over $30 million, according to PitchBook.

The company says its site is now used in more than 275,000 neighborhoods around the world and in nearly 1-in-3 U.S. households. It allows users to organize events, sell or give away items and alert neighbors to danger. Earlier this year, Nextdoor debuted an anti-racism notification after long facing criticism for racist comments on its platform.

In 2018, Nextdoor hired Sarah Friar, who was finance chief at Square, as its new CEO, replacing the company’s founder, Nirav Tolia. Before that, Friar spent over a decade at Goldman Sachs.

Gurley said Friar ran all the numbers and closely considered an IPO before making the ultimate decision.

“Sarah Friar is an extremely experienced CEO with tons of Wall Street experience, both having worked at an investment bank and as CFO of a public company,” Gurley said. “She dual-tracked it, was looking at the IPO and just said I have more control and get better economics by going the SPAC route.”

Investing to fix the labor shortage

Gurley appeared on “TechCheck” alongside Sumir Meghani, the co-founder and CEO of Instawork, an online jobs marketplace. Instawork on Thursday announced it raised $60 million in a financing round led by Craft Ventures.

The start-up connects workers in the restaurant, hospitality and retail industries with hourly jobs at companies in need of labor. The transaction comes a week after Suzanne Clark, CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told CNBC that the biggest problem facing American businesses is hiring enough qualified workers. She pointed to a lack of skilled labor, Covid-era jobless benefits, insufficient access to child care, and work visa restrictions.

“Our professionals make nearly double minimum wage,” Meghani said. “Our best professionals can make even more than that. They can get paid instantly when they clock out of a shift. We’re rewarding quality on Instawork with faster pay, higher pay but most of all flexibility.”

Gurley, who was one of the earliest backers of Uber, said Benchmark is focusing heavily on the category and has made about eight investments in “these types of marketplaces.”

— CNBC’s Pia Singh contributed to this report.

WATCH: U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO on infrastructure outlooks

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Navan sets price range for IPO, expects market cap of up to $6.5 billion

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Navan sets price range for IPO, expects market cap of up to .5 billion

FILE PHOTO: Ariel Cohen during a panel at DLD Munich Conference 2020, Europe’s big innovation conference, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich.

Picture Alliance for DLD | Hubert Burda Media | AP

Navan, a developer of corporate travel and expense software, expects its market cap to be as high as $6.5 billion in its IPO, according to an updated regulatory filing on Friday.

The company said it anticipates selling shares at $24 to $26 each. Its valuation in that range would be about $3 billion less than where private investors valued Navan in 2022, when the company announced a $300 million funding round.

CoreWeave, Circle and Figma have led a resurgence in tech IPOs in 2025 after a drought that lasted about three years. Navan filed its original prospectus on Sept. 19, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN.”

Last week, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that has substantially reduced operations inside of agencies including the SEC. In August, the agency said its electronic filing system, EDGAR, “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”

Cerebras, which makes artificial intelligence chips, withdrew its registration for an IPO days after the shutdown began.

Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and technology chief Ilan Twig started the company under the name TripActions in 2015. It’s based in Palo Alto, California, and had around 3,400 employees at the end of July.

For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year. Competitors include Expensify, Oracle and SAP. Expensify stock closed at $1.64on Friday, down from its $27 IPO price in 2021.

Navan ranked 39th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, after also appearing in 2024.

WATCH: Brex CEO on Navan partnership

We developed 'best in class' enterprise travel expense solution, says Brex CEO on Navan partnership

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Tech megacaps lose $770 billion in value as Nasdaq suffers steepest drop since April

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Tech megacaps lose 0 billion in value as Nasdaq suffers steepest drop since April

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer during a CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer event at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 7th, 2025.

Kevin Stankiewicz | CNBC

Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following President Donald Trump’s threats for increased tariffs on Chinese goods.

With tech’s trillion-dollar companies occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines send the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.

After market close on Friday, Trump declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and on Nov. 1 it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”

Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about 2% in extended trading following the post.

The president’s latest threats are disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.

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In late September, Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline by nearly $229 billion on Friday.

OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only seeing rising demand.

In September it introduced the Sora 2 video creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now boasts over 800 million weekly users. But Microsoft must buy infrastructure to operate its cloud data centers. Microsoft’s market cap dropped by $85 billion on Friday.

The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. It competes with Microsoft to rent out GPUs from its cloud data centers, but it doesn’t have major business with OpenAI. The online retailer is now worth $121 billion less than it was on Thursday.

“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”

Tesla, which introduced lower-priced vehicles on Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.

The automaker reports third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week. Nvidia reports in November.

Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%, respectively.

WATCH: Pres. Trump: Calculating massive increase of tariffs on Chinese products into U.S.

Pres. Trump: Calculating massive increase of tariffs on Chinese products into U.S.

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Govini, a defense tech startup taking on Palantir, hits $100 million in annual recurring revenue

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Govini, a defense tech startup taking on Palantir, hits 0 million in annual recurring revenue

Govini, a defense tech software startup taking on the likes of Palantir, has blown past $100 million in annual recurring revenue, the company announced Friday.

“We’re growing faster than 100% in a three-year CAGR, and I expect that next year we’ll continue to do the same,” CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview. With how “big this market is, we can keep growing for a long, long time, and that’s really exciting.”

CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate, a measurement of the rate of return.

The Arlington, Virginia-based company also announced a $150 million growth investment from Bain Capital. It plans to use the money to expand its team and product offering to satisfy growing security demands.

In recent years, venture capitalists have poured more money into defense tech startups like Govini to satisfy heightened national security concerns and modernize the military as global conflict ensues.

The group, which includes unicorns like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, Shield AI and artificial intelligence beneficiary Palantir, is taking on legacy giants such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, that have long leaned on contracts from the Pentagon.

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Dougherty, who previously worked at Palantir, said she hopes the company can seize a “vertical slice” of the defense technology space.

The 14-year-old Govini has already secured a string of big wins in recent years, including an over $900-million U.S. government contract and deals with the Department of War.

Govini is known for its flagship AI software Ark, which it says can help modernize the military’s defense tech supply chain by better managing product lifecycles as military needs grow more sophisticated.

“If the United States can get this acquisition system right, it can actually be a decisive advantage for us,” Dougherty said.

Looking ahead, Dougherty told CNBC that she anticipates some setbacks from the government shutdown.

Navy customers could be particularly hard hit, and that could put the U.S. at a major disadvantage.

While the U.S. is maintaining its AI dominance, China is outpacing its shipbuilding capacity and that needs to be taken “very seriously,” she added.

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