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Fanatics logo is seen on the dugout wall before the game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Milwaukee Brewers at PNC Park on July 3, 2022 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Justin Berl/Getty Images)

Justin Berl | Getty Images

Fanatics has agreed to acquire the U.S. operations of PointsBet, marking the sports giant’s first major leap into U.S. sports betting.

The deal is worth about $150 million in cash. The companies announced the deal Sunday night soon after CNBC reported an agreement was reached.

“Fanatics and PointsBet are excited to enter into an agreement for Fanatics Betting and Gaming to acquire PointsBet’s U.S. business,” the companies said in a joint statement. “While there are still several steps in the process to complete the acquisition, both parties are confident in the outcome. Fanatics Betting and Gaming and PointsBet will provide further details of the proposed deal and timely updates in the coming weeks.”

Fanatics will gain access to at least 15 states with the deal, according to people familiar with the deal who declined to be named because discussions were private. Fanatics expects to have access to the majority of states where PointsBet operates by the start of the NFL season, according to one of the people.

PointsBet, whose shares are traded in Australia, is expected to hold a shareholder vote on the deal in late June. Only PointsBet’s U.S. assets are part of the deal. Fanatics will plan to fund some of the remaining cash flow burn from PointsBet, which has had to spend heavily on marketing to compete with larger rivals DraftKings and FanDuel.

PointsBet forecast a loss of between $77 million and $82 million for the second half of the year. Citing “very challenging” market conditions, the company said Sunday that it would need to raise additional capital at a “significant discount to recent market prices” in the near term if the deal with Fanatics somehow fell apart.

NBCUniversal will get proceeds from its previous deal with PointsBet and will no longer have an equity stake, according to PointsBet. NBC acquired a 4.9% equity stake in PointsBet in 2020.

Fanatics has been in talks with a number of different sports betting companies over the past year as it has plotted its path forward in mobile gambling.

“This is a 10-year journey,” Matt King, the CEO of Fanatics Betting, said at the SBC Conference earlier this month. “We’re going to move very methodically through that 10-year journey. And by doing that and taking that approach, it allows you to be a bit more considered in your decisions. You can kind of move slower, slightly slower today, in order to move fast later.”

Fanatics is a sports platform company with a private valuation of $31 billion. The company has forecast 2023 revenue of $8 billion.

Fanatics owns commerce assets, a sports trading card business, and is building out a sports betting division. The company acquired legendary trading card company Topps for $500 million last year.

Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of NBC Sports and CNBC.

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Bitcoin rises to a fresh record above $94,000 as investors watch Trump transition, ETF options

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Bitcoin rises to a fresh record above ,000 as investors watch Trump transition, ETF options

Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Bitcoin advanced past $94,000 on Wednesday for the first time as traders continued to monitor President-elect Donald Trump’s transition back to the White House and weighed early options trading on bitcoin ETFs.

The price of the cryptocurrency was last higher by more than 1% at $94,461.75, according to Coin Metrics. Earlier, it traded as high as $94,834.33.

Coinbase shares rose 2%. Meanwhile, MicroStrategy jumped 8%, bringing its week-to-date gains to 36%.

Bitcoin has been regularly hitting fresh records since the election, though in smaller increments since the postelection rally faded last week, on hopes that Trump will usher in a crypto-friendly era for the industry that includes a more supportive regulation and a potential national strategic bitcoin reserve or stockpile.

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Bitcoin continues its climb toward $95,000

Traders this week are keeping a close eye on Trump’s appointments for Treasury Secretary and the Securities and Exchange Commission chair.

“We’re still very much in a phase of kind of pricing in the Trump trade,” said Joel Kruger, market strategist at LMAX Group.

He also pointed to the “mainstream, institutional adoption that we’re getting by way of the approval of the bitcoin and ETH spot ETFs this year” and options trading on those ETFs going live beginning Tuesday, which he called “another reflection of the maturation of the crypto market.”

Options on BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) began trading on the Nasdaq Tuesday. The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), the Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust (BTC) and the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB) are expected to have options available Wednesday.

Elsewhere, traders are looking forward to Nvidia earnings after the bell, which could impact bitcoin’s price. The cryptocurrency often benefits from moves in risk assets broadly, more so this year as institutional investors have become more comfortable with it thanks to bitcoin ETFs.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC PRO:

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Alphabet’s VC arm backs little-known SAP rival Odoo, boosting valuation to $5.3 billion

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Alphabet's VC arm backs little-known SAP rival Odoo, boosting valuation to .3 billion

Fabien Pinckaers, CEO of Belgian-based enterprise software startup Odoo.

Odoo

Odoo, a startup taking on SAP in the realm of enterprise software, boosted its valuation to 5 billion euros ($5.3 billion) in a secondary share round led by Alphabet‘s venture fund and Sequoia Capital.

The Belgium-based company develops open-source enterprise resource planning software, with over 80 applications available on its platform offering businesses tools for accounting, customer relationship management, human resources and e-commerce and website building.

Fabien Pinckaers, CEO and co-founder of Odoo, told CNBC in an interview this week that his company didn’t have a need to raise any primary capital as it is “cash profitable” and growing revenue at a rate of 50% year-over-year. Enterprise resource planning, he said, is “still a very fragmented market.”

“The reason everybody [has] failed [in this market] is that it’s quite complex,” Pinckaers told CNBC. “Small companies have complex needs from accounting to inventory, to website, e-commerce, point-of-sale. It’s a lot and they don’t have budget, and they need something that is simple and affordable.”

“Nobody succeeded to get both,” he added. “You have complex products like SAP that run well for large companies. But it’s complex and expensive.”

Andrew Reed, partner at Sequoia Capital, added that the market Odoo is addressing “just requires more gestation time than most startups both because the core system is very complex, and making it simple to use for small businesses and various countries is no small feat.”

Humble beginnings

Odoo “is not your traditional Silicon Valley tech story,” according to Reed.

Pinckaers opened the company’s first-ever office 22 years ago on a farm in Belgium. That was all he could afford at the time. Later, as the company started bringing in revenue, Odoo opened two additional offices in Belgium, home to the firm’s research and development, support and technical teams.

Today, Pinckaers resides in India with his family. He’s lived there for a year now, working to expand the company’s presence there, hiring more people, increasing marketing and broadening Odoo’s overall partner network.

Odoo had billings of 370 million euros last year and is on track to top 650 million of billings in 2025 — after that, the company is hoping to top the 1 billion-euro billings milestone by 2027. Billings — or the total sum of all invoices for a given year — is Odoo’s preferred metric for tracking annual revenue performance.

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Around 80% of Odoo’s business today accounts for open-source software, with the remaining 20% coming from software licensed for a fee, Pinckaers said. Open source refers to a type of software that allows users to access the underlying code — most often free of charge — which they can then modify and adjust.

In no rush to IPO

Despite Odoo now being at the scale of an IPO-ready business, Pinckaers said he’s in no rush to take the company public. If anything, remaining private has given Odoo flexibility to stay focused on investing for the long term, he said.

Odoo’s private backers aren’t in a rush for the firm to go public, either. Alex Nichols, partner at Alphabet’s CapitalG, told CNBC that he’s not worried about “IPO timing,” adding that factors like public market conditions are ultimately “out of our control.”

Pinckaers built the business to the size it is today primarily by bootstrapping — that is, growing without raising external funding. Odoo hasn’t had to raise primary capital from investors in a decade, opting instead to let early investors and employees sell shares in secondary sales.

The last time Odoo secured primary funding was in 2014, when it raised $10 million in a Series B round. Prior to the latest secondary round, Odoo was most recently valued by investors at 3.2 billion euros.

Odoo’s other backers include the likes of private equity firms Summit Partners, Noshaq, and Wallonie Entreprendre, which all sold a portion of their shares to CapitalG and Sequoia as part of the 500-million-euro investment announced on Wednesday.

Even after selling a portion of its shares, Summit remains Odoo’s largest institutional shareholder. Pinckaers himself has never sold his own personal shares.

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Qualcomm says it expects $4 billion in PC chip sales by 2029, as company gets traction beyond smartphones

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Qualcomm says it expects  billion in PC chip sales by 2029, as company gets traction beyond smartphones

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon speaks at the Computex forum in Taipei, Taiwan, June 3, 2024.

Ann Wang | Reuters

Qualcomm said on Tuesday that it expects its push into new markets to generate an additional $22 billion per year by 2029.

Of that amount, roughly $4 billion will come from PC chips, Qualcomm said at its investor day on Tuesday. The chipmaker just introduced PC processors earlier this year, when it released Snapdragon X for Windows devices.

The latest forecast marks an important milestone for Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, who took over the company in 2021 with a promise to get past a reliance on smartphones. In fiscal 2024, Qualcomm’s handset business reported $24.86 billion in sales, about 75% of its entire chip business.

Qualcomm also said on Tuesday that automotive revenues would rise about 175% by 2029 to $8 billion, of which 80% is tied to contracts that have already been secured.

We have been on this trajectory realizing that the technologies we have developed over the many years can be very relevant to a number of different industries beyond mobile,” Amon said at the investor event.

Another $4 billion in revenue will come from industrial chips and $2 billion will come from chips for headsets, a category Qualcomm calls XR. About $4 billion of the forecast is a catch-all for other chip sales, like those for wireless headphones and tablets.

Qualcomm shares are up 16% this year, trailing the Nasdaq, which has gained 26%.

Qualcomm grew rapidly over the past decade as its modems and processors became essential parts for high-end smartphones, especially those running Google Android. Qualcomm also sells modems and related parts to Apple for its iPhones.

But the company has warned investors that Apple could choose to stop buying Qualcomm parts as soon as 2027. Qualcomm said on Tuesday that its growing businesses will more than offset any losses from Apple.

A Li Auto L9 electric vehicle (EV) is seen displayed at the Qualcomm booth during the first China International Supply Chain Expo (CISCE) in Beijing, China November 28, 2023. 

Florence Lo | Reuters

Qualcomm’s strategy under Amon has been to use the technology its developed for its handset chips, like modems, processors, and AI accelerators, in new markets, including cars, PCs, and virtual reality. The investor event was the first time in years that the company has given a forecast for those new markets. Qualcomm said its total addressable market is as large as $900 billion.

“We put a strategy in ’21, and we’re not changing our strategy,” Amon said.

Laptop and desktop chips are currently dominated by Intel, which has over 70% percent of the market, according to Mercury Research. Intel reported $29 billion in PC chip sales in its 2023.

“The competitive landscape changed between the Windows and Macs,” Amon said, referring to Apple’s move in 2020 to switch from Intel to its own processors. “We saw that as an opportunity, especially as the ecosystem did not have confidence in the existing players to actually deliver a solution.”

The forecast for XR headsets also hints at the growth potential of the VR market over the next five years. Qualcomm supplies chips to many of the top headset makers, including Meta for its Quest and Ray-Bans products.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, Qualcomm calls itself an “edge AI” company, in contrast to cloud-based AI that’s typically powered by Nvidia processors. Company officials didn’t rule out introducing data center products in an interview with CNBC.

Qualcomm suggested that its mobile chips will be able to run the kind of advanced AI that’s restricted to large server farms today, an indication that that company may benefit from the AI boom down the road as the technology becomes more efficient.

“What you can run on the cloud last year, you can run on the device this year,” Durga Malladi, Qualcomm’s senior vice president in charge of planning, said at the event.

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