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Satirical News Website The Daily Mash Sold for £1.2m

The satirical news website the Daily Mash, which provided the inspiration for the Nish Kumar BBC comedy show The Mash Report, has been sold for £1.2m.

The site is known for spoof headlines such as “It wasn’t worth it, says 103-year-old vegetarian”, “Only people who still want Brexit are inexplicably angry posh couple with two labradors”, and “Man worried he’s the last of his friends to have an article in Guardian”.

Its co-founders Paul Stokes and Neil Rafferty, former national newspaper reporters, are in line for a payday after they agreed to sell the site’s parent company, Mashed Productions, to Digitalbox, a media company in Bath.

The Daily Mash has a loyal following built up during 12 years of publishing. Despite the site’s relatively high profile, its parent company recorded revenues of £396,000 and a profit before tax of £135,000 in the last financial year, showing the tight budgets in ad-supported online publishing.

The site, which has two full-time members of staff and relies on a pool of freelance writers, will become part of Digitalbox, which also owns the website Entertainment Daily. The combined business is intending to list on the Aim stock market next month and then acquire other digital publishers.

In a decidedly un-Daily Mash statement to the stock market, the new parent company said the site was “capable of consistently generating high-quality, original humour content which is extremely hard to replicate” and “has increasingly turned its attention to satirising social tribes and trends to produce highly viral content of a more timeless nature that has a much broader and longer appeal than daily news”.

The Daily Mash attracted 1.8 million visitors a month, the vast majority of them in the UK and most of them coming from social media referrals from the likes of Facebook.

Rafferty, the Daily Mash’s editor-in-chief, said: “This is a great opportunity for the Mash to build on what we have created so far. My co-founder, Paul Stokes, did an incredible job building a profitable business from the ground up.”

The site has occasionally spread confusion, notably when Sky News inadvertently read out a spoof Daily Mash headline claiming the former London mayor Ken Livingstone had a pet newt called Adolf, at the height of claims about antisemitism in the Labour party.

Read More – www.theguardian.com

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Liberty London department store could be sold for £350m

The department store Liberty London has been put on the market with a potential £350m price tag.

The retail landmark, which was founded by Arthur Lasenby Liberty in 1875 with a £2,000 loan from his future father-in-law, has grown to become an international brand that sells its tana lawn fabrics and luxury leather goods around the world.

The private equity firm BlueGem bought Liberty for £32m in 2010 and refinanced it in 2014, reducing its stake to about 40% and allowing some investors to take cash out but nearly all to reinvest in buying the department store for £165m.

It is understood BlueGem is looking to offload its stake. It is unclear if other investors are willing to sell.

Group sales reached £133m in the year to February 2018, up 8% year on year, while pretax profits more than tripled to nearly £7m. About 60% of the store’s profits come from selling own-label merchandise.

The Tudor-revival store on Great Marlborough Street in central London opened in 1924 and has been extensively renovated by its current owners as a home for designer fashion as well as beauty, accessories, homewares and haberdashery.

The company was once listed on the London Stock Exchange but controlled by property company MWB Group. It lost money for years, making sales of about £70m and losses of £4.5m in 2009.

BlueGem had hoped to bring Liberty back to the stock market last year, but has now hired UBS to seek a private buyer, according to Sky News, which first reported the potential sale.

The retailer is on the market during a period of great upheaval for department stores, which face competition from online shopping and a squeeze on consumer spending.

House of Fraser went into administration last summer and was bought out by Mike Ashley’s Sports Direct group. He also has his eye on Debenhams, which is struggling for survival after several years of poor trading and rising costs.

Read More – www.theguardian.com

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Thoma Bravo Continues Frenetic Year With $3.7B Mortgage Deal

Thoma Bravo has wasted no time getting a jump on 2019.

The tech-focused buyout juggernaut completed its $950 million purchase of application security business Veracode from Broadcom on the first day of the year. Ten days later, Thoma Bravo finalized its acquisition of cybersecurity business Imperva for roughly $2.1 billion. And at the end of the month, the firm closed its 13th flagship fund on $12.6 billion, its biggest vehicle ever, topping a predecessor that brought in $7.6 billion in 2016 and joining an elite group of private equity firms that have raised $10 billion or more for buyout funds this decade.

Now, in its latest move, the Chicago-based investor has agreed to take mortgage software maker Ellie Mae private in a deal worth some $3.7 billion. Thoma Bravo will pay $99 per share in cash for the company, marking a 47% premium to its average closing share price over the 30 days ended February 1 and a roughly 21% premium to its Monday close. Based in Pleasanton, CA, Ellie Mae will now have a 35-day go-shop period to seek a better deal; otherwise, the buyout is expected to close in 2Q or 3Q.

Founded in 1997, Ellie Mae is the creator of a cloud-based platform used by banks, credit unions and mortgage companies to originate loans, with a client list that includes powerful US government-backed entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (Despite its similar name, Ellie Mae has no direct link to either company or to the government). Over the past eight years, the company has been on an incredible upward trajectory, driven by low interest rates and the recovery of the housing market. When Ellie Mae went public back in 2011, it raised a modest $45 million and established an initial market value south of $150 million—or about 25 times less than its valuation in the Thoma Bravo deal.

Thoma Bravo has had an impressive upward climb of its own, with its 35 completed private equity deals in 2018 representing a YoY increase of nearly 60%, according to the PitchBook Platform. And the Ellie Mae deal is right in line with Thoma Bravo’s usual preferences: Since the start of 2010, more than 80% of the firm’s PE deals have come in the IT sector.

Read More – www.pitchbook.com

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DoorDash Adds $500M to Food Delivery Duel With Postmates

Lately, food delivery startup DoorDash has had a voracious appetite for capital.

Six months after closing a $250 million Series E, the Bay Area company is in talks to raise around $500 million from Temasek Holdings at a valuation of more than $6 billion, per The Wall Street Journal, roughly 10 times what DoorDash was worth four years ago.

Backed by investors including CRV, Sequoia, Coatue Management and DST Global, DoorDash had a strong 2018 when it came to VC funding, pulling in more than $780 million and achieving unicorn status in March, following a $535 million round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Its valuation rose to $4 billion last August, following another $250 million fundraise.

DoorDash was founded in 2013 by a group of Stanford University students, including current CEO Tony Xu. The company has quickly grabbed a sizable market share and delivers food from restaurants to customers in more than 1,000 cities across the US and Canada. In January, it became the first food delivery startup to operate in all 50 states, per TechCrunch.

By now, it’s well-established that the growing trend of pondering a visually attractive menu online and ordering restaurant food from the comfort of your home is not going to fizzle out anytime soon. The global market for online food delivery is expected to reach $112 billion by 2023, according to Research and Markets, and competition in the space can be fierce.

One of DoorDash’s key competitors, food delivery unicorn Postmates, has also been grabbing headlines in the past week. Founded in 2011, the San Francisco-based company has hauled in plenty of capital as well, raising more than $670 million in VC funding overall, including a $100 million round in January from new investor BlackRock and a group of existing backers that includes Tiger Global. That latest round valued Postmates at $1.85 billion.

Read More – www.pitchbook.com