Tech publisher IDG is being sold by investment firm China Oceanwide Holdings to a private equity investor Blackstone for $1.3 billion. IDG owns tech analyst firm IDC plus publications including CIO, Computerworld, and Tech Hive. It’s a fire-sale price: not much more than China Oceanwide reportedly paid for IDG in 2017 and fraction of IDG’s revenues, which are I’d guess are between $3 billion and $5 billion.
We have a tasty mix of investment news today, Dear Reader. First is pricing of marketing tech, data, and services vendor (and CDP) Zeta Global’s previously-announced IPO, which proposes to raise $250 million for a market cap of $2 billion or so. It’s a fairly modest 5x revenue, which will be around $400 million.
The virtual event industry is as hot as the publishing industry is not. Hybrid event platform Bizzabo is building on pandemic-driven growth and a $138 million Series E with the acquisition of AI-powered scheduling engine x.ai. They’ll use x.ai’s skills to enrich the experience of event attendees.
The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that could potentially ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell its holdings within a year. The bill now goes to the President Biden, who has said he will sign it. Court challenges are likely to follow.