Fantasy sports company DraftKings will go public after merging with Diamond Eagle Acquisition Corp. ($DEAC) and SBTech. When the bookmaker makes it official, the company will have a market cap of $3.3 billion and be listed on Nasdaq u.
DraftKings CEO Jason Robins said the company was looking to achieve three objectives: acquire SBTech, raise capital to fund launching in new states for sports betting, and go public. The deal got “all three of those objectives accomplished in one transaction,” he told Cheddar.
Diamond Eagle will change its name to DraftKings Inc. once the transaction closes, which is expected in the first half of 2020 and will create the first vertically integrated sports betting company. Through the merger with SBTech, which is a sports betting technology provider, and the already special purpose acquisition company Diamond Eagle Acquisition ($DEAC), DraftKings will become a publicly-traded company without undergoing a lenghthier, traditional IPO process.
According to the CEO, DraftKings uses a lot of its own homegrown technology, but he noted that "the one thing that’s not is the bets that are made and the systems and operations behind that.”
“We’re a tech company, we’re a product company and, for us, it’s absolutely critical to own and control that,” Robins said of SBTech.
Robins will lead the new DraftKings, and the company will remain headquartered in Boston, where it is one of the largest tech companies in the city, but will reincorporate in Nevada. The company was founded in 2012 and most recently had attempted to merge with its rival FanDuel, but the deal was abandoned after federal regulators sued.
Seth Schachner, Managing Director at Strat Americas, talks Disney's taking control of Hulu, Warner Bros. and Discovery's split and how if affects the viewers.
The Tony Awards on Sunday lured 4.85 million viewers to CBS, its largest broadcast audience in six years. CBS says Monday that Nielsen data shows the telecast — hosted by “Wicked” star Cynthia Erivo — scored a 38% increase over last year’s 3.53 million viewers. That’s the largest audience for the Tonys since 2019, when the telecast that year nabbed 5.4 million viewers and “Hadestown” was crowned best new musical. The latest version also had to compete with the second game of the NBA Finals, between the Thunder and Pacers,
After stumbling out of the starting gate in Big Tech’s pivotal race to capitalize on artificial intelligence, Apple tried to regain its footing Monday during a developers conference that focused mostly on incremental advances and cosmetic changes in its technology.
Six weeks before UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down outside a Manhattan hotel last December, Luigi Mangione mused about rebelling against “the deadly, greed fueled health insurance cartel” and expressed that killing the executive “conveys a greedy bastard that had it coming."
Shaquille O’Neal and Allen Iverson once clashed on the court in the 2001 NBA Finals, but now the basketball legends are joining forces to revive the Reebok brand they helped make iconic.
Midea is voluntarily recalling about 1.7 million of its popular U and U+ Smart air conditioners because pooled water in the units may not drain fast enough, leading to mold growth.
