Today the Financial Times reported a unique deal that will see several of early Twitter employees sell stock at a valuation of more than $9 billion to a fund managed by the BlackRock group.
The $80 million offer to “a number” of early employees will allow them to shed some of their equity holdings in the social giant. The $9 billion valuation, according to the FT’s report, is an increase of more than 10% on the firm’s last priced funding. Facebook, another key player in the social web, by comparison, is worth more than $68 billion.
Blackrock is a multinational investment management corporation known to be the “the world’s largest asset manager.” Twitter has raised a total of $1.16B in funding, most recently bringing in 400M back in September, 2011.
Recently, rumors swirled that Twitter has reached the point of being a profitable company. The cash-rich firm, if profitable, would not be in need of external funding, which likely explains why it itself did not sell stock in the above deal.
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However, allowing early employees to cash in might lessen pressure on the company to go public, thus granting it more time to get its numbers straight for a strong IPO. Companies such as Zynga and Groupon made it onto the public markets, only to face stern repudiation of slowing revenue growth and elusive profits.
Top Image Credit: Jo Jakeman
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