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.
Kraft Heinz is splitting into two companies a decade after they joined in a massive merger that created one of the biggest food companies on the planet. One of the companies will include brands such as Heinz, Philadelphia cream cheese and Kraft Mac & Cheese. The other will include brands like Oscar Mayer, Kraft Singles and Lunchables. When the company formed in 2015 it wanted to capitalize on its massive scale, but shifting tastes complicated those plans, with households seeking to introduce healthier options at the table. Kraft Heinz's net revenue has fallen every year since 2020.
About 780,000 pressure washers sold at retailers like Home Depot are being recalled across the U.S. and Canada, due to a projectile hazard that has resulted in fractures and other injuries among some consumers.
President Donald Trump has fired one of two Democratic members of the U.S. Surface Transportation Board to break a 2-2 tie ahead of the board considering the largest railroad merger ever proposed.
Ford is recalling more than 355,000 of its pickup trucks across the U.S. because of an instrument panel display failure that’s resulted in critical information, like warning lights and vehicle speed, not showing up on the dashboard.
