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<ul class="summary-list"><li>Shared-workspace company <keyword id="2918346" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="WeWork">WeWork</keyword> has agreed to go <keyword id="22377" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="public">public</keyword> via a <keyword id="1817616" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="SPAC">SPAC</keyword> merger.</li><li>It agreed to merge with the BowX Acquisition Corp. SPAC in a deal valuing it at $9 billion.</li><li>The deal comes two years after its failed IPO attempt. It was valued at $47 billion in 2019.</li></ul>WeWork is merging with a special-purpose acquisition company, SPAC, in a deal that values it at $9 billion including debt, the company said Friday.The merger with the BowX Acquisition Corp. SPAC would take the Softbank-owned WeWork public, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-ipo-fiasco-adam-neumann-explained-events-timeline-2019-9">two years after the shared-workspace company's disastrous attempt to file an initial public offering (IPO) in 2019</a>. <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/wework-agrees-to-spac-deal-that-would-take-startup-public-11616752804?mod=latest_headlines">The Wall Street Journal</a> first reported the merger Friday morning, and <a href="https://www.wework.com/ideas/newsroom-landing-page/newsroom/posts/wework-to-become-publicly-traded-via-spac-merger-with-bowx-acquisition-corp">WeWork then confirmed the deal in a press release</a>.A <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-a-spac">SPAC</a> is a company created solely to merge or acquire another business and take it public, making it a cheaper, faster alternative to an IPO, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-a-spac">Insider's Martin Daks reported</a>.The valuation is less than a quarter of the $47 billion valuation <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/weworks-nightmare-ipo?r=ts-sub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">WeWork</a> achieved in January 2019, which was in part thanks to a SoftBank investment in January 2019.But its valuation had plummeted more than 80% to below $5 billion by September 2019. The plunge reflected growing concerns about the company's business model, the controversial behavior of CEO Adam Neumann, and lax corporate governance.The BowX Acquisition Corp. SPAC's sponsor is Bow Capital Management, run by Vivek Ranadivé, who also owns the NBA team the Sacramento Kings. NBA legend Shaquille O'Neal is an advisor to Bow Capital Management. The SPAC raised $420 million last year.The transaction would be funded with BowX's $483 million of cash in trust, WeWork said, as well as $800 million private investment from groups including Insight Partners, funds managed by Starwood Capital Group, Fidelity Management &amp; Research Company LLC, Centaurus Capital, and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, WeWork said in its press release.WeWork will get about $1.3 billion of cash from the deal, "which will enable the company to fund its growth plans into the future," it said.Ranadivé and Deven Parekh, managing director of Insight Partners, will join WeWork's board, the company said.<h2>SoftBank's WeWork bailout</h2>After WeWork's IPO plans fell through, SoftBank agreed to purchase $3 billion in stock from investors and employees in a bailout package in October 2019. Neumann agreed to step down from the board.But <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/softbank-is-abandoning-its-3-billion-wework-tender-offer-2020-4" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">SoftBank walked away from the deal</a> in April 2020. SoftBank in February of this year reached a proposed settlement with WeWork and Neumann, where it<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/adam-neumann-wework-founder-softbank-payout-settlement-lawsuit-2021-2" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> would buy around half of its original $3 billion stock purchase</a>, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/wework-co-founder-adam-neumann-nears-settlement-with-softbank-11614033832?mod=tech_lead_pos2" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">the Wall Street Journal</a> reported at the time.<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-co-founder-adam-neumann-is-stepping-down-as-ceo-2019-9">Neumann stepped down as CEO</a> in 2019 after the failed IPO, and sued SoftBank.Under WeWork and SoftBank's proposals, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/softbank-wework-stock-adam-neumann-board-payout-wework-ipo-settlement-2021-2">Neumann would leave the company's board</a>, too, and <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/adam-neumann-wework-founder-softbank-payout-settlement-lawsuit-2021-2">be paid about $480 million for a quarter of his shares in the company</a>, the Journal reported.Softbank owns a majority stake in WeWork.

WeWork has agreed to go public via a SPAC merger. The deal values it at $9 billion, less than a quarter of its 2019 valuation.

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">EQT Ventures</div></div></div><ul><li>EQT Ventures has developed Motherbrain, an AI-powered software program to help it find new startups in which to invest. </li><li>Motherbrain is treated as a partner at the firm, and even has her own e-mail address. </li><li>EQT Ventures partner Alastair Mitchell believes that the venture capital industry is 20 years behind other kinds of investors because it doesn't embrace algorithms or data in making deals. </li><li>Some other VCs believe that no machine can replace the human touch in dealmaking.</li></ul>Stockholm-based investment firm EQT Ventures has 30 employees. Among them, the firm has one partner who stands out from the rest. Like EQT Venture's other partners, she has a company email address, a short bio on the company's website, and a record of insightful market predictions. But there's one small catch: She isn't actually human.Her name is "Motherbrain" and she's a powerful, data-driven machine overseen by a team of data scientists and software developers. Her job description: Use all of that data to predict which startups will become billion dollar companies, faster than anyone else in venture capital."It's a 'she,' actually. We refer to her as a 'she,'" Alastair Mitchell, a founding partner at the firm said in a phone conversation, after I referred to Motherbrain multiple times as "it.""She's a core part of our thesis," he continued. "When we founded EQT we wanted to disrupt European ventures. We had multiple approaches to disrupting venture capital, and one of our main interests was the way in which software and AI will disrupt venture capital itself." Already, Mitchell said that Motherbrain has found two formerly undiscovered companies for the firm, one of which is currently unannounced. The other company is a remote desktop service called AnyDesk, which EQT Ventures led a €6.5 million investment in earlier this year."When we invested in them, they were a team of 15 people based out of a small town in Germany," said Mitchell. "They weren't on anyone's network. They weren't on Pitchbook or Crunchbase, they hadn't raised any angel money or talked to investors. But they had built an amazing bit of software."With Motherbrain, Mitchell and his firm have taken a bold stance in an important debate at the center of the venture capital world: In an industry that drives technological innovation, how much should technology itself influence the way firms invest?<h2>'The VC fund of the future will not be based purely on the old boy's club of internal partners'</h2>For EQT Ventures and its team, data is the key to not only informing whether or not a startup will be a good investment in the future, it's a route to discovering great companies as well. "Clearly the more startups you see, the more likely you are to find the better deal," said Mitchell. "It's a data-based problem. The more data you have, the more companies you see, and then you can make better decisions faster."Typically, investors rely on their professional and social networks to hear about interesting companies and notable new technological innovations. But even the most well-connected investor will fall short of a software program that's tasked with the exclusive job of combing the internet in search of undiscovered startups. "It seems totally ludicrous that this process of discovering companies could not be dramatically improved through the use of modern data and AI," said Mitchell. "It's a pretty obvious conclusion that the VC fund of the future will not be based purely on the old boy's club of internal partners, but on the data and software they use to source and pick those companies."While Mitchell declined to disclose the exact specifics of how Motherbrain's proprietary technology works, he said that its AI-powered software discovered AnyDesk's software by tracking down the large number of web downloads it regularly received. "We wouldn't have been able to discover this company without Motherbrain, because there's no way we would have known to look for it," said Mitchell.Mitchell also said that Motherbrain's data revealed that AnyDesk was poised to outpace a $2 billion competitor in its field, meaning that EQT was going to get in on the deal early.In addition to AnyDesk, Mitchell credits Motherbrain with one of EQT's best investments in a fast-growing Finnish gaming company called Small Giant Games. "It's an unbelievable unicorn company. It's gone from taking in $50,000 in a month to $15 million a month in just over a year," he said.Mitchell said that the decision to invest was almost entirely based on Motherbrain's insight."We entirely made the decision to invest in them based on data," "We looked at the trends within the data, and the potential monetization. From that information, we were able to make an investment."<h2>Can a machine invest as well as a human?</h2>While data typically plays a large role in traditional venture capital, firms differ in their approach. In multiple conversations with Business Insider, many venture capitalists have said that their investing decisions are based on a number of contributing factors. Tangible data like metrics and analytics are big part of the process, they say, but there's also a fundamental human element that goes into calling a good deal, as well. Some call it intuition. Others describe it as emotional intelligence. Still others describe it as instinct; a gut feeling that guides the final decision. Or, as Deven Parekh, managing director at Insight Venture Partners puts it: "At the end of the day, for now at least, venture capital is still a human decision business. Determining a good deal still requires human judgement." But does it?According to Mitchell, venture capital's current reliance on human insight has placed the industry abysmally behind the data-driven approach traditionally used by institutional investors."Venture capital is probably 20 years behind given the fact that the stock market has been trading algorithmically for many years," said Mitchell. "Right now, the classic phrase that investors would use is that the industry is about 98% human pattern recognition. 2% is based on data."This paradigm, said Mitchell, is deeply flawed. While Mitchell said that EQT Ventures currently relies on a 50/50 split of human insight and AI-powered data, he suggests that an ideal investing model would rely more heavily on algorithms and machine-driven analytics. "I think we're going to end up around 80% data and 20% human insight and personal experience," he said. "In venture capital, we're investing in technology, but the industry itself is so far behind. The irony is never lost on me."<h2>Not every VC loves having that much data</h2>While most venture firms typically use at least some data to inform their deals, there's been debate over just how much of that information should be a part of the decision-making process. <a href="https://medium.com/social-capital/capital-as-a-service-a-new-operating-system-for-early-stage-investing-6d001416c0df">After Silicon Valley venture firm Social Capital announced plans to move to a more data-informed investment approach last year,</a> several partners left the firm. In conversations with Business Insider, multiple people familiar with the firm <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/social-capital-founding-partner-ted-maidenberg-is-joining-arjun-sethis-new-vc-firm-2018-7">suggested that the departures had resulted in part due to its move to data-driven investing.</a>See more: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/social-capital-founding-partner-ted-maidenberg-is-joining-arjun-sethis-new-vc-firm-2018-7">VCs are fleeing ex-Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya's firm to launch an offshoot fund: 'It's like Social Capital without Chamath'</a>"As soon as you move to algorithms and you're just purely data-driven, you're going to lose the sensibility of a company," one person familiar with the departures who asked not to be identified told Business Insider at the time. "I don't care if you're the founder of a tech startup or a VC. Being disconnected from the touch is damaging."Social Capital is far from being the only venture firm to express a growing interest in data. GV (formerly Google Ventures) has long distinguished itself as leader in data driven investing.<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/technology/venture-capital-blends-more-data-crunching-into-choice-of-targets.html"> In a 2013 interview with the New York Times,</a> a managing partner at the firm said that data was a critical component of its decision-making process. "We have access to the world's largest data sets you can imagine, our cloud computer infrastructure is the biggest ever," <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/technology/venture-capital-blends-more-data-crunching-into-choice-of-targets.html">he said.</a> "It would be foolish to just go out and make gut investments."<h2>This could be the future of VC</h2>Mitchell predicts that data-driven investing is still only in its very nascent stages. In the upcoming years, venture firms will run with a deeper reliance on AI-sourced insights, he said. "In the future, you're going to see the rise of small startup investment shops that will be run exclusively by engineers," he said. "They'll say, 'Oh, we can run this better than everyone else and raise money off the back of the software we make.'"Not every investor seems sure about the algorithmic future of investing."Oftentimes, the best deals aren't clear," said Insight Venture Partner's managing director Deven Parekh. "When you put an algorithm against an investment, I worry that the algorithm will focus on the lowest common denominators in the investment process."While Parekh said that data informs a large part of how his firm invests, he's speculative of the idea that AI-driven investing could be the future of venture capital."But who knows?" Parekh continued. "Will this evolve over the next thirty years? I don't know. But there's probably a lot of livelihoods that are at risk before we get to venture capital."For Mitchell, running a venture firm that actively cultivates its own proprietary tech is essential not only to investing but to attracting startup founders as well. "Our founders love it," he said. "They're on the cutting edge of data. They love that we have a team of 10 data scientists, and that we're iterating and testing our own software. We're not sitting in an ivy tower saying that we have the best insight based on our own gut feeling." <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-issues-problems-hardware-software-ios-2018-7">Everything wrong with the iPhone</a></h3> <div> </div> </div>

A partner at a $630 million fund reveals his firm's secret to scouting billion dollar companies - and says that the rest of venture capital is 20 years behind

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">APDemocratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks at the Democratic Party of Arkansas Jefferson Jackson dinner in North Little Rock, Ark.</div></div></div>WASHINGTON (AP) - Hillary Rodham Clinton's economic agenda targets companies that focus on short-term profits and high-speed trading instead of investing in workers. The Democratic presidential candidate's finance operation is going after their executives for another purpose - donations.A day after proposing higher capital gains taxes on short-term investors, Clinton raised at least $450,000 Tuesday night at the Chicago home of Raj Fernando, a longtime donor. His firm, Chopper Trading, specializes in high-frequency transactions and was recently purchased by Chicago-based competitor DRW.Clinton's summertime fundraising circuit highlights a central tension of her campaign: how to encourage financial executives to open their wallets for her presidential effort even as she comes out with plans aimed at reining multimillion-dollar paychecks. Since her first presidential campaign in 2008, income inequality has become a bigger force in Democratic <keyword id="6358883" type="PERSON" weightage="100" keywordseo="Politics">politics</keyword>, with liberal voters clamoring for candidates who will take a sharply populist turn and enforce tough new regulations on Wall Street.The early outlines of Clinton's economic plans have included steps to raise taxes on hedge fund and private equity bonuses, penalize short-term investors with higher tax rates and strengthen penalties for rogue executives who are involved in fraudulent deals on Wall Street. She wants further strengthening of financial regulations put in place after the 2008 financial crisis.In announcing her economic platform in New York, Clinton called some of the financial institutions led by her top contributors "too complex and too risky." She said "serious risks are emerging from institutions in the so-called shadow banking system, including hedge funds, high-frequency traders, non-bank finance companies."In New Hampshire in April, she singled out hedge fund managers who pay lower tax rates. "If it's just, you know, playing back in forth in the global marketplace to get one-10th of 1 percent advantage, maybe we should not let that go on because that is unfortunately kind of at the root of some of the economic problems that we all remember painfully from '08."Clinton has avoided the kind of rhetoric that Obama used to describe the industry - "fat cat bankers on Wall Street," the president said in 2009 - after he raised millions from the industry in his first presidential campaign. Obama had pushed for the 2010 regulations.Alan Patricof, a private equity pioneer and longtime Clinton donor, said Obama was polarizing on the issue but Clinton "is being very realistic" and he's not aware of donors from the industry holding back from her.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Thomson ReutersU.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at the Iowa Democratic Party's Hall of Fame dinner in Cedar Rapids</div></div></div>Nor is she shy about turning to them for campaign money, sometimes in events at executives' homes. As she's put it about her aggressive fundraising operation, Republicans and their allies will spend billions of dollars to defeat Democrats and "we're going to have to be in a position where we can defend ourselves."In her first campaign finance report, people who listed occupations in banking, finance, investment, money management, private equity or venture capital contributed more than $1.6 million to Clinton's campaign, according to a review by The Associated Press. The vast majority of those checks were for the maximum legal amount of $2,700.Following the event in Chicago with Fernando, Clinton was attending a Wednesday fundraiser hosted by George Reddin, a North Carolina-based managing director of FMI Capital Advisors who has specialized in mergers and acquisitions in the construction materials industry.About a dozen of Clinton's top campaign bundlers - donors who have raised at least $100,000 for her presidential bid - work in finance and investing, such as private equity investors Imaad Zuberi and Deven Parekh and hedge fund managers Marc Lasry and Orin Kramer.Clinton also has appeared at fundraisers held by Doug Teitelbaum, founder of investment firm Homewood Capital, and Lisa Perry, whose husband, Richard, is a top hedge fund executive.Morgan Stanley vice chairman Tom Nides, who worked for Clinton at the State Department, said the new policies haven't caused any waves on Wall Street and predicted they're unlikely to hamper Clinton's fundraising.As a senator representing New York, Clinton established strong relationships with Wall Street donors and Nides said she has maintained those ties, in part by carefully measuring the rhetoric she uses when she talks about the industry."She's been tough, but I don't think she's been irrational," he said. "People in our industry know they'll have someone who has a good reputation or at least someone who will listen to them."___Associated Press writer Julie Bykowicz contributed to this report.___Follow Ken Thomas and Lisa Lerer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kthomasdc and https://twitter.com/llerer Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Hillary Clinton is raising big money from the finance sector as she knocks the industry

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WeWork has agreed to go public via a SPAC merger. The deal values it at $9 billion, less than a quarter of its 2019 valuation.

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A partner at a $630 million fund reveals his firm's secret to scouting billion dollar companies - and says that the rest of venture capital is 20 years behind

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Hillary Clinton is raising big money from the finance sector as she knocks the industry

Ken Thomas and Lisa Lerer

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