Chime Prices IPO Above Expected Range

Fintech firm Chime priced its IPO at $27 per share, above the expected range, in the latest sign of a revival in new listings.
The online banking startup raised around $700 million in the IPO from the sale of 25.9 million shares, while existing investors sold about 6.1 million shares for nearly $165 million.
Shares of companies that listed recently, like USDC stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Group, Israel-based retail trading platform eToro, and space and defense tech firm Voyager Technologies, all surged in their trading debuts.Fintech firm Chime late Wednesday priced its initial public offering (IPO) at $27 per share, above the expected range, in the latest sign of a revival in new listings.
Chime is set to start trading Thursday under the ticker symbol "CHYM." The online banking startup raised around $700 million from the sale of 25.9 million shares, while existing investors sold about 6.1 million shares for nearly $165 million.
Last week, Chime said the IPO price was expected to be between $24 and $26 per share.
Shares of companies that debuted recently, like USDC stable coin issuer Circle Internet Group (CRCL), Israel-based retail trading platform eToro (ETOR), and space and defense tech firm Voyager Technologies (VOYG), all soared in their first day of trading.
In its prospectus last month, Chime reported 2024 revenue of $1.67 billion and a $62.2 million loss from operations. The company noted that it averaged $251 in revenue for each of its 8.6 million active members.
Read the original article on Investopedia

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Yahoo

an hour ago

• Yahoo

Energy in Europe is also at stake as Israel-Iran tension escalates

Rising European energy prices are among the many risks of the current geopolitical crisis, which threatens to block one of the world's most important fuel shipping routes. Coupled with the trade war sparked by US tariffs, there are fears that the crisis may also drag down the global economy. The World Bank is expecting 2.3% growth for this year, after a 2.8% reading in 2024. Since Israel launched airstrikes against Iran's military and nuclear infrastructure on 13 June, oil prices have surged by more than 10% globally. High prices and supply disruptions, coupled with the implications of the trade war, are threatening to lower production globally. Markets are pricing in risks to the global oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply. Iran is controlling the highly strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which one-third of global seaborne oil and one-fifth of global LNG shipments travel. If that gets blocked, prices could skyrocket beyond $100. Currently, a barrel of crude oil is traded for more than $75, and international Brent is around $77. Related Israel-Iran crisis: How vital is the Strait of Hormuz for oil market? Israel-Iran conflict fuels best month for energy stocks since 2022 'I do not expect that the strait is going to be closed,' Dr. Yousef Alshammari, President of the London College of Energy Economics, said to Euronews Business. He added: 'It is simply because Iran needs the Strait of Hormuz open for ships to go through for its clients, India and China.' However, even when it is not closed, the passage has already impacted prices due to the risks associated with the crisis. Some oil tankers have refused to go through. According to the FT, the world's largest publicly listed oil tanker company Frontline said it would turn down new contracts to sail through the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, 'insurance companies are likely to charge more currently, while Qatar is trying to delay its LNG shipments going through the Strait,' added Alshammari. Natural gas fields in the region are also attracting attention. Iran shares the largest natural gas field in the world, the South Pars field, with Qatar. The liquefied natural gas (LNG) coming from this region is vital for the rest of the world, including Europe. Though the EU has adequate supplies of LNG at the moment, the bloc's dependence on global LNG makes it vulnerable to geopolitical shocks as it is lowering its dependence on Russian gas. As the market weighed the recent risk of supply disruptions, European gas prices climbed significantly. The primary benchmark for European gas prices, the Dutch TTF (Title Transfer Facility) rose to a three-month high, nearing €41/MWh Friday at midday in Europe. Europe's imports from Qatar are providing nearly 10% of its LNG needs. Other countries in the region, including Egypt, also export LNG to Europe. However, after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack, Israel closed down part of its own production, forcing Egypt to stop LNG shipments and prompting a spike in European natural-gas prices. Europe currently has a number of natural gas suppliers. Norway was the top supplier of gas to the EU in 2024, providing over 33% of all gas imports. Other suppliers included the United States, Algeria, Qatar, the UK, Azerbaijan and Russia. The largest LNG importing countries in the EU include France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium. If shipments from Qatar are impacted, Belgium, Italy and Poland are the most impacted, as the country supplies 38-45% of their LNG imports, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). The good news is that demand for gas is usually at its lowest level in Europe at this time of the year. Even so, the hotter-than-usual weather across the bloc is boosting demand for cooling, which could increase the need for energy in the coming weeks. 'Spikes in energy prices push up inflation, and can have a knock-on effect on the central bank's policy,' Alshammari said. Central banks, including the US Fed and the Bank of England, have stopped short on cutting interest rates as the uncertainty is rising. If they see that inflation is more persistent in the near term, and that — in the case of the ECB and the BoE — the 2% target is floating away, further monetary tightening could squeeze the economy with higher costs for borrowing and investment. "As a result of the Ukraine War, there was a pivot from the EU in particular to get their liquefied natural gas, their LNG gas, not from Russia but from producers including Qatar,' Marco Forgione, Director General of the Chartered Institute of Export and International Trade, told Euronews. He added that anything constraining the transit of liquefied natural gas will have a quick impact on the EU, 'particularly in the manufacturing sector'. Oil demand is the highest in summer, partially due to industrial activity. But current supply constraints and higher prices could further squeeze manufacturing. For European businesses, who are already facing heightened trade tensions linked to US tariffs, facing the current complications is "like playing four-dimensional chess', Forgione said. He predicted that sudden spikes in oil prices and depressed shipping rates may result in significant consumer price increases, supply shortages, and shrinkflation. This is where a product shrinks in size but the price remains the same. Iran's energy infrastructure is in the crosshairs of the conflict. The country is the ninth-largest oil producer globally. At full capacity, the country produces 3.8 million barrels of oil a day, according to the US Energy Information Administration. But due to Western sanctions, Iran's oil exports are mainly shipped to China and India. Iran exports 1.5 million barrels per day, providing 10% of China's oil imports. If the world's second-largest economy, China, is deprived of this import, it could impact its economy as it is forced to source this from elsewhere, meaning prices could skyrocket. The potential geopolitical consequences of the Iran-Israel conflict are leaving markets on edge, and it seems volatility is here to stay. Meanwhile, Europe's role in the conflict remains to be seen. 'My biggest worry is that it turns out to be a wider conflict, involving European countries, UK and France. This is the scenario that nobody wants to see happen,' added Alshammari. Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data

CNBC

an hour ago

• CNBC

Encountered a problematic response from an AI model? More standards and tests are needed, say researchers

As the usage of artificial intelligence — benign and adversarial — increases at breakneck speed, more cases of potentially harmful responses are being uncovered. These include hate speech, copyright infringements or sexual content. The emergence of these undesirable behaviors is compounded by a lack of regulations and insufficient testing of AI models, researchers told CNBC. Getting machine learning models to behave the way it was intended to do so is also a tall order, said Javier Rando, a researcher in AI. "The answer, after almost 15 years of research, is, no, we don't know how to do this, and it doesn't look like we are getting better," Rando, who focuses on adversarial machine learning, told CNBC. However, there are some ways to evaluate risks in AI, such as red teaming. The practice involves individuals testing and probing artificial intelligence systems to uncover and identify any potential harm — a modus operandi common in cybersecurity circles. Shayne Longpre, a researcher in AI and policy and lead of the Data Provenance Initiative, noted that there are currently insufficient people working in red teams. While AI startups are now using first-party evaluators or contracted second parties to test their models, opening the testing to third parties such as normal users, journalists, researchers, and ethical hackers would lead to a more robust evaluation, according to a paper published by Longpre and researchers. "Some of the flaws in the systems that people were finding required lawyers, medical doctors to actually vet, actual scientists who are specialized subject matter experts to figure out if this was a flaw or not, because the common person probably couldn't or wouldn't have sufficient expertise," Longpre said. Adopting standardized 'AI flaw' reports, incentives and ways to disseminate information on these 'flaws' in AI systems are some of the recommendations put forth in the paper. With this practice having been successfully adopted in other sectors such as software security, "we need that in AI now," Longpre added. Marrying this user-centred practice with governance, policy and other tools would ensure a better understanding of the risks posed by AI tools and users, said Rando. Project Moonshot is one such approach, combining technical solutions with policy mechanisms. Launched by Singapore's Infocomm Media Development Authority, Project Moonshot is a large language model evaluation toolkit developed with industry players such as IBM and Boston-based DataRobot. The toolkit integrates benchmarking, red teaming and testing baselines. There is also an evaluation mechanism which allows AI startups to ensure that their models can be trusted and do no harm to users, Anup Kumar, head of client engineering for data and AI at IBM Asia Pacific, told CNBC. Evaluation is a continuous process that should be done both prior to and following the deployment of models, said Kumar, who noted that the response to the toolkit has been mixed. "A lot of startups took this as a platform because it was open source, and they started leveraging that. But I think, you know, we can do a lot more." Moving forward, Project Moonshot aims to include customization for specific industry use cases and enable multilingual and multicultural red teaming. Pierre Alquier, Professor of Statistics at the ESSEC Business School, Asia-Pacific, said that tech companies are currently rushing to release their latest AI models without proper evaluation. "When a pharmaceutical company designs a new drug, they need months of tests and very serious proof that it is useful and not harmful before they get approved by the government," he noted, adding that a similar process is in place in the aviation sector. AI models need to meet a strict set of conditions before they are approved, Alquier added. A shift away from broad AI tools to developing ones that are designed for more specific tasks would make it easier to anticipate and control their misuse, said Alquier. "LLMs can do too many things, but they are not targeted at tasks that are specific enough," he said. As a result, "the number of possible misuses is too big for the developers to anticipate all of them." Such broad models make defining what counts as safe and secure difficult, according to a research that Rando was involved in. Tech companies should therefore avoid overclaiming that "their defenses are better than they are," said Rando.

Axios

2 hours ago

• Axios

Exclusive: Slide raises $25M Series A for data recovery

Slide, a data disaster recovery platform, locked up a $25 million Series A round led by Base10 Partners, cofounder and CEO Michael Fass tells Axios Pro. Why it matters: Business are searching for tools to protect data and business operations as ransomware and malware attacks increase and threats of network outages loom. How it works: Slide's business continuity and disaster recovery platform was built specifically for managed service providers that help secure small and medium-sized businesses. Catch up quick: The platform debuted in the market in February, but is already being used by hundreds of MSPs, Fass says. Zoom in: Outsiders Fund and Top Down Ventures also took part in the Series A. Founded in 2023, the Norwalk, Connecticut-based Slide has raised nearly $30 million. Context: Slide cofounder and chair Austin McChord was founder and CEO of security and cloud-based software company Datto, which was bought by IT management firm Kaseya in 2022 for about $6.2 billion. Fass served as general counsel and chief people officer at Datto. What they're saying: The Datto "transaction was not the outcome we had wanted," McChord says. "We thought, 'What if we start over and deliver the vision we have for MSPs?'"