The company's headquarters are in New York.
Brendan McDermid.
After the digital media company went public in a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, the shares of the company plummeted.
The stock plunged as much as 31% in its debut after briefly surging as much as 20%. The shares ended the session at $8.56. The digital media company merged with another company.
The company was initially valued at about 1.5 billion dollars and given a war chest of cash to pursue acquisitions, like the $300 million acquisition of Complex Networks. Last year, HuffPost was bought by BuzzFeed.
According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, about 98% of the $288 million raised by the SPAC had been withdrawn by investors before going public.
In an interview with CNBC, the Chief Executive Officer of BuzzFeed said that he had anticipated high redemptions because the market went "ice cold" after the company went public.
Peretti said that they structured the deal so that they could get public and buy Complex regardless of redemption levels.
He said that they entered a market where companies that were not very good were raising a lot of cash. We have over half a billion dollars in revenue and could have taken a traditional IPO path.
More than 600 companies have gone public this year, more than double last year's volume and the highest on record, according to SPACinsider, which showed a grand total of $154 billion raised for the blank-check companies.
Business Insider has an original article.
