WeWork to Acquire Meetup

Crunchbase is reporting that WeWork continues with its acquisition spree in a planned acquisition of community meeting platform, Meetup.

Meetup declined to comment. WeWork declined to comment. Meetup hasn’t taken part in a funding event since 2014, and it has, over the years, only taken about $19 million in investments according to Crunchbase. Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) led two of its rounds, participating in the rest, also according to Crunchbase. CEO Heiferman also said the acquisition would allow the firm to double in size. In the same meeting, he mentioned a $30 million figure. It was not clear if that was an acquisition price, or a reference to expected investment into his company from the acquiring entity. The startup, which has 35 million Meetup members and over 300,000 “IRL” community meetups to date, is still hiring for several jobs, according to its website. However, the acquisition also comes on the heels of several Meetup employees being asked to voluntarily resign, which was confirmed to Crunchbase News by an internal source on condition of anonymity.
– via Crunchbase News

And this from The Wall Street Journal:

With the deal, WeWork hopes to increase its usage rate during non-working hours. Most traditional clients use spaces on weekdays while Meetup-organized events mostly happen on nights and weekends. Meetup helps organizations and clubs host events and grow membership. More than 100,000 people have attended meetups at WeWork locations so far this year, the companies said Tuesday.
– via WSJ

The Journal article goes on to point out that Meetup has indicated more than 15,000 events are held each day thorugh its platform.

Cyber Monday Record Breaker

TechCrunch is reporting that Cyber Monday was the largest-ever single day of online sales in the U.S., coming in at $6.59 billion purchased online.

Purchases made by smartphone also broke a new record, coming in at $1.59 billion in sales.

The figures come from Adobe, which has been tracking shopping online in the last few days as retailers officially kick-off of holiday shopping season, the most important time of the year for their businesses. These early days are seen by many as a bellwether for how the next six weeks will play out.
– via TechCrunch

Overall, Adobe said traffic was up 11.9 percent for the day (season average: 5.7 percent). As with other days in the long weekend, mobile has been very much a part of the story: 47.4 percent of visits (39.9 percent smartphones, the rest tablets), and 33.1 percent of revenues. Notable in the mobile story is that of smartphone-based browsing and purchases. The record-high of $1.59 billion in sales made via smartphones was a whopping 39.2 percent year-on-year increase: an outsized number compared to the rest of the increases across the board that ran between 10 and 20 percent.
– via TechCrunch

And Amazon accounted for the most sales of any single platform:

According to Hitwise, the e-commerce giant accounted for 45.1 percent and 54.9 percent of all transactions respectively on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Hitwise puts the actual numbers at 5.6 million and 7.1 million transactions.
– via TechCrunch