Some of the early employees of the social network operator sold shares worth $80 million to a fund managed by BlackRock, said three sources close to the situation. The sale was supervised by the Chief Operations Officer of Twitter, Ali Rowghani said one source for Bloomberg. According to this transaction the company was valued at about $9 billion.
Twitter helped the early employees of the company to capitalize a portion of their share holdings, therefore allowing selected investors to buy shares of the Internet company before it is listed on the stock exchange.
The transaction with the BlackRock fund marks an increase in the valuation of the company, a couple of years after an investment made by a group led by DST Global has assessed Twitter at $8 billion. Spokesmen for Twitter, founded in 2006, and BlackRock declined to comment.
Rowghani, promoted last month from his position as chief financial officer to COO, has been active in attracting buyers for Twitter shares, said one of the sources. This way the company might be able to limit the pressure on the market value of Twitter, caused by early shareholders that want to get rid of massive holdings after the launch of an initial public offering and the expiration of the timeframe in which sales would be blocked. The strict control over the actions of buyers can limit flow of information from the company, before the IPO.
On sites such as SecondMarket and SharesPost, Facebook shares were traded freely between employees and investors without company interference. Data exchanges took place often on confidential information about the company’s financial situation and daily estimates of its fair market value, which negatively influenced the IPO.
This time however, Rowghani rejected many potential buyers and have limited the access to the financial situation of Twitter to only a few investors that were carefully selected, according to the sources familiar to the situation.
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