Rovio, Creator Of Angry Birds, Surprisingly Passive In First Day’s Trading

Morning Report: The birds are angry. The stock is boring.

Living up to the Levie Dictum, Rovio’s IPO today was a bit of a snooze.

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After pricing at the upper-end of a lower-than-expected range, shares of the Angry Birds franchise owner are flat at the time of writing. They are worth €11.50 per share, the same value at which they debuted.

The Rovio debut on the Finnish Nasdaq is a slight disappointment, coming on the heels of debuts from Despegar, Best, and Roku. Those firms had more impressive first days.

But Rovio is a gaming company. This forces us to ask, and the company to answer, all sorts of questions. Questions like does the firm depend too much on one set of gaming IP? And since we all know the answer to that question, we get to ask another:  to compensate for any potential loss in revenue from Angry Birds, can the firm create another popular franchise?

Investors who bid the company’s shares up in early trading before they settled to unch seemed to think so.

In the meantime, we’re figuring out how to get the company’s exotic ticker symbol to work in our sometimes-updated Live Stock Spreadsheet, so hang tight for now.

And finally, it’s worth nothing that the IPO world has now gone back to sleep. There are zero tech IPOs currently on the calendar for October. MongDB could change that, but it’s not clear what else is on the horizon.

From The Crunchbase Daily: 

Ikea buys TaskRabbit

• Ikea is buying TaskRabbit, the online platform for connecting consumers and workers to do household chores involving things like moving, home improvements and furniture assembly. Terms weren’t disclosed. TaskRabbit, which currently operates in the U.S. and U.K., will continue to operate as an independent company.

Rovio shares flat in IPO

• The maker of Angry Birds is now a public company. Finnish mobile game developer Rovio Entertainment priced shares for its IPO at 11.50 Euros ($13.60), giving the company an initial valuation of around $1 billion. Shares were up about 7 percent in early trading on the Nasdaq Helsinki before falling back to around the offer price.

Investors really like neurotech devices

• Artificial intelligence gets all the buzz in startup circles these days. But VCs are also pouring capital into the original AI prototype: the human brain. A Crunchbase News analysis finds that VCs have invested more than $600 million since last year into companies working on neurotech devices and therapies, including many utilizing some form of brain-computer interface.
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