\n<\/p>\n
Grindr\u2019s majority owners are scrambling to take the LGBTQ+ dating app private after a stock decline triggered a personal financial crisis, according to a report from Semafor.<\/p>\n
The owners in question are Raymond Zage, a former hedge fund manager and U.S. expat now based in Singapore, and James Lu, a Chinese-American entrepreneur and former Amazon and Baidu exec. Together they led the 2020 acquisition of Grindr from Chinese ownership for over $600 million, then took the app public in 2022 through a blank-check merger.<\/p>\n
Reportedly, Zage and Lu, who together control more than 60% of Grindr, pledged nearly all their shares as collateral for personal loans from a unit of Singapore\u2019s sovereign wealth fund Temasek. After Grindr began a slide at the end of September, those loans became undercollateralized (worth less than the debt), so the Temasek unit seized and sold some of the shares last week.<\/p>\n
Grindr\u2019s stock slide appears disconnected from business fundamentals \u2013 profits were up 25% in the second quarter, Semafor notes, though it has seen some executive turnover; there has been some investor concern about narrowing margins, too.<\/p>\n
Either way, the pair are now said to be in talks with Fortress Investment Group \u2013 itself now majority owned by Mubadala Investment Company, which is itself<\/em> owned by the government of Abu Dhabi \u2013 to secure financing for a buyout at around $15 per share, which would value Grindr at around $3 billion. Shares jumped following the report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Grindr\u2019s majority owners are scrambling to take the LGBTQ+ dating app private after a stock decline triggered a personal financial crisis, according to a report from Semafor. The owners in question are Raymond Zage, a former hedge fund manager and U.S. expat now based in Singapore, and James Lu, a Chinese-American entrepreneur and former Amazon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27914,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[1790,16620,819,1877,6707],"class_list":{"0":"post-27913","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-financial","9":"tag-grindrs","10":"tag-owners","11":"tag-private","12":"tag-squeeze"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}