Also: Theranos, Tesla, and lots of COVID.
Good morning.
Some deal news this morning: Blackbaud, the leading cloud service provider devoted to powering social good, is purchasing EVERFI, a leader in addressing social challenges through education programs. The $750 million deal may be smaller than you normally read about in CEO Daily. But it’s here for a reason: the combined companies plan to feed off exploding corporate demand to address environmental and social goals.
“We’ve got over 100 Fortune 500 customers on our YourCause platform,” Blackbaud CEO Mike Gianoni told me last night. YourCause is a software product that helps companies manage employee giving and volunteering as well as grantmaking. “We saw this really pick up with the European investment community first, and now it has taken over in the U.S. It’s happening at the CEO and board levels as part of the effort to drive ESG goals. It’s also linked at the corporate level to the war for talent. It’s getting weaved into every business we see.”
Big companies pursuing social goals also provide most of EVERFI’s revenue, funding educational programs in the companies and in schools and communities. EVERFI CEO Tom Davidson described this in a commentary piece for Fortune last year as a new “Impact-as-a-Service” model.
“When you look across what companies are doing,” Davidson said last evening, “they are managing all their internal employee giving of time and money; they are using of technology to upskill their people; they are using software for their carbon net zero programs; they are pushing into social impact and community engagement….Out of this, there are going to be two, maybe three companies that drive this for the Fortune 500. We definitely want to be one of those companies.”
Davidson will join Blackbaud—“First time I’ve ever had a boss,” he said. Deal terms include $450 million in cash and around $300 million of Blackbaud stock. Blackbaud is a public company with a market cap of $3.8 billion. EVERFI’s investors include TPG’s The Rise Fund as well as tech titans including Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt and Evan Williams.
And while we are talking about market caps, worth noting that yesterday Apple became the first company ever to cross the $3 trillion threshold. Something to shoot for, fellows. More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
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Holmes guilty
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has been convicted on four counts of fraud and conspiracy, for tricking investors into thinking the company's blood-testing tech actually worked. She could now face up to two decades behind bars. Holmes was found not guilty on four other felony charges, and jurors couldn't decide on three other charges. Fortune
Tesla in Xinjiang
Tesla has taken the controversial step of opening a sales and service center in Ürümqi, capital of the Xinjiang region where Chinese authorities have been clamping down on the local Uyghur culture and Muslim religion. U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio's response: "Nationless corporations are helping the Chinese Communist Party cover up genocide and slave labor in the region." CNBC
Evergrande up
Evergrande shares rose as much as 10% this morning, having resumed trading after a Monday suspension. The gains fell back to 1.3%, though. The suspension was pending the release of "inside information"—the world's most indebted property developer confirmed authorities told it to demolish 39 buildings on Hainan island. BBC
COVID record
The U.S. recorded a over a million COVID cases on Monday, which is a global record. The previous record-holder was…the U.S., which recorded 590,000 cases before the weekend. Fortune
Engineer a tech-forward future Deloitte’s 13th annual Tech Trends Report explores how organizations can challenge orthodoxies amid COVID-19 by turning to increasingly powerful technology such as cloud, security and data in the next 18-24 months. Explore the trends
Bitcoin predictions
What will happen to Bitcoin this year, after a sputtering last couple months? Some think it will hit $100,000 by the end of June. Some think "cryptocurrencies are the greatest case of financial-market group-think stupidity in history." Who's right? Fortune
Cruises uncontrolled
Despite CDC warnings about the ease with which COVID-19 spreads on cruise ships, even among the unvaccinated, the big cruise ship companies—and many of their passengers—are carrying on regardless. Fortune
Omicron symptom
Apparently Omicron causes night sweats in some people—a symptom that hasn't been associated with other COVID variants. (Bonus read: this Financial Times piece on what we currently know about Long COVID and treating it.) Fortune
Greene posts
Shortly after Twitter permanently banned her personal account for spreading COVID misinformation, Facebook has removed a post from Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for pretty much the same thing. "This is beyond censorship of speech," the hard-right Republican thundered on alternative platforms Telegram and Gettr. Wall Street Journal
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.
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