It wasn’t a surprise to learn that former scooter unicorn Bird is pursuing a reverse stock split. The company isn’t treading new ground here — it isn’t the only tech firm that has IPO’d in the past couple of years to consolidate its equity in hopes of keeping its share price above $1 to avoid a delisting. Root Insurance did the same thing last August. As did Hippo, another former insurtech startup.
Root and Hippo were very much part of the trend that saw several consumer-facing insurance startups going public during the last venture boom, as were MetroMile and Lemonade. Since their IPOs, most of these companies’ track records on the public market have been suboptimal, to put it mildly.
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Valued at around $6.8 billion in its IPO, Root is today worth a mere $67.2 million, per Yahoo Finance. Hippo and MetroMile went the SPAC route, and both saw their values decline precipitously afterwards: Hippo is worth $440 million today …
