Last month, Brett Adcock, founder of Robotics Startup Figure AI, claims in a post in x That his company “is now # 1 more sought after private stock in the secondary market”.
But the company has sent a ceasefire and decoration letters to at least two brokers managing secondary markets, their brokers told TechCrunch. These people said the AI ceasefire and decoration letters demanded that they stop trading the company’s stock.
Both brokers said they received the letters for the first time after Reported Bloomberg In mid-February, the number was looking for $ 1.5 billion around $ 39.5 billion in a fifteen-time increase in the $ 2.6 billion valuation that achieved in February 2024.
A Figure AI spokesman told TechCrunch that the company sends such letters when it has not authorized the broker to sell its stock, suggesting that it has a long history of sending such letters.
“This year, when we discovered that an unauthorized third -party broker was the marketing of shares without being approved by the Board of Directors, the company sent a cessation and abandonment asking the unauthorized broker to stop, as he did before when he was discovered.” “We do not allow the secondary market market in our shares without the Board of Directors and the company will continue to protect against undesirable third -party brokers on the market.”
Because Figure is a private company, not publicly, its stock cannot easily be sold at will by its investors, especially without a company authorized. This restriction is the reason why the secondary markets have arisen at all, including those who offer investors alternative ways to get cash out of shares before an IPO, such as loans secured by starting shares that become repayments when a company is made public.
The secondary markets at the end of the figures of the figure told TechCrunch that they have other theories about why some managing tips do not like the sales of shares in their markets.
Existing shareholders were trying to sell their inventory at a price that was below the new $ 39.5 billion valuation, according to brokers. Both brokers told TechCrunch that some Chafe companies with the prospect that secondary shares with a lower price could compete with the new round.
Without commenting on Figure’s case in particular, Sim Desai, founder and chief executive of Marketplace Secondary Share HiHe told TechCrunch that companies sometimes block immediate secondary sales because they believe it is “a zero -sum game”.
Desai, of course, argues that the reverse could be true: Active secondary market marketing could attract more interest in primary shares in a new increase.
But if the market secondary activity does not lead to interest in the primary round, the issue may be in the valuation itself. “If one has a hard time to sell something, it’s just a function of price and valuation rather than the availability of capital,” Desai said.
The figure has also been the subject of many news, describing Figure’s progress with Marquee client BMW. The figure responded, in at least one case, saying that the article had so many inaccuracies that he was threatening to sue.
As for how much the figure increases the next one – and in what valuation, this remains to be seen. Whether existing investors will also be able to redeem the principles of secondary transactions must also be determined.
