Verizon in Blue Jeans
Emailed on April 17th 2020 in The Friday Forward
Verizon agreed to buy BlueJeans, a San Jose, Calif.-based business videoconferencing platform, for just under $500 million. The two sides had been in talks since last year.
According to Axios: "Even though sources say the sale price rose slightly during the final weeks of negotiation, it’s downright embarrassing that BlueJeans was valued higher by venture capitalists five years ago than it fetched in this white-collar WFH era."
BlueJeans had raised around $175 million in VC funding, including at around a $725 million valuation in 2015, from firms like Accel, Battery Ventures, NEA, and Norwest Venture Partners, Wing Venture Partners, and Derek Jeter.
BlueJeans was originally founded in 2009 as an enterprise cloud infrastructure company. Its core architecture wasn’t intended for self-service signups like Zoom, but has ballooned in adoption since the change.
