Rubicon is going public via a merger with the special-purpose acquisition company Founder SPAC.
Photograph by Ignat Kushanrev
The data analytics giant Palantir Technologies is moving into crunching numbers on trash.
Palantir (ticker: PLTR) announced a partnership Thursday with Rubicon Technologies, a relatively new software and solutions provider to the waste and recycling industry.
Rubicon wants to be the operating system for the waste industry, providing haulers with software and connectivity solutions to help make them more efficient, as well as data-collection solutions for cities and companies generating garbage.
Rubicon believes the waste industry has too much, well, waste and is ripe for disruption. The relationship with Palantir enhances Rubicon’s data analytics capabilities, which eventually will help save waste generators and haulers money, it said. Palantir will also help Rubicon commercialize some of its products.
“Data has been at the center of the Rubicon story since our company’s founding, and the application of data to business processes is what has enabled us to consistently drive environmental innovation in the waste and recycling category,” said Rubicon CEO Nate Morris in the companies’ news release.
Rubicon isn’t a public company yet. It is merging with the special-purpose acquisition company Founder SPAC (FOUN) to raise additional capital. When the merger is complete, the combined company will trade under the stock symbol “RBT.” The deal will raise about $350 million in cash for Rubicon.
The transaction values Rubicon stock at about $2 billion based on about 199 million shares outstanding when the deal closes. That is expected to happen in the second quarter of 2022 .
Since the merger was announced in mid-December, Founder stock, which will become Rubicon, is up about 1%. That isn’t bad, given that the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite are down about 15% and 25%, respectively, over the same span. The Defiance Next Gen SPAC Derived ETF (SPAK) has fallen 32%.
Founder stock may have held up better than other stocks and SPAC shares because Rubicon has sales and is more modestly valued than other software companies. The company generated $583 million in 2021 and expects to generate about $736 million in 2022. That’s about 26% year over year growth. The company generates gross profits, but not operating profit just yet.
Shares of Founder trade for, very roughly, three times Rubicon’s sales. Software companies in the S&P 500 trade for closer to nine times sales, although those in the market benchmark have a better mix of growth and profit margins.
The software components of the S&P 500 have been growing sales at roughly 14% a year on average for the past three years. Operating profit margins are about 34% for the group. Of course, software companies in the S&P 500 are mature and include companies such as Salesforce (CRM) that generate tens of billions in annual sales.
The Palantir relationship is designed to enhance Rubicon’s offerings. That could mean even faster sales growth for investors.
Coming into Wednesday trading, Palantir stock was off about 56% year to date.
Write to Al Root at [email protected]
