Babylon will be listed in New York with a valuation of $ 4.2 billion, backed by Palantir

Palantir, a big data company in the US, has taken a strategic stake in the British healthcare company Babylon as part of a $ 4.2 billion pure verification agreement to take over the U.S. public.

Babylon, which provides a wide range of healthcare services to 24 million patients through a mobile app, has agreed to join Alkuri Global to achieve the special goals listed on Nasdaq, becoming the latest European technology company to reject a London listing.

The deal gives Babylon $ 3.6 billion in value and $ 575 million in gross revenue. This includes the private placement of $ 270 million in new investments, including Swedbank Robur, an asset management company and the controversial data analytics company Palantir, as well as existing investors such as Kinnevik and Alkuri Sponsors.

Founded in 2013 by former British-Iranian businessman Ali-Parsa and Babylon, it developed the Hand at GP application. It allows UK patients to access almost all of their NHS GPs by acting as a primary care digital practice. The service now has around 90,000 patients in books, making it the largest “practice” in England.

Babylon also has contracts with Samsung in South Korea and Tencent in China raise money As part of a $ 550 million fundraiser from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund in August 2019.

Last year, it was launched in the US, and Parsa said it has so far accounted for more than 80% of its annual revenue so far. “Last year we made $ 80 million in revenue, this year we will make $ 300 million in the north. We are thinking that we will have equality at the ebitda level in 2023,” he said, despite losses of $ 95 million in 2019 and 2020.

Palantir, a new strategic investor known for his work in the US defense and national security sectors, was hired by the NHS in the UK last year to work in a Covid “data warehouse” to manage the distribution of PPE and other medical equipment among UK hospitals.

“They are the owners of Palantir technology. . . no one has brought that to the field of biology and health, “Parsa said.” The data and their knowledge about health can review what we can do. [together]. We wanted to take it. . . to build a preventive image of the daily biometrics of the human body and to be able to build a digital twin of each of us ”.

The outflows of digital health companies hit records in 2020, and are projected to rise in 2021. In the first quarter of this year, seven digital healthcare companies have already been listed through Spacs in the US, according to data from CBInsights.

However, shares in Alkuri Global, which were traded at a discount on net worth, hardly changed after the announcement of the agreement. Alkuri’s current $ 9.85 share price is below $ 10 per share when investors, including Pipes, buy into the transaction.

Large “sheds” of Spac stocks after purchase ads are rare because increased regulatory scrutiny and poor performance have made it difficult for investors to trust. During the rise of Spac in the first quarter of 2021, it was common for shares of vacant companies to jump 80 or 90 percent based on rumors of a deal.

Parsa has admitted that it is a difficult time for the Spac market and said he would have seen a different result if the company had been listed six months ago.

Babylon Spac is the latest technology group to be listed in the U.S. through the agreement. It follows in the footsteps of Arrival, a London-based electric car company that began trading on the Nasdaq in late March. After merging with CIIG Merger Corp., and Cazoo, a British used car dealer making it public In a US $ 7 billion deal with Ajax I listed in the US