Teardown

Daily digest · 2026-07-31

Scan #020: What the 2021 marks are worth now

Four emerging companies being repriced against their ZIRP-era valuations and four incumbents that bought assets at the bottom — Newfront, Rondo Energy, Mirakl, AtoB, Dick's Sporting Goods, Saia, Procore, Aptean.

The thread running through today’s eight is repricing. The 2021–22 vintage of private marks is finally clearing against real transactions: Newfront just sold for half its last round, AtoB’s Series C was reportedly flat-to-down, Mirakl’s rumored IPO has to be priced off a $3.5B mark from 2021, and Procore trades below its IPO valuation with twice the revenue. Meanwhile the incumbents that bought hard assets at the bottom — Foot Locker at 0.3x sales, Yellow’s terminals at auction, 56 vertical ERPs at maintenance-stream multiples — are being paid for their patience.

Newfront — Insurance · Emerging. The a16z-era attempt to rebuild commercial brokerage around software: veteran producers recruited with richer splits and equity, an AI back office, ~$310M raised to a $2.2B valuation in April 2022. The story ended in January 2026 — WTW acquired it for $1.05B upfront, half the 2022 mark and roughly the same revenue multiple Gallagher paid for the decidedly non-AI Woodruff Sawyer, meaning the market priced the “AI brokerage” premium at approximately zero. The open question is whether the producer flywheel survives inside WTW once book portability and equity upside disappear.

Rondo Energy — Energy · Emerging. Refractory-brick heat batteries that charge on the day’s cheapest renewable power and discharge continuous 1,000°C+ steam at a claimed 97–98% efficiency; ~$165M raised, and the world’s largest industrial heat battery running in Kern County since October 2025 — at an oil field, making steam for enhanced oil recovery. The whole model is an arbitrage on the spread between cheap midday power and industrial gas, which rarely pencils at $4/MMBtu US gas. Meanwhile Antora quietly commissioned a 5GWh system in May 2026 — roughly forty times Rondo’s deployed base.

Mirakl — Ecommerce · Emerging. The Paris/Boston SaaS layer behind 450+ enterprise marketplaces (Best Buy, Macy’s, Kroger, Airbus), moving ~$15B GMV in 2025 on $218M ARR, last priced at $3.5B by Silver Lake in 2021. The number other coverage misses: its effective take rate has fallen from ~4.5% in 2015 to ~2% in 2024 by design — which is why 2024 GMV grew 30% while ARR grew only 15%, and why the Ads/Payments/Nexus stack is really a plan to monetize the same GMV a second time before the rumored 2026–27 Euronext listing.

AtoB — Logistics / Fintech · Emerging. Mastercard-rails fuel cards with telematics-locked fraud controls for 30,000+ small trucking fleets; ~$205M equity raised from General Catalyst and Mastercard. Despite claiming 500% YoY growth at the September 2024 Series C, the company stopped disclosing valuation — one tracker pegged the round below the August 2022 mark — and its core business is extending weekly-settled fuel credit to the carrier segment failing at record rates. Motive now sells its own fuel card attached to the ELD hardware that owns the exact data feed AtoB’s underwriting edge depends on.

Dick’s Sporting Goods — Retail · Incumbent, well positioned. The 1948 bait-and-tackle shop turned $14.1B US sporting-goods leader, Stack-family-controlled with ~78% voting power, which closed the $2.4B Foot Locker acquisition in September 2025. The market hated the deal (-14% on announcement); the early telemetry says otherwise — 88 Foot Locker stores closed and ~90 remodels in Q1 FY2026 alone, double-digit comps in remodeled stores, and Foot Locker’s first positive comp since late 2024. The structural story: Dick’s is an allocation business whose Nike/Hoka/On access got more valuable the moment Nike re-embraced wholesale.

Saia — Logistics · Incumbent, well positioned. The 101-year-old LTL carrier that bought its former parent Yellow’s terminals out of bankruptcy for $235.7M in December 2023, growing to 216 doors — then paid for it with an operating-ratio blowout and a ~30% one-day crash in April 2025. The detail buried in its own releases: adverse cargo-claims development is now a named driver of margin misses, making customer-service culture a direct earnings line item. Q2 2026 (revenue +17.1%, OR improving year-over-year) is the first hard evidence the new doors mature into margin.

Procore — Construction software · Incumbent, well positioned. The system of record for commercial construction — $1.32B FY2025 revenue, 17,850 customers, priced per dollar of construction volume rather than per seat. It trades below its May 2021 IPO valuation with revenue more than doubled since, a drawdown that traces entirely to the self-inflicted August 2024 go-to-market reorg while gross retention (95%) and NRR (106%) never wavered. A sub-IPO price plus ICONIQ’s concentrated ownership plus a new ex-Ansys CEO is a live setup for strategic interest.

Aptean — Supply-chain software · Incumbent, well positioned. A Vista-engineered 2012 merger of two distressed software estates that became a 56-acquisition vertical ERP roll-up, marked up from ~$1B in 2019 to $3.55B in October 2022, still buying (Logility at ~$490M, Jan 2026’s OpsVeda, Jun 2026’s ROTOR). The uncomfortable pairing: Moody’s flagged ~9x leverage and “very aggressive financial policies,” while customers document 30% support-fee hikes, $147K three-year quotes — and renew anyway. Its flagship food ERP is built on Microsoft Dynamics, making its most important vendor the same ecosystem arming resellers against it.

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