JPMorgan Twitter Deal Is Said to Value Startup at $4.5 Billion

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has invested in a fund that has bought about $400 million in Twitter Inc. shares, valuing the blogging service at as much as $4.5 billion, three people with knowledge of the matter said.

The fund, which has more than $1 billion, is being run by Twitter investor Chris Sacca, said two of the people, who declined to be identified because the arrangement isn’t public. JPMorgan is committing the bulk of the financing for the fund, the people said.

Twitter, founded in 2006, has seen its valuation climb in tandem with the popularity of its site, which lets users post 140-character messages. The company was valued at $3.7 billion in December after receiving $200 million in a funding round led by venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Twitter was worth $1 billion in September 2009, a person familiar with the matter said at the time.

JPMorgan’s investment management division said in a regulatory filing last month that it’s raising as much as $1.22 billion in a venture-capital fund.

In February, venture firm Andreessen Horowitz said it was investing more than $80 million in Twitter, whose online- messaging service has more than 175 million registered users.

Sacca declined to comment, as did Darin Oduyoye, a spokesman for JPMorgan, and Sean Garrett, a spokesman for San Francisco-based Twitter.

The investment in closely held Twitter was reported earlier by the Financial Times and technology blog TechCrunch.

To contact the reporters on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at dmacmillan3@bloomberg.net; Jeffrey McCracken in New York at jmccracken3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Thomas Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net

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Twitter's Biz Stone

Jacob Kepler/Bloomberg

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter Inc.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter Inc. Photographer: Jacob Kepler/Bloomberg

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