Katie Benner, Columnist

Jawbone Gets a Loan and a Leash

The troubled company can't afford to burn BlackRock.

May 18, 2015 at 11:46 PM UTC

Katie Benner is a Bloomberg View columnist who writes about technology, innovation, and the cult and culture of Silicon Valley. She lives in San Francisco. Benner previously wrote a tech and finance column for the Information. She has worked at Fortune, TheStreet.com and CNN Money, and was a freelance writer based in China covering culture, business and politics. She has a bachelor's degree in English from Bowdoin College.

Those are some expensive handcuffs.
Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg

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Jawbone, the San Francisco maker of wearable technology, recently got a hefty $300 million investment from BlackRock, the largest and one of the most trusted asset management companies in the world.

But the investment wasn't a $300 million cash infusion, I learned recently. According to documents filed in California and to people close to the deal, BlackRock is giving Jawbone, which makes speakers, Bluetooth headsets and fitness trackers, a $300 million loan.