Casper CEO Philip Krim. Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch, under Creative Commons license

Casper, an online mattress retailer, notably held an initial public offering (IPO) in early February, debuting at around $12 a share although that was down from an initial target of between $17 to $19. Lowered investor interest seems to have affected Casper, which although has recorded hundreds of millions in revenue hasn’t turned a profit for years. A great deal of Casper’s revenue goes into high sales and marketing spend, which the company likely has to keep running to maintain growth. Casper brought in $439 million in revenue last year, significantly lower than the company’s own earlier $556 million projection. Losses for the year amounted to $93 million and the company had $67.4 million in cash and cash equivalents as of 2019 end.

Casper’s finances don’t seem to be encouraging investors and that coupled with a mass-market selloff amid the coronavirus outbreak has plunged the company’s share price from around $12 to around $4 (as of writing), representing a dip of more than 60%. Casper’s valuation (as of writing) currently hovers at about $160 million compared to a $1.1 billion valuation the company got in its last private funding before becoming public. Such implies investors who participated in that financing round are currently much in the red assuming they haven’t already exited their investments. Investors who also participated in earlier financing rounds for Casper will also be in the red from their investments and so will employees. That doesn’t spell good for any of the parties.

Casper isn’t the only company that happens to have taken a stock-market beating as of late. The likes of Lyft, Uber, SmileDirectClub and many more have seen their market caps plunge amidst a mass-market selloff and uncertainty stemming from situations surrounding the coronavirus outbreak. However, some companies have enjoyed good rides amidst chaos affecting others. They include the likes of Zoom, Netflix, Cloudflare, Datadog and several more whose services are likely to fare well, if not better, amid lockdown measures enacted to curtail the coronavirus outbreak.

Companies not trading on the public markets haven’t been spared by the coronavirus outbreak either. Airbnb has been sizeably affected and is said to have halted all marketing and most hiring efforts in the middle of dwindling revenue stemming from global movement restrictions. Getaround, a SoftBank-backed carsharing startup, is said to be pursuing a sale after a revenue plunge. Thousands of layoffs and furloughs have already been instituted across several startups, including more than 300 at travel startup TripActions and some at small business lending startup Kabbage. It’s in no way a good time for companies both in and outside the tech industry. In fact, it seems bleaker outside the tech industry. However, there have been some big happenings and acquisitions as of late that seem to lighten the mood. They include Microsoft’s $1.35 billion acquisition of Affirmed Networks, Via’s recent private financing at a valuation of $2.3 billion, Palo Alto Networks’ recently announced acquisition of CloudGenix for $420 million, OfferUp and Letgo’s merger, Scopely’s $200 million Series D extension, HashiCorp’s $175 million Series E, and Fox Corp’s acquisition of Tubi.