Twitter lost almost all of the money it had invested in SoundCloud, the company disclosed as part of its 2017 annual report.
The company had to write off a total of $66.4 million of the $70 million it had invested into the music service in 2016, according to the filing.
SoundCloud eventually secured a deal that included $170 million of new funding from the Raine Group and Singapore’s Temasek in August of 2017. However, that deal came with a corporate restructuring that wiped out many of the start-up’s early investors, and ultimately also forced out SoundCloud’s founding CEO Alexander Ljung.
Twitter was apparently on the losing side of that deal as well. SoundCloud was reportedly valued at $700 million when Twitter invested in the audio startup. Before receiving the cash injection from Raine and Temasek, that value had plunged to $150 million. That resulted in Twitter acknowledging that “the carrying value of this investment was not expected to be recoverable within a reasonable period of time,” according to its annual report.
