Investment banker Michael Montgomery has his chance to prove he’s still relevant in the tech banking world if this VentureBeat story is true. The rumor is that Meebo has hired Montgomery & Co. to represent them in a new fundraising round that may value the company at a cool $250 million.
If they pull it off, they’ll set Meebo’s value at half of the $500 million Slide was recently able to talk the markets into. That Slide deal had Montgomery & Co. competitor Allen & Co. behind the deal.
In fact, Allen & Co. seems to be representing all the hot startups these days. In addition to representing Slide in that massive valuation, they’ve worked with Bebo in their recent sale to AOL and Digg in their ongoing acquisition talks, etc. Montgomery, meanwhile, has been taking on lower profile deals like Technorati’s recent fundraising/sale effort. If Montgomery pulls of this deal, perhaps Silicon Valley startups will stop looking exclusively to Allen & Co. for the big stuff.
Is Meebo worth half a Slide? Well, I’m not sure Slide is worth half a Slide, to be honest. If anything, though, Meebo is a potentially more interesting platform. They have created a syncronous world of chat that works perfectly along side a number of applications. Gaming, for example, is a natural fit with Meebo.
Still, Comscore says Meebo has only 4.6 million unique monthly visitors. That’s valuing each of them at $54. That’s significantly more than AOL paid for each of Bebo’s 22 million Comscore visitors ($39). My guess is the valuation may get taken down a notch or two before the deal’s done. Or perhaps not, if Montgomery does his job and gets a few bidders going after the deal.