The IPO market looks hot as Airbnb and C3.ai raise price targets

So much for a December slowdown — this morning, Airbnb and C3.ai raised their IPO price ranges and we got early pricing information from Upstart and Wish.

This gives us a good amount of ground to cover. So, we’ll dig into Airbnb’s new price range first, working to understand how richly investors are valuing the American home-sharing unicorn. We’ll repeat the experiment with C3.ai, a company we find utterly fascinating. Then we’ll calculate valuation ranges for both Upstart, a consumer lending fintech, and Wish, an e-commerce giant, to see where they stand.

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There are other IPOs in the wings: We’re still waiting on early pricing information from Affirm and Roblox, and DoorDash raised its range last week.

The upcoming calendar is busy. C3.ai and DoorDash should price tomorrow and trade Wednesday. Airbnb should price Wednesday and trade Thursday. Upstart will price next Tuesday and trade the following day.

In normal times, we’d take each element of today’s IPO news fusillade and parse it in its own post. But we only have 10 fingers, so let’s double-time through the numbers and get to what matters while you drink coffee. To work!

Airbnb and C3.ai

Public investors are bidding shares of both Airbnb and C3.ai up ahead of their debuts.

This morning, C3.ai, a company that sells enterprise AI technology, raised its IPO price range from $31-$34 to $36-$38 per share. It both raised and tightened its range, the latter often happening as a company gets a better handle on where demand lies as it ramps toward final pricing and eventual trading.

There are two ways to calculate the company’s new valuation range. The first uses the company’s nondiluted, expected post-IPO share count of 98,655,627, a figure that includes a little more than 2 million shares reserved for underwriters. At that share count, C3.ai would be worth between $3.57 billion and $3.77 billion.