- After some big successes in the 2020 IPO class, investors are looking ahead to a big-name slate of more unicorns and decacorns coming to the public market.
- Palantir and Asana could go public, perhaps via direct listings, by the end of September.
- Other big names eyeing IPOs include Airbnb and Snowflake.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
After a dip in initial public offerings in the spring, the market is back in full swing.
Tech companies that sat out market volatility and pandemic-induced business uncertainty in the first half of the year are making plans to exit in coming months, now that the market has calmed down and investors have signaled their desire to put big money to work in newly-public companies.
March, April, and May saw only 13 total IPO pricings, per research from Renaissance Capital. Then June and July ramped up, with 58 pricings total, including tech names like ZoomInfo and SoftBank-backed Lemonade.
Ted Smith, the founder of tech-focused investment bank Union Square Advisors, said he’s identified 50 tech companies in the IPO pipeline. But even with the uptick, the bar for IPOs could still be high for many tech names.
“We absolutely could exceed last year’s total numbers of IPOs. Performance so far for the 2020 class has been very positive, which reinforces investors’ desire to participate,” he said. “It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that even with an open IPO market, which I believe we have, the vast majority of exits of venture-backed companies in tech are still going to come from M&A, not an IPO. It’s still fairly rarified air with respect to who should become a standalone company.”
There were 159 IPOs in 2019 in the US last year, according to Renaissance Capital, of which 41 were tech companies.
Going into 2020, bankers said they’d planned to front-load IPOs to avoid November’s tumult, but many of those offerings paused when markets turned volatile in March.
Here are eight companies poised for a public-markets exit, though how they do so – traditional IPO, direct listing, or special purpose acquisition vehicle (SPAC) – is often still up in the air.
The companies could decide to stay private and raise additional capital, as many have done in recent months. They could also sell, like when Uber agreed to buy Postmates more than a year after the food delivery company confidentially filed to go public.
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