Startup Trends: Latest companies to appear IPO bound
In just one week in March, social network site Reddit and chipmaker Astera Labs launched IPOs, an encouraging development for a group of other privately held tech companies that are ready to take the plunge themselves.
On April 18, 2024, Denver, Co-based Ibotta made its public debut. Shares of the mobile shopping app surged 33% on its first day of public trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
Rubrik soon followed Ibotta with a public debut on April 25, 2024. Shares of the Palo Alto, Calif-based cybersecurity company gained 15.6% at closing of its opening day.
At least four more privately held companies – Circle Internet Financial, Egnyte, Klarna, and Neo4j – have signaled through filings and press accounts that they may go public in the coming weeks.
Circle Internet Financial
Founded in 2013, Circle is a fintech company that allows its business customers to use both cryptocurrencies and the blockchain to conduct commercial transactions globally. The company is also the issuer of USDC, a digital coin that is designed to maintain price equivalence to the U.S. dollar.
In January, the Boston-based company announced that it confidentially submitted a draft registration statement with the SEC relating to the proposed initial public offering of its equity securities. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the offering have not yet been determined.
Circle Internet Financial’s Forge Price™ is $24.71 as of April 22, 2024 which implies a valuation of $4.72 billion and a 41% discount to its last funding round in May of 2022.
Egnyte
In February, Reuters reported that the Mountain View, Calif.-based cloud storage service company, which competes with firms such as Dropbox and Box, has hired underwriters for an IPO that could value the company at more than $3 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
Egnyte was founded in 2007 and its Forge Price™ is $9.14 as of April 22, 2024 which implies a valuation of $831 million and an 80% premium to its last funding round in October of 2018.
Klarna
As Forge Global has reported in recent months, the Stockholm, Sweden-based buy-now-pay-later fintech company that was founded in 2005 is preparing to go public after shelving previous plans to do so. Bloomberg reported in late February that the company is moving forward with plans to list in the U.S. in what could be one of the largest IPOs of 2024.
Klarna, according to Bloomberg sources, is considering seeking a valuation of around $20 billion in a public debut that could happen as early as the third quarter of this year, sources told Bloomberg. The company’s last-known valuation, as of July 2022, was $6.7 billion.
Klarna’s Forge Price™ is $282.24 as of April 22, 2024.
Neo4J
In February, Bloomberg reported that the San Mateo, Calif.-based company is preparing to go public sometime in the future, according to a principal at the company’s biggest investor, Greenbridge Holdings. The Greenbridge source didn’t provide any pricing information on a future IPO.
Founded in 2007, Neo4J offers an open-source graph database designed to help companies build various applications.
Neo4j’s latest Forge Price™ was $13.71 as of April 22, 2024 which implies a valuation of $2.41 billion and a 5% premium to its latest funding round in June of 2021.
About the Author
John Kimelman is a veteran journalist who has worked at Barron’s and CNBC covering such topics as investing and commercial banking. Mr. Kimelman has received compensation from Forge Global, Inc. for authoring this article. Read more from John.