Astera Labs' successful IPO debut
Astera Labs makes public debut on Nasdaq
While several high-profile names in AI, such as chatbot developers OpenAI and Anthropic, have no immediate plans to go public, chipmaker Astera Labs debuted on the Nasdaq exchange Wednesday, March 20, 2024. The company is known for providing its chips for AI software and cloud-based applications.
Shares of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company, whose ticker is ALAB, surged after the opening bell, gaining 72% in the first day of trading over an IPO share price of $36.
The closing first-day share price of $62.03 gave Astera Labs a market capitalization of almost $9.5 billion, according to Bloomberg, three times the company’s last known private valuation listed on Forge Global of $3.16 billion, based on a Series D funding round in November 2022.
The company, according to Reuters, raised $712.8 million by selling 19.8 million shares.
The successful IPO came a day before the planned public debut of Reddit, the popular social media site, priced its IPO Wednesday, March 20, 2024 at $34 a share, sources told The Wall Street Journal. Reddit closed its first trading day on Thursday, March 21, 2024 at 48.4% above its IPO price. Rubrik, a cybersecurity software maker, also plans to go public in April, according to Reuters. The strong performance of publicly traded tech stocks, which has been fueled in part by expectations of Federal Reserve rate cuts later this year, could bode well for all these companies.
Astera Labs’ institutional investors included Atreides Management, Avigdor Willenz Group, Fidelity, GlobalLink1 Capital, Intel Capital, and Sutter Hill Ventures.
Astera Labs was founded in 2017 by a group of employees in Texas Instrument’s High Speed interface business. The company’s mission, as stated on its website, is to remove performance bottlenecks in data-centric systems.
Known for its so-called Intelligent Connectivity Platform for cloud and AI infrastructure, the company generated $116 million in revenue for calendar year 2023, and its losses narrowed during the year from the previous year, wrote Reuters in an article last month.
Astera Labs’ Forge Price™ at the start of the year was $15.36. The price had climbed 38% YTD to $21.20 as of March 19, 2024 just prior to its public debut.
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.