Following a record-smashing tech IPO year in 2021 that featured the debuts of electric car maker Rivian, restaurant software company Toast, cloud software vendors GitLab and HashiCorp and stock-trading app Robinhood, 2022 has been a complete dud.
The only notable tech offering in the U.S. this year was Intel’s spinoff of Mobileye, a 23-year-old company that makes technology for self-driving cars and was publicly traded until its acquisition in 2017. Mobileye raised just under $1 billion, and no other U.S. tech IPO pulled in even $100 million, according to FactSet.
In 2021, by contrast, there were at least 10 tech IPOs in the U.S. that raised $1 billion or more, and that doesn’t account for the direct listings of Roblox, Coinbase and Squarespace, which were so well-capitalized they didn’t need to bring in outside cash.
The narrative completely flipped when the calendar turned, with investors bailing on risk and the promise of future growth, in favor of profitable businesses with balance sheets deemed strong enough to weather an economic downturn and sustained higher interest rates. Pre-IPO companies altered their plans after seeing their public market peers plunge by 50%, 60%, and in some cases, more than 90% from last year’s highs.
In total, IPO deal proceeds plummeted 94% in 2022 — from $155.8 billion to $8.6 billion — according to Ernst & Young’s IPO report published in mid-December. As of the report’s publication date, the fourth quarter was on pace to be the weakest of the year.
With the Nasdaq Composite headed for its steepest annual slump since 2008 and its first back-to-back years underperforming the S&P 500 since 2006-2007, tech investors are looking for signs of a bottom.
But David Trainer, CEO of stock research firm New Constructs, says investors first need to get a grip on reality and get back to valuing emerging tech companies based on fundamentals and not far-out promises.
As tech IPOs were flying in 2020 and 2021, Trainer was waving the warning flag, putting out detailed reports on software, e-commerce and tech-adjacent companies that were taking their sky-high private market valuations to the public markets. Trainer’s calls appeared comically bearish when the market was soaring, but many of his picks look prescient today, with Robinhood, Rivian and Sweetgreen each down at least 85% from their highs last year.
“Until we see a persistent return to intelligent capital allocation as the primary driver of investment decisions, I think the IPO market will struggle,” Trainer said in an email. “Once investors focus on fundamentals again, I think the markets can get back to doing what they are supposed to do: support intelligent allocation of capital.”
Lynn Martin, president of the New York Stock Exchange, told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” last week that she’s “optimistic about 2023” because the “backlog has never been stronger,” and that activity will pick up once volatility in the market starts to dissipate.
Hangover from last year’s ‘binge drinking’
For companies in the pipeline, the problem isn’t as simple as overcoming a bear market and volatility. They also have to acknowledge that the valuations they achieved from private investors don’t reflect the change in public market sentiment.
Companies that were funded over the past few years did so at the tail end of an extended bull run, during which interest rates were at historic lows and tech was driving major changes in the economy. Facebook’smega IPO in 2012 and the millionaires minted by the likes of Uber, Airbnb, Twilio and Snowflake recycled money back into the tech ecosystem.
Venture capital firms, meanwhile, raised ever larger funds, competing with a new crop of hedge funds and private equity firms that were pumping so much money into tech that many companies were opting to stay private for longer than they otherwise would.
Money was plentiful. Financial discipline was not.
In 2021, VC firms raised $131 billion, topping $100 billion for the first time and marking a second straight year over $80 billion, according to the National Venture Capital Association. The average post-money valuation for VC deals across all stages rose to $360 million in 2021 from about $200 million the prior year, the NVCA said.
Those valuations are in the rearview mirror, and any companies who raised during that period will have to face up to reality before they go public.
Some high-valued late-stage startups have already taken their lumps, though they may not be dramatic enough.
Stripe cut its internal valuation by 28% in July, from $95 billion to $74 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Checkout.com slashed its valuation this month to $11 billion from $40 billion, according to the Financial Times. Instacart has taken a hit three times, reducing its valuation from $39 billion to $24 billion in May, then to $15 billion in July, and finally to $13 billion in October, according to The Information.
Klarna, a provider of buy now, pay later technology, suffered perhaps the steepest drop in value among big-name startups. The Stockholm-based company raised financing at a $6.7 billion valuation this year, an 85% discount to its prior valuation of $46 billion.
“There was a hangover from all the binge drinking in 2021,” said Don Butler, managing director at Thomvest Ventures.
Butler doesn’t expect the IPO market to get appreciably better in 2023. Ongoing rate hikes by the Federal Reserve are looking more likely to tip the economy into recession, and there are no signs yet that investors are excited to take on risk.
“What I’m seeing is that companies are looking at weakening b-to-b demand and consumer demand,” Butler said. “That’s going to make for a difficult ’23 as well.”
Butler also thinks that Silicon Valley has to adapt to a shift away from the growth-first mindset before the IPO market picks up again. That not only means getting more efficient with capital, showing a near-term path to profitability, and reining in hiring expectations, but also requires making structural changes to the way organizations run.
For example, startups have poured money into human resources in recent years to handle the influx in people and the aggressive recruiting across the industry. There’s far less need for those jobs during a hiring freeze, and in a market that’s seen 150,000 job cuts in 2022, according to tracking website Layoffs.fyi.
Butler said he expects this “cultural reset” to take a couple more quarters and said, “that makes me remain pessimistic on the IPO market.”
Cash is king
One high-priced private company that has maintained its valuation is Databricks, whose software helps customers store and clean up data so employees can analyze and use it.
Databricks raised $1.6 billion at a $38 billion valuation in August of 2021, near the market’s peak. As of mid-2021, the company was on pace to generate $1 billion in annual revenue, growing 75% year over year. It was on everybody’s list for top IPO candidates coming into the year.
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi isn’t talking about an IPO now, but at least he’s not expressing concerns about his company’s capital position. In fact, he says being private today plays to his advantage.
“If you’re public, the only thing that matters is cash flow right now and what are you doing every day to increase your cash flow,” Ghodsi told CNBC. “I think it’s short-sighted, but I understand that’s what markets demand right now. We’re not public, so we don’t have to live by that.”
Ghodsi said Databricks has “a lot of cash,” and even in a “sky is falling” scenario like the dot-com crash of 2000, the company “would be fully financed in a very healthy way without having to raise any money.”
Snowflake shares in 2022
CNBC
Databricks has avoided layoffs and Ghodsi said the company plans to continue to hire to take advantage of readily available talent.
“We’re in a unique position, because we’re extremely well-capitalized and we’re private,” Ghodsi said. “We’re going to take an asymmetric strategy with respect to investments.”
That approach may make Databricks an attractive IPO candidate at some point in the future, but the valuation question remains a lingering concern.
Snowflake, the closest public market comparison to Databricks, has lost almost two-thirds of its value since peaking in November 2021. Snowflake’s IPO in 2020 was the largest ever in the U.S. for a software company, raising almost $3.9 billion.
Snowflake’s growth has remained robust. Revenue in the latest quarter soared 67%, beating estimates. Adjusted profit was also better than expectations, and the company said it generated $65 million in free cash flow in the quarter.
Still, the stock is down almost 20% in the fourth quarter.
“The sentiment in the market is a little stressed out,” Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman told CNBC’s Jim Cramer after the earnings report on Nov. 30. “People react very strongly. That’s understood, but we live in the real world, and we just go one day at a time, one quarter at a time.”
Returns on Amazon are free and easy for shoppers, but they’re risky and expensive for the small businesses that sell a majority of the goods on the world’s biggest e-commerce site. Returns have driven some sellers to exit the popular Fulfillment by Amazon program, while others told CNBC they’d like to leave the platform altogether.
At the heart of the problem is a big rise in returns fraud, which has led to customers mistakenly receiving used products when they ordered something new. In two particularly egregious examples involving baby products described to CNBC, Amazon sent customers used diapers and a chiller with someone else’s rotten breastmilk inside.
“I really don’t think that consumers understand how many small businesses are on Amazon and how their return habits affect small businesses and families like mine,” said Rachelle Baron, owner of Beau and Belle Littles, which sells reusable swim diapers on Amazon.
Baron said her business tanked after a return incident with Amazon. The e-commerce platform shipped soiled swim diapers to customers after the used baby products had been returned to Amazon, Baron said.
“There was actually two diapers that were sent out that were poopy,” she said.
In 2024, nearly 14% of all U.S. retailreturns were fraudulent, up from 5% in 2018, according to a report by the National Retail Federation. In total, the report found that returns cost retailers $890 billion in 2024.
Amazon started charging sellers in its fulfillment program (FBA) a new fee in June 2024 for items that exceed certain return rate thresholds. Sellers who sign up for FBA rely on Amazon for logistics, including shipping, packing and returns.
In September, a couple months after the fee went into effect, e-commerce group Helium 10 saw return rates for U.S. Amazon sellers drop nearly 5%.
“It’s forcing the seller to have higher quality listings and higher quality products,” said Helium 10 General Manager Zoe Lu.
Amazon has alsostarted adding a warning label to some “frequently returned items,” which could be contributing to the dip.
Rising prices
However, the new fee may also be leading to rising prices.
One survey by e-commerce analysis company SmartScout found that 65% of sellers said they raised prices in 2024 directly because of Amazon fee changes. Other sellers told CNBC returns fraud is the reason they’ve raised prices.
In total, CNBC talked to seven Amazon sellers to find out how they’re handling the rising cost of returns.
“We’re running at about just over 1% net profit on Amazon, totally due to fraud and return abuse,” said Lorie Corlett, who sells Sterling Spectrum protective cases for hot wheels. She said her return rate is 4% on Amazon and only 1% on other marketplaces like Walmart. “It’s really Amazon that’s accountable at the end of the day. People would stop doing it if Amazon held them accountable.”
Amazon told CNBC it has no tolerance for fraudulent returns and that it takes action against some scammers. Those measures include denying refunds and requiring customer identity verification.
Mike Jelliff sells professional music gear through his GeekStands brand on Amazon and eight other marketplaces. He said his return rate on Amazon is three times higher than the average he sees elsewhere.
“On eBay, we’re allowed to block specific customers out,” Jelliff said. “But on Amazon, that customer is still allowed to repurchase from us.”
Jelliff showed CNBC the system of about 40 cameras he’s installed in his Tyler, Texas, warehouse to track every outgoing item, incoming return and unboxing. He uses the images when filing appeals with Amazon, including when customers request refunds claiming they never receive an item. He keeps a blacklist of repeat offenders who commit this kind of fraud and those who return used and damaged items, which become a total loss for him.
Amazon has made some improvements to its returns process, said Jelliff, who doesn’t rely on FBA. This includes Amazon allowing small businesses to make multiple appeals when fighting a fraudulent return. Amazon has also let Jelliff opt-out of automatic return labels for items above $100 starting in 2023, and his return rate has been dropping since.
Mike Jelliff at his GeekStands warehouse in Tyler, Texas, on June 6, 2025. Jelliff sees three times more returns of his professional music gear on Amazon, compared to the average on other marketplaces like eBay and Walmart.
Jacob Schatz
Why returns are destroyed
Figuring out which returns are fraudulent and which are ready for re-sale is labor-intensive and item specific, experts said. That creates plenty of room for error.
“Because it’s such a large operation, things are missed,” said Lu of Helium 10. “I think they’re probably missed on the margins, but these stories are very impactful because it is such a reckoning for the brand.”
Ceres Chill founder Lisa Myers, who once relied on Amazon to handle returns for her business as part of FBA, has one of these stories.
In 2023, Amazon sent one of Ceres Chill’s products to a customer with someone else’s rotten breastmilk inside, said Myers, adding that the customer wrote a review saying, “she will never forget that smell.”
“To have something, and I don’t mean to be dramatic, but dangerous, somebody else’s bodily fluids in your kitchen rotting in something that you had intended to use for your child is unacceptable,” Myers said. “That’s the moment I broke down crying and just sat down and thought, I have no idea how this could have happened.”
Myers said she left FBA after the incident, leaving behind benefits like having her products labeled with Amazon’s Prime badge.
“It hurts our business to not participate in Fulfilled by Amazon,” Myers said.“It’s just we’re not willing to, we will never put profit over the safety and, frankly, mental health of our customers.”
Instead, Myers outsources all her returns to baby resell specialist Goodbuy Gear, which is on track to re-sell 200,000 returned baby products this year.
Re-selling responsibly
Kristin Langenfeld started GoodBuy Gear when she was a new mom struggling to find a good quality, used jogging stroller.
“We’ve spent the last nine years building out a database that has all of the products and the variations, the common issues, the recalls,” Langenfeld said. “For some of these, there’s 40 points that we inspect on the item itself, and it’s really complicated.”
Langenfeld showed CNBC the process at her warehouse in Malvern, Pennsylvania, where each item is inspected for about 15 minutes and is typically handled by at least four employees. The resource intensive process is paying off. She says 33 new sellers signed up in 2024, three times more than the previous year. And with business growing 50% year-over-year, she’s upgrading to a bigger warehouse in Columbus, Ohio.
She was inspired to handle returns after visiting a major retailer’s returns warehouse five years ago.
“Taped on the floor were signs that said ‘incinerate,’ ‘destroy,'” she said.
Returns generated an estimated 29 million metric tons of carbon emissions in 2024, and 9.8 billion pounds of returns ended up in landfills, according to reverse logistics software provider Optoro.
Amazon has faced criticism for destroying millions of pounds of unused products. In 2022, Amazon told CNBC it was “working towards a goal of zero product disposal,” but wouldn’t give a timeline for that ambition. Three years later, that goal is still in the works, with Amazon telling CNBC in a statement, “The vast majority of returns are resold as new or used, returned to selling partners, liquidated, or donated.”
In 2020, Amazon added two new options for sellers to re-home returns. “Grade and Resell” allows all U.S. FBA sellers to have Amazon rate the return and mark it as “used” before re-selling it. FBA Liquidation allows sellers to recoup some losses by offloading palettes of goods for re-sale on the secondary market through liquidation partners like Liquidity Services.
There’s also an FBA Donations program that’s been around since 2019, allowing sellers to automatically offer eligible overstock and returns to charity groups through the non-profit Good360. Amazon told CNBC these seller programs give a second life to more than 300 million items a year.
For shoppers wanting to keep returns from incineration or landfills, Amazon also has options.
Amazon Resale has used and open-box goods, Amazon Renewed sells refurbished items and Amazon Outlet sells overstock. Daily deal site Woot!, bought by Amazon for $110 million in 2010, also sells scratched and dented items. Customers can also trade in certain electronics, like Amazon devices, phones and tablets, for Amazon gift cards or send them to the company’s certified recycler.
“I hope the change that we’re able to make as a country is that we stop making crap,” Langenfeld said. “We should make high quality products that are meant for resale.”
Meta approached artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI about a potential takeover bid before ultimately investing $14.3 billion into Scale AI, CNBC confirmed on Friday.
The two companies did not finalize a deal, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because of the confidential nature of the negotiations.
One person familiar with the talks said it was “mutually dissolved,” while another person familiar with the matter said Perplexity walked away from a potential deal.
Bloomberg earlier reported the talks between Meta and Perplexity. Perplexity declined to comment. Meta did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Meta’s attempt to purchase Perplexity serves as the latest example of Mark Zuckerberg‘s aggressive push to bolster his company’s AI efforts amid fierce competition from OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet. Zuckerberg has grown agitated that rivals like OpenAI appear to be ahead in both underlying AI models and consumer-facing apps, and he is going to extreme lengths to hire top AI talent, as CNBC has previously reported.
Read more CNBC reporting on AI
Meta now has a 49% stake in Scale after its multibillion-dollar investment, though the social media company will not have any voting power. Scale AI’s founder Alexandr Wang, along with a small number of other Scale employees, will join Meta as part of the agreement.
Earlier this year, Meta also tried to acquire Safe Superintelligence, which was reportedly valued at $32 billion in a fundraising round in April, as CNBC reported on Thursday.
Daniel Gross, the CEO of Safe Superintelligence, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman are joining Meta’s AI efforts, where they will work on products under Wang. Gross runs a venture capital firm with Friedman called NFDG, their combined initials, and Meta will get a stake in the firm.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on the latest episode of the “Uncapped” podcast, which is hosted by his brother, that Meta had tried to poach OpenAI employees by offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million with even larger annual compensation packages.
“I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor,” Altman said on the podcast. “Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they have hoped and I respect being aggressive and continuing to try new things.”
Ether ETFs have finally come to life this year after some started to fear they may be becoming zombie funds.
Collectively, the funds tracking the price of spot ether are on pace for their sixth consecutive week of inflows and eight positive week in the last nine, according to SoSoValue.
“What we’re seeing is institutional recalibration,” said Ben Kurland, CEO at crypto charting and research platform DYOR. “After the initial ETH ETF approval fizzled without a price pop, smart money started quietly building positions. They’re betting not on price momentum but on positioning ahead of utility unlocks like staking access, options listings, and eventually inflows from retirement platforms.”
The first year of ether ETFs, which launched in July 2024, has been characterized by weak demand. While the funds have had spikes in inflows, they’ve trailed far behind bitcoin ETFs in both inflows and investor attention – amassing about $3.9 billion in net inflows since listing versus bitcoin ETFs’ $36 billion in their first year of trading.
“With increasing acceptance of crypto on Wall Street, especially now as a means for payments and remittances, investors are being drawn to ETH ETFs,” said Chris Rhine, head of liquid active strategies at Galaxy Digital.
Additionally, he added, the CME basis on ether – or the price difference between ether futures and the spot price – is higher than that of bitcoin, giving arbitrageurs an opportunity to profit by going long on ether ETFs while shorting futures (a common trading strategy) and contributing to the uptrend in ether ETF inflows.
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Ether (ETH) 1 month
Despite the uptrend in inflows, the price of ether itself is negative for this month and flat over the past month.
For the year, it’s down 25% as it’s been suffering from an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about Ethereum’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year has not helped.
In March, Standard Chartered slashed its ether price target by more than half. However, the firm also said the coin could still see a turnaround this year.
Since last week’s big spike in inflows, they’ve “slowed but stayed net positive, suggesting conviction, not hype,” Kurland said. “The market looks like a heart monitor, but the buyers are treating it like a long-term infrastructure bet.”
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