InstaCart employees fulfill orders for delivery
Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tech investors last week finally heard utterance of their favorite three-letter acronym: IPO.
It’s been 20 months since a notable venture-backed tech company went public in the U.S., and the chatter in Silicon Valley has centered around who will break the ice. On Friday, grocery delivery startup Instacart and data and marketing automation company Klaviyo filed for stock market debuts.
Earlier in the week, chip designer Arm, which is owned by Japan’s SoftBank, said it plans to hit the Nasdaq seven years after being taken private in a $32 billion acquisition.
The three companies have very little in common, but collectively they represent a test of the excitement level among public market investors for new opportunities. Depending on how they perform out of the gate, their offerings could propel others to follow in the fourth quarter.
“Other teams will watch the reception of these and it could encourage some of those management teams to stop waiting around for yesteryear and just get it done,” said Lise Buyer, founder of IPO consultancy Class V Group.
By “yesteryear,” Buyer is referring to the kinds of valuations tech companies were achieving in 2020 and 2021, which were record years for tech IPOs. Software vendor Snowflake, which debuted in late 2020 and saw its price-to-sales multiple shoot up to about 50, now trades at under 17 times revenue. Food delivery company DoorDash has seen its stock drop by more than two-thirds since its high in 2021, even though revenue has since grown by over 60%.
“We aren’t going back to 2021 anytime soon,” Buyer said.
Instacart, backed at high prices by venture firms including Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz, has had a big valuation haircut ahead of its IPO. After raising private cash at a $39 billion valuation in early 2021, the company slashed that number to $24 billion in March of last year as tech stocks sank and growth slowed dramatically in a post-Covid world. The valuation reportedly fell by another 50% by late 2022.
DoorDash, which is probably Instacart’s closest public market comparison, currently trades at 3.8 times revenue. That kind of multiple would value Instacart at around $11 billion.
Instacart, which reported revenue growth of 15% in the latest quarter to $716 million, has managed to turn a profit for five straight periods by keeping costs in check and slashing head count. Net income increased to $114 million from $8 million a year earlier.
Klaviyo, which was valued at $9.5 billion in a 2021 funding round, has not been forced to reduce its valuation, according to Pitchbook and public reports. Founded in 2012, the company’s technology helps clients store user data and build profiles that enable targeted marketing via email, text messages and other channels.
Andrew Bialecki, CEO and co-founder of Klaviyo, poses for a portrait in Boston on Sep. 5, 2019.
Barry Chin | Boston Globe | Getty Images
Even though it has a much lesser-known brand, Klaviyo is growing significantly faster than Instacart, with revenue in the second quarter climbing 50% to $164.6 million. The business swung to a profit of $10.9 million in the period after losing close to $12 million a year earlier.
When looking for comparisons, the Bessemer Cloud Index, which consists of about 70 publicly traded cloud companies, provides the cleanest data. Klaviyo’s growth rate would put it near the top of the index, where companies trade at around 12 times revenue. That would imply a valuation for Klaviyo in the neighborhood of $7 billion.
Klaviyo’s biggest institutional backer is Summit Partners, followed by e-commerce software vendor Shopify, which is a key business partner. Venture firm Accel is also an investor.
According to Buyer, it’s not surprising to see companies filing to go public right now. The way SEC rules work, management teams and bankers have to wait at least 15 days after the IPO filing before they can start their roadshow. The offering could take place two weeks later.
Companies that filed last week can hit the road in early September, right after Labor Day, and go public in the middle of the month.
“Historically, late August is when you see filings for companies that want to be first in the back-to-school season,” Buyer said. “The timing makes all sorts of sense. People are coming back from the summer holidays with a fresh look at the market and interest in adding new names in Q4.”
While Instacart and Klaviyo could have significant implications for startup investors as they look at what to expect for the rest of 2023 and into next year, Arm has a slightly different audience.
The chip designer is owned by Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank, which is seeking liquidity after losing billions of dollars in recent years on mistimed and overly aggressive investments in names like WeWork, Chinese ride-hailing company Didi and Indian hotel company Oyo.
Not only is Arm much bigger than a typical venture-backed company at the time of IPO, but it’s based in the U.K. and was a public company in the past.
Arm, whose technology is critical to almost all of the world’s smartphones, reported $524 million in net income on $2.68 billion in revenue in its fiscal 2023, which ended in March, according to its filing. Arm’s 2023 revenue was slightly down from the company’s 2022 sales of $2.7 billion.
To capture a public market valuation of $32 billion, Arm would need a multiple of roughly 61 times earnings. Within the semiconductor market, Nvidia towers over everyone, with a price-to-earnings ratio of 114. But that’s a company that’s tripled in value this year and just told investors to expect 170% sales growth in the current quarter. Elsewhere in the chip space, Qualcomm trades for 15 times earnings and Applied Materials has a ratio of 19.
The technology sector may be starting to slow again. The Nasdaq is up 30% this year, coming off its worst year since 2008, but an outsized portion of the gains come from huge rallies in shares of Nvidia and Meta. So far in August, the Nasdaq is down 5.3% and is headed for its first monthly drop since February.
But at some point, companies have to stop focusing on market conditions and just decide it’s time to be public, Buyer said, as there hasn’t been a significant VC-backed tech IPO in the U.S. since HashiCorp and Samsara went public in December 2021.
The market will determine a company’s value, and if it performs over time, there will always be opportunities to sell shares at a higher price.
“You’ve got to prove your worth in the marketplace,” she said.
The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 9, 2023.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.
Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.
The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.
Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.
Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.
With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.
“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.
“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”
‘Cave rapidly’
During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”
A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.
Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”
That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.
At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”
However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.
“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images
Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.
When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.
Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.
C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.
Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.
“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports12 months agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business3 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway