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The New York Stock Exchange welcomes Reddit, Inc. (NYSE: RDDT) to celebrate its initial public offering. To honor the occasion, Snoo, rings the Opening Bell®.

NYSE

Wall Street’s tech IPO bankers may finally have a reason to break out the champagne after an extended drought was broken up this week with the market debuts of Reddit and Astera Labs.

While occupying very different corners of the technology market, Reddit and Astera were the first notable venture-backed tech companies to go public in the U.S. since Instacart and Klaviyo in September. Before that, there hadn’t been a significant deal since late 2021.

Morgan Stanley was the big winner among banks, having captured the coveted lead left spot on both IPOs. Goldman Sachs led last year’s only two big venture-backed offerings, meaning it had been a long dry spell for Morgan Stanley. The bank was lead left on IPOs for HashiCorp and Samsara in December 2021.

In the past two years, there have only been 15 tech IPOs total, according to research provided by University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter. That came after a booming market in 2021, when 121 tech companies went public, the most since the dot-com bubble in 2000. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley cut thousands of jobs last year in part due to the downturn in initial public offerings.

“The capital markets have been relatively quiet the past couple of years,” said Eric Juergens, a partner at law firm Debevoise and Plimpton who focuses on capital markets and private equity. Investment banks have “certainly been active in pitching clients on IPOs and other transactions and positioning themselves to be there when companies are finally ready,” he said.

Some market experts see the past week’s action as a sign of what’s to come. New York Stock Exchange President Lynn Martin told CNBC on Thursday, at the opening of Reddit trading, that a lot of companies are working toward going out in the second quarter.

NYSE President Lynn Martin: Reddit IPO was a 'big test' for other companies

That would be welcome news for Morgan Stanley. The bank collected around $37 million in total fees as the lead underwriter for the Astera and Reddit IPOs. It’s a drop in the bucket for the bank, which reported $12.9 billion in net revenue last quarter, largely from wealth management. But it could be a sign of life in the investment banking unit, which saw revenue drop by 46% over a two-year stretch from the fourth quarter of 2021 to the final three months of last year.

The 12 underwriters on Astera’s IPO this week collected $39.2 million in fees, with Morgan Stanley taking one-third of the total, or around $12.9 million. The overallotment, or greenshoe option, which allows underwriters to purchase an additional 15% of shares for clients, would add $5.9 million to the fees paid out.

Astera sells data center connectivity chips to cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure companies. The stock soared 72% in its Nasdaq debut on Wednesday and continued rallying, gaining another 13% over the next two days, benefiting from investors’ seemingly insatiable appetite for all things AI.

‘Everyone was watching’

Reddit’s long-awaited IPO came Wednesday night, with shares hitting the open market Thursday. Morgan Stanley made $13 million in fees in the deal and stood to make up to $5.6 million from fees on the greenshoe option.

Shares of the 19-year-old social media company popped 48% in their first day of trading on the NYSE, before dropping 8.8% on Friday.

Lise Buyer, founder of IPO consultancy Class V Group, said the market is showing signs of thawing.

“A warm reception in the market for these IPOs surely will help open the floodgates,” Buyer said. “Everyone was watching these. Investors, boards of directors and management were encouraged by them.”

She added that the bankers who have been waiting for action, “have to be delighted by this.”

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley’s biggest rival, had the No. 2 position on the Reddit IPO, capturing about 19% of the fee payout. The firm scored wins last year as the lead on the Instacart and Klaviyo IPOs, which brought in combined fee revenue of around $35 million. When SoftBank took semiconductor design company Arm Holdings public last year, Barclays led the deal, with participation from Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan.

Arm Holdings CEO Rene Haas poses for a photo with members of leadership outside of the Nasdaq MarketSite on September 14, 2023 in New York City. 

Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images

For Investment banks, the IPO is often viewed as just the beginning of the relationship with a company. The future could bring follow-on offerings, debt raises and acquisitions, which are all specialties of the top Wall Street firms.

Morgan Stanley is finding another way to bring in additional potential business. In both the Reddit and Astera IPOs, a portion of the equity was set aside for so-called directed-share programs (DSPs), giving high-valued customers, business partners or company insiders a chance to participate.

The model was previously employed by Airbnb, Rivian and Doximity, bringing power users or early customers into their IPOs. For Morgan Stanley, the DSPs have the potential to lure new individual customers into the bank for wealth management and other services.

In Reddit’s case, the company said tens of thousands of Redditors participated in its DSP.

“The goal is just to get them in the deal,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told CNBC in an interview on Thursday. “Just like any professional investor.”

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.

Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.

S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.

Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.

Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.

While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.

DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.

Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.

New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

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Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

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Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.

BitMine Immersion Technologies, a bitcoin miner that announced plans this week to make ETH its primary treasury reserve asset, jumped about 20%. It’s gained more than 1,000% since the announcement. Betting platform SharpLink Gaming, which has also initiated an ETH treasury strategy, added more than 11%. Bit Digital, which last week exited bitcoin mining to focus on its ETH treasury and staking plans, jumped more than 6%.

“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.

On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.

The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.

Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’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.

The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.

Fundstrat's Tom Lee on being named chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies

BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.

Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.

The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.

Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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China’s Honor launches new challenge to Samsung with thin foldable smartphone and a big battery

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China's Honor launches new challenge to Samsung with thin foldable smartphone and a big battery

Honor launched the Honor Magic V5 on Wednesday July 2, as it looks to challenge Samsung in the foldable space.

Honor

Honor on Wednesday touted the slimness and battery capacity of its newly launched thin foldable phone, as it lays down a fresh challenge to market leader Samsung.

The Honor Magic V5 goes will initially go on sale in China, but the Chinese tech firm will likely bring the device to international markets later this year.

The company, which spun off from Chinese tech giant Huawei in 2020, is looking to stand out from rivals with key features of the Magic V5, like artificial intelligence, battery and size.

Honor said the Magic V5 is 8.8 mm to 9mm when folded, depending on the color choice. The phone’s predecessor, the Magic V3 — Honor skipped the Magic V4 name — was 9.2 mm when folded. Honor said the Magic V5 weighs 217 grams to 222 grams, again, depending on the color model. The previous version was 226 grams.

In China, Honor will launch a special 1 terabyte storage size version of the Magic V5, which it says will have a battery capacity of more than 6000 milliampere-hour — among the highest for foldable phones.

Honor has tried hard to tout these features, as competition in foldables ramps up, even as these types of devices have a very small share of the overall smartphone market.

Honor vs. Samsung

Foldables represented less than 2% of the overall smartphone market in 2024, according to International Data Corporation. Samsung was the biggest player with 34% market share followed by Huawei with just under 24%, IDC added. Honor took the fourth spot with a nearly 11% share.

Honor is looking to get a head start on Samsung, which has its own foldable launch next week on July 9.

Francisco Jeronimo, a vice president at the International Data Corporation, said the Magic V5 is a strong offering from Honor.

“This is the dream foldable smartphone that any user who is interested in this category will think of,” Jeronimo told CNBC, pointing to features such as the battery.

“This phone continues to push the bar forward, and it will challenge Samsung as they are about to launch their seventh generation of foldable phones,” he added.

The thinness of a foldable phone has become a battleground for smartphone makers to appeal to consumers who want the large screen size the device has to offer without extra weight.

At its event next week, Samsung is expected to release a foldable that is thinner than its predecessor and could come close to challenging Honor’s offering by way of size, analysts said. If that happens, then Honor will be facing more competition, especially against Samsung, which has a bigger global footprint.

“The biggest challenge for Honor is the brand equity and distribution reach vs Samsung, where the Korean vendor has the edge,” Neil Shah, co-founder of Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

Honor’s push into international markets beyond China is still fairly young, with the company looking to build up its brand.

“Further, if Samsung catches up with a thinner form-factor in upcoming iterations, as it has been the real pioneer in foldables with its vertical integration expertise from displays to batteries, the differentiating factor might narrow for Honor,” Shah added.

Vertical integration refers to when a company owns several parts of a product’s supply chain. Samsung has a display and battery business which provides the components for its foldables.

Honor talks up AI

Smartphone players, including Honor, have also looked to stand out via the AI features available on their device.

In March, Honor pledged a $10 billion investment in AI over the next five years, with part of that going toward the development of next-generation agents that are seen as more advanced personal assistants.

Honor said its AI assistant Yoyo can interact with other AI models, such as those created by DeepSeek and Alibaba in China, to create presentation decks.

The company also flagged its AI agent can hail a taxi ride across multiple apps in China, automatically accepting the quickest ride to arrive? and cancelling the rest.

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