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®.
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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.
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.”
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is on the launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites, which are expected to eventually rival Elon Musk’s Starlink system, at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 9, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
Amazon on Monday launched the first batch of its Kuiper internet satellites into space after an earlier attempt was scrubbed due to inclement weather.
A United Launch Alliance rocket carrying 27 Kuiper satellites lifted off from a launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida shortly after 7 p.m. eastern, according to a livestream.
“We had a nice smooth countdown, beautiful weather, beautiful liftoff, and Atlas V is on its way to orbit to take those 27 Kuiper satellites, put them on their way and really start this new era in internet connectivity,” Caleb Weiss, a systems engineer at ULA, said on the livestream following the launch.
The satellites are expected to separate from the rocket roughly 280 miles above Earth’s surface, at which point Amazon will look to confirm the satellites can independently maneuver and communicate with its employees on the ground.
Six years ago Amazon unveiled its plans to build a constellation of internet-beaming satellites in low Earth orbit, called Project Kuiper. The service will compete directly with Elon Musk’s Starlink, which currently dominates the market and has 8,000 satellites in orbit.
The first Kuiper mission kicks off what will need to become a steady cadence of launches in order for Amazon to meet a deadline set by the Federal Communications Commission. The agency expects the company to have half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, up in the air by July 2026.
Amazon has booked more than 80 launches to deploy dozens of satellites at a time. In addition to ULA, its launch partners include Musk’s SpaceX (parent company of Starlink), European company Arianespace and Jeff Bezos’ space exploration startup Blue Origin.
Amazon is spending as much as $10 billion to build the Kuiper network. It hopes to begin commercial service for consumers, enterprises and government later this year.
In his shareholder letter earlier this month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Kuiper will require upfront investment at first, but eventually the company expects it to be “a meaningful operating income and ROIC business for us.” ROIC stands for return on invested capital.
Investors will be listening for any commentary around further capex spend on Kuiper when Amazon reports first-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday.
Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2018 conference in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Monday, Oct. 22, 2018.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Oracle engineers mistakenly triggered a five-day software outage at a number of Community Health Systems hospitals, causing the facilities to temporarily return to paper-based patient records.
CHS told CNBC that the outage involving Oracle Health, the company’s electronic health record (EHR) system, affected “several” hospitals, leading them to activate “downtime procedures.” Trade publication Becker’s Hospital Review reported that 45 hospitals were hit.
The outage began on April 23, after engineers conducting maintenance work mistakenly deleted critical storage connected to a key database, a CHS spokesperson said in a statement. The outage was resolved on Monday, and was not related to a cyberattack or other security incident.
CHS is based in Tennessee and includes 72 hospitals in 14 states, according to the medical system’s website.
“Despite this being a major outage, our hospitals were able to maintain services with no material impact,” the spokesperson said. “We are proud of our clinical and support teams who worked through the multi-day outage with professionalism and a commitment to delivering high-quality, safe care for patients.”
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Oracle stock this year
Oracle didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
An EHR is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that’s updated by doctors and nurses. It’s crucial software within the U.S. health-care system, and outages can cause serious disruptions to patient care. Oracle acquired EHR vendor Cerner in 2022 for $28.3 billion, becoming the second-biggest player in the market, behind Epic Systems.
Now that Oracle’s systems are back online, CHS said that the impacted hospitals are working to “re-establish full functionality and return to normal operations and procedures.”
Oracle’s CHS error comes weeks after the company’s federal electronic health record experienced a nationwide outage. Oracle has struggled with a thorny, years-long EHR rollout with the Department of Veterans Affairs, marred by patient safety concerns. The agency launched a strategic review of Cerner in 2021, before Oracle’s acquisition, and it temporarily paused deployment of the software in 2023.
Against a volatile market backdrop, the software maker’s stock has gained 45% and is the best performer among companies valued at $5 billion or more, according to FactSet. The closest tech names are VeriSign, up 33%, Okta, up 30%, Robinhood, up 29%, and Uber, up 29%.
“When you think about macroeconomic concerns, you as a company need to be more efficient, and this is where Palantir thrives,” said Bank of America analyst Mariana Pérez Mora.
Palantir has set itself apart in the software world for its artificial-intelligence-enabled tools, gaining recognition for its defense and software contracts with key U.S. government agencies, including the military. In the fourth quarter, its government revenues jumped 45% year-over-year to $343 million.
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Companies have faced immense volatility in 2025 as tariffs threaten to jeopardize global supply chains and halt day-to-day manufacturing operations by hiking costs. Those fears have brought the broad market index down about 7% this year, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite has slumped 11%.
At the same time, the Trump administration has clamped down on government spending, giving Tesla CEO Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency freedom to slash public sector costs. Some administration officials have touted shifting dollars from consulting contracts to commercial software providers like Palantir, said William Blair analyst Louie DiPalma.
“Palantir’s business model is highly aligned with the priorities of the Trump administration in terms of increasing agility and being very quick to market,” he said.
That’s put Palantir in the league with major contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, which have outperformed in this year’s downdraft. Many companies in the space are also looking to partner with the firm and tend to flock to defense during recessionary times, DiPalma said.
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Palantir vs. the Nasdaq Composite
CEO Alex Karp has also been a vocal supporter of American innovation and the company’s central role in helping prop up what he called the “single best tech scene in the world” during an interview with CNBC earlier this year. Karp also told CNBC that the U.S. needs an “all-country effort” to compete against emerging adversaries.
But the ride for Palantir has been far from smooth, and shares have been susceptible to volatile swings. Shares sold off nearly 14% during the week that Trump first announced tariffs. Shares rocketed 22% one day in February on strong earnings.
Its inclusion in more passive and quant funds over the years and the growing attention of retail traders has added to that turbulence, DiPalma said. Last year, the company joined both the S&P and Nasdaq. Palantir trades at one of the highest price-to-earnings multiples in software and last traded at 185 times earnings over the next twelve months. That puts a steep bar on the stock.