IPO Price Archives

Like so many of the VC-backed unicorns going public these days, vegan protein specialist Beyond Meat has never made a profit.

But the past two days were highly, insanely, ludicrously profitable for the company’s backers, as stock in Beyond Meat shot up nearly 200% from its IPO price and investors swarmed in pursuit of a piece of that sweet, sweet meatless meat. That sort of spike is rare. But it also aligns with the post-IPO performance of the rest of 2019’s unicorn herd.

So far this year, when unicorns go public, they tend to get more valuable—and that’s one of nine things you need to know from the past week:

1. To infinity for Beyond

The first hints that something might be brewing emerged earlier in the week, when Beyond Meat elevated its original IPO price range. The company priced at $25 per share, at the top of its revised range. And then everything went crazy: Stock in Beyond Meat (NASDAQ: BYND) opened Thursday trading at $46 per share, closed at $65.75, and then inched up even higher on Friday, finishing the week at $66.79. That equates to a market cap of $3.8 billion, compared to a $1.5 billion IPO valuation and a $1.35 billion figure with its last round of VC.
There’s probably nobody happier about it all than the folks at Kleiner Perkins: The firm owned a 15.9% pre-IPO stake in Beyond Meat, holding shares now worth well over $500 million.

Recent weeks, of course, have been peppered with unicorn IPOs. For the most part, once these companies have gone public, they’ve been out of mind; the main exception might be Lyft, whose slipping stock price has caused cries of concern about Uber’s eventual fate. But for the rest of the cohort, the move to the public markets has been accompanied with steadily rising stock prices.

IT software provider PagerDuty went public on April 11 with an IPO price of $24 per share, valuing the company at $1.8 billion. Its stock shot up nearly 60% on its first day of trading, closing at $38.25 per share, and has continued to tick up in the weeks since. Shares in the company closed Friday at $46.52 per piece, for a market cap of $3.4 billion, compared to $1.3 billion with its last VC round.

Social media unicorn Pinterest debuted a week later, pricing its IPO at $19 per share—above its expected range—to establish a $10 billion valuation, notably less than its prior $12.3 billion VC-backed valuation. But Pinterest stock closed its first day trading up at $24.40 per share, and it closed Friday at $28.36, for a market cap of about $15 billion.

The prime example of the trend might be Zoom, which joined Pinterest in going public on April 18. After pricing above its anticipated range at $36 per share, the company’s stock zoomed (sorry) to $62 by the end of its first day, representing a valuation increase from $9.2 billion to nearly $16 billion in mere hours. Zoom’s stock closed Friday at $79.18, valuing the workplace video company at almost $20 billion.

The performance of these stocks and the rest of the unicorns on their way to the public markets will of course be worth monitoring in the weeks, months and years to come. The early results, though, must have some of the longtime investors in those unicorns asking: What took you so long?

2. A new Vision

There could be an unusual new entrant in the sprint to the public markets: SoftBank’s Vision Fund. The Japanese investor might conduct an IPO for the $100 billion vehicle sometime this year, per The Wall Street Journal, among additional plans to raise an equally enormous follow-up fund; the hope of chief executive Masayoshi Son is reportedly to turn the vehicle into a tech-focused (and unprofitable) analog to Berkshire Hathaway. One of SoftBank’s major portfolio companies could also soon go public, as WeWork announced this week that it confidentially filed for an IPO back in December.

3. Making it easy

That’s the goal of UiPath, a startup focused on automating workplace functions that raised $568 million this week at a $7.1 billion valuation, a huge step-up from a $3 billion valuation just six months ago. Making cross-border payments easy is what helped London’s Checkout.com bring in an enormous Series A this week, collecting $230 million at a reported $2 billion valuation. Other kinds of payments are the domain of Divvy, which banked $200 million at an $800 million valuation this week: The company makes software designed to replace expense reports.

4. Fight club

The Professional Fighters League pinned down a $30 million Series C this week to fund its unique mixed martial arts competition, with Elysian Park Ventures and Swan Ventures among the backers. And while Sumo Logic doesn’t have anything to do with actual sumo wrestling, PitchBook learned that the data analytics company is raising new cash at what would be a unicorn valuation.

Read More – www.pitchbook.com

It would have been bad enough for Uber if the company’s long-awaited IPO occurred during the same week that US-China trade tensions roiled the stock markets. Or if the offering came just a few days after rival Lyft posted eyebrow-raising losses in its first quarter as a public company. Or if Uber’s drivers planned a strike in the lead-up to the listing in protest of Uber’s pay practices.

Instead, all three things happened. And now, Uber is planning to price its IPO at or below its midpoint price of $47 per share, per reports, which would give the company a fully diluted valuation of $86 billion or less. That’s likely up from the $76 billion valuation Uber reportedly attained with its last round of private funding, but several billion shy of figures that have been thrown around in recent months.

It’s been a little less than two weeks since Uber announced an IPO price range of $44 to $50 per share, equating to a valuation range of about $80.5 billion to $91.5 billion. Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that the listing was at least three times oversubscribed, enough to price at the upper end of its range if so desired—healthy demand, to be sure, but quite different from a Lyft IPO in late March that was reportedly 20 times oversubscribed.

The fate of Lyft in the intervening weeks is surely one reason Uber’s offering isn’t looking quite so gargantuan as once expected—although it will still be one of the largest VC-backed listings of all time. Since stock in Lyft closed its first day of trading at more than $78 per share March 29, the price of those shares has fallen more than 30%, dipping below $53 Wednesday to reach a new all-time low. The company now has a market cap of $15.1 billion, the same as the valuation that came with its final round of private VC funding last summer.

A single-day drop Wednesday of nearly 11% came a day after Lyft reported its financial results for the first time as a public company, including a net loss for 1Q of more than $1.1 billion. While the company chalked up some of those losses to IPO-related expenses, it’s also a reminder to investors that profitability is still very far away. Lyft lost $911 million for the whole of 2018, compared with a $1.8 billion loss for Uber.

Those losses are, of course, at odds with Lyft and Uber’s sky-high valuations and revenue figures, a quasi-contradiction that could be interpreted a number of ways. As an example, one can look to the ridehailing companies’ ongoing labor dispute with their drivers, which on Wednesday took the form of a boycott by Uber and Lyft drivers in cities across the US, the UK and Australia. Those drivers—who are, of course, regarded as contractors, not employees—see all that money flowing in and wonder why they, the people who actually allow Uber and Lyft’s apps to function, can’t get a little bit more of it. The companies, meanwhile, can point to the losses as a reason thriftiness is required.

That argument perhaps crumbles a bit when Uber’s two top executives reportedly took in more than $90 million in compensation last year. There’s certainly enough money to make sure some people become immensely wealthy. Labor just isn’t on that list.

And depending on the IPO price Uber ultimately settles on, by the end of the week, there might be a little bit less wealth to go around than everyone expected a few months ago.

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