Weekly Update #189: What comes after the Snap IPO?
What comes after the Snap IPO?
Now that Snap's IPO is complete, what can we expect for the rest of 2017? For starters, a lot of "small" (under $5 billion) unicorns will begin tapping the public markets. Mulesoft has already filed its S-1 (for more about S-1s, read here: WTF is an S-1?), planning to raise $169 million at a $1.8 billion valuation. A few others have hinted at an IPO too, including Sonos (speaker company) and Cloudera (big data company, apparently selecting bankers for a 2017 listing).
HOWEVER, I recommend you take these indications/hints/predictions/Ouija-board readings with a grain of salt. For every company that sticks to their IPO listing plans, there are countless others that push their IPO plans back considerably (I'm looking at you, Eventbrite, circa 2012).
Keep an eye on the market's reaction to Mulesoft, as it's much more representative of other potential IPO candidates (in terms of cash burn, valuation, revenue size, and growth), plus it carries much less retail awareness compared to Snap:
- Snapchat has 161 million daily active users, while....
- Mulesoft has 1,000 customers. Total.
Strong investor appetite for Mulesoft shares (ticker: MULE) will likely encourage other unicorns to follow suit.
In other news...
- The Party Isn’t Over: A Deep-Dive into Why Unicorns Will Bounce Back in 2017 (toptal)
- Lyft Seeking At Least $500 Million in New Funding (Wall Street Journal)
- Instacart In Talks to Raise About $400 Million (Bloomberg)
- Cloudera Said to Choose Banks for IPO as Soon as This Year (Bloomberg)
- Tintri storage strategy shoots straight at public cloud (TechTarget)