We’re digging into the final IPO prices set by fintech unicorn Marqeta and enterprise productivity unicorn Monday.com this morning. Briefly, it’s good news.
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To catch up on this busy IPO week, Marqeta, Monday.com and two other IPOs are on the docket. The final pair are Zeta Global and 1stDibs, debuts that matter, if a bit less so for our purposes than the others.
We’ll unpack the final price of each, comparing it to its IPO valuation range and drawing a few conclusions about where we stand in the larger unicorn liquidity cycle.
This is familiar ground for us, but given the sheer flow of IPOs we cannot sit back and presume that our knowledge is current; things are happening with enough speed that regular revisions of our market views are key.
And we may have been too conservative before, so we have a bit of clean-up ahead of us.
Strong pricing
Why do we care about IPO pricing? After all, the DoorDash and Airbnb IPOs showed that the value at which a company opens life as a public entity can wildly differ from where bankers estimated it should be valued.
Two quick things: First, IPO pricing sets the terms for the floating company’s fundraise; IPOs are fundraising events that often take the place of one last private round, so their price matters from a dilution perspective. And a lot of the hottest IPOs from the last six months have given back some of their early gains, making their official IPO price relevant.
DoorDash, for example, priced at $102 before soaring as high as $256 per share after its debut. Today, the company is worth $135.50 in pre-market trading. That’s a lot closer to its IPO price than we might have anticipated after watching its first days as a floating stock.
So, this stuff really does matter, and the numbers that we see below will help private companies price their next venture rounds. Furthermore, strong public market pricing could help keep alive the current game of wealthy private groups like Tiger hunting ever-earlier-stage startups with promising — if nascent — growth rates.
Here’s Marqeta data rundown that we need:
- Marqeta final IPO price range: $20 to $24 per share.
- Marqeta IPO price: $27 per share.
- Marqeta fully diluted IPO valuation: $15.4 billion.
- Marqeta final private price: Around $4.3 billion.
Shares of the company have appreciated to $30.52 since it began to trade. The Marqeta IPO is super bullish. The company priced above range, traded a bit higher afterward and multiplied its final private price. Fintech? Looking good. The broader exit market? Looking strong.
Now, Monday.com:
- Monday.com final IPO price range: $125 to $140 per share.
- Monday.com IPO price: $155 per share.
- Monday.com fully diluted IPO valuation: $7.9 billion.
- Monday.com final private price: Around $1.9 billion.
The company has yet to begin trading, so it’s hard to say what’s next, but Monday.com’s IPO pricing is also very bullish. The company’s new valuation is a multiple of where private investors left its worth, and the company raised more in its debut than it may have expected. Throw in $150 million at its above-range IPO price in the form of investments from both Salesforce and Zoom, and the Israeli company is more than flush.
From here, the news gets a bit murkier.
Zeta Global priced its IPO at $10 per share, the low end of its range. And it sold fewer shares than anticipated. The result was a $1.9 billion valuation, lower than anticipated. A bearish sign? Not precisely; Zeta’s growth on a year-over-year basis was modest. So we’re not really looking at the valuation of a quickly growing unicorn approaching the public markets, but a more moderately growing entity that has generated growing adjusted profits. It’s a different sort of beast.
The Zeta news is neutral.
Finally, 1stDibs, the e-commerce marketplace company that you forgot was going public this week. It priced at $20 per share, inside its $19 to $21 IPO price range. It’s worth a little less than $800 million at that price. At that figure, it’s valued a little less than 2x its Q1 2021 annualized GMV run rate. That doesn’t sound wild in either direction, frankly. The 1stDibs debut also feels neutral.
Of course, Zeta and 1stDibs could appreciate when they start to trade, shaking up the narrative somewhat. But our scorecard for the busy IPO week is that the two larger debuts were pretty damn positive, and the smaller debuts rather unsurprising. That nets out to a fine week for the IPO market and venture capital returns alike.
Expect more and more and more companies and SPACs to target runs at the public market, and soon.
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