But there are reasons to be optimistic that we will get a good crop of public offerings
The IPO market so far 2023 has been a chicken egg, and we probably won’t get any interesting IPOs for another quarter or two. This is incredibly sad for your friendly, local australiabusinessblog.com+ reporting crew who love an S-1 more than anything.
The good news is that when we get the IPO train back on track, we should see a pretty good string of public market debuts.
Let’s talk about why.
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When you dive back by research from the Silicon Valley Bank, which feels quite different now than it did two weeks ago, you can get a pretty good idea of why institutions aren’t expecting a wave of IPOs in the near future. In its State of the Markets report for the first half of 2023, SVB predicted that the market for “venture capital-backed tech IPOs is likely to remain dormant in the first half of 2023.”
So far it has been 100% correct.
However, the bank also predicted that as “the market gains clarity on the [interest] tariff cap [and] With future revenue multiples consistent with long-term averages and pent-up demand from institutional investors’ and unicorns, we should expect no fewer than 10 IPOs from venture-backed companies in the second half of the year.
When we first read that a while ago, it felt a bit optimistic. Why would we go from zero to double digits in such a short time?
We’ve since gotten a little more context. australiabusinessblog.com+ recently spoke with Arjun Kapura managing partner and founder at Forecast Labs, on the IPO issue.
(Forecast Labs is a sister entity of Comcast Ventures. The latter is an enterprise store that invests in areas of strategic importance to its parent company, Comcast NBCUniversal, a corporate merger that stretches from Internet access to cable television to the content itself. Prediction, in contrast, trades equity for access to television advertising, which essentially offers CPA-based ads on the tube at a below-market rate for equity. It’s a pretty interesting model for companies looking to reach a larger consumer audience, but at a discount.)
