Topline
Grocery delivery company Instacart and marketing automation firm Klaviyo each filed paperwork with U.S. regulators to go public Friday afternoon, setting the stage for two of the largest initial public offerings of the last two years.
Instacart and Klaviyo are slated to become two of the most anticipated IPOs of the year.
Key Facts
Instacart and Klaviyo filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission within an hour of each other, notably coming the same week as Arm, the British chip designer which filed its paperwork to go public in New York at a reported target valuation of more than $60 billion.
Instacart’s latest internal valuation was $12 billion, the Information reported in April, a far cry from its $39 billion valuation following a March 2021 funding round, while Klaviyo was last valued at $9.5 billion after a May 2021 capital raise.
Both Instacart and Klaviyo will be among the largest IPOs since electric vehicle firm Rivian went public at a near $80 billion valuation in November 2021 – self-driving technology company Mobileye, financial services firm Corebridge and Johnson & Johnson spinoff Kenvue are the only New York-listed companies that went public in 2022 or 2023 valued above $10 billion.
Instacart and Klaviyo’s filings Friday also revealed their complete financial information publicly for the first time, showing that in the first six months of 2023, Instacart brought in $1.5 billion of revenue and $242 million in net income, an improvement from $1.1 billion in sales and a $74 million loss during the same period last year.
Klaviyo reported $321 million in first-half revenue and a $15 million in net income, compared to $208 million in sales and a $25 million loss in 2022.
Key Background
The sixth-ranked firm on Forbes’ Cloud 100 ranking of the top private computing firms, Klaviyo is a data based-marketing company. Instacart describes its mission as “transforming how the world shops, eats and lives.” Both Instacart and Klaviyo took their lumps in recent years as an unsteady macroeconomic environment and cooling of the IPO market weighed on the startups. Boston-based Klaviyo laid off about 10% of its roughly 1,600-person workforce in March, and San Francisco’s Instacart reportedly conducted a round of layoffs of unknown size last fall after it called off its plan to debut last year. Instacart listed the Sequoia venture capital firm and D1 Capital hedge fund among its top investors, while Klaviyo named Summit Partners and Accel as its top beneficiaries.
Surprising Fact
Last year was the slowest year for IPOs since 2016, according to PwC data, bucking 2021’s record volume.
Further Reading
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2023/08/25/instacart-klaviyo-will-go-public-should-be-two-of-the-largest-ipos-since-2021/