Get ready for big tech deals—and IPOS—says top Silicon Valley VC

Don’t let all that bad news coming out of Silicon Valley get you down: dealmaking’s set to pick up in tech-land.

Or so says Kamran Ansari, Greycroft Board Partner and former Pinterest (PINS) Head of M&A on Yahoo Finance Live (video above).

“My suspicion,” said Ansari, “is that going into the new year, Q1, Q2, you’re going to see a number of additional deals announced. Particularly from private equity firms that operate in the tech space – like Thoma Bravo, Vista, and Silver Lake – and large-cap tech buyers themselves, like Amazon, Salesforce, and Oracle,” said Ansari.

Amazon (AMZN), Salesforce (CRM), and Oracle (ORCL) have all been active acquirers in recent years, though tech M&A notably slowed in 2022 as the economy took a turn for the worse. However, slowdown aside, 2022 wasn’t a total wash when it came to deals. In particular, Ansari highlighted Microsoft’s (MSFT) proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard (ATVI), Broadcom’s (AVGO) $61 billion buyout of VMWare (VMW), and Adobe’s (ADBE) $20 billion deal to buy interface design app Figma.

There will be rough patches ahead for some deals, of course. For example: Microsoft’s Activision buyout – set to be worth a whopping $69 billion – has been challenged by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which under Chair Lina Khan has taken an active stance on reeling in Big Tech. But that aside, deals are there to be made.

“I’ve actually been surprised there haven’t been more deals because you have a combination of a lot of dry powder, both for mega-tech names and others,” Ansari said. “So, just giant cash stockpiles, and private equity firms that have very large cash stockpiles of funds they’ve raised. By the same token, you have valuation declines in both the public market and the private market. I think the opportunity is really ripe right now in the coming months for us to see quite a few M&A transactions happening.”

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IPOs back, too?

Though it’s not imminent, we could soon see an uptick in tech IPOs. Ansari told Yahoo Finance we’ll see at least some big-name public offerings this year, though perhaps not until the back half of 2023.

“In the tech space, I think you have a number of companies, SpaceX and Stripe being the biggest, most-anticipated, most-IPO-ready,” he said. “They’ve been thinking about it and putting things in place for years to be able to make that happen.” (Recently, Stripe reportedly cut its internal valuation by 11% to $63 billion.)

Additionally, Ansari flagged Instacart and Databricks as similarly “well-positioned” to go public. Instacart’s particularly ready to roll, he said.

“They’re not looking for the perfect valuation,” he told Yahoo Finance. “I think they’ve cut their internal valuation from $40 billion down to $10 billion and they’re being realistic about market expectations. That’s a business that also has $2 billion in revenue and has turned profitable. I think they’re well-positioned to come out.”

Allie Garfinkle is a Senior Tech Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter at @agarfinks.

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