A Sign of Hope in the Frozen IPO Market
After a year of silence, the IPO market is finally starting to thaw. News from Insider indicates that TripActions, a unicorn in the corporate travel and expense category, has filed confidential paperwork to go public. Per the publication, the company is targeting a Q2 2023 public debut at around a $12 billion price tag.
Instacart’s Path to IPO
Mix in the fact that we are still expecting a late-2022 Instacart S-1 filing and perhaps even debut, and now we have not merely two IPOs on our dockets but two potential decacorn public offerings. These are going to be big, noisy, large-dollar transactions that will provide valuable data concerning market appetite for tech shares generally and shed light on two important startup sectors’ respective worth.
What We Hope to Learn from Each IPO Filing
Instacart
Instacart had a huge pandemic run, growing quickly before swapping CEOs, reaccelerating growth, and sticking to its IPO-timing guns. TripActions is different; the pandemic didn’t help its business right away – in fact, it roughed it up a little. But the company shook up its model, expanding its product mix in the process, and now, with business travel coming back, is apparently satisfied with its results to the point where an IPO is in the cards.
When Instacart does file, here’s our working list of things that we want to better understand about the company and its market:
- How lucrative is servicing the corporate travel market? We presume that the customer is companies instead of individuals, so there’s good money to be made here. But we don’t know for sure.
- What impact has TripAction’s expansion into the corporate spend market had on its overall business results? Corporate spend – where Brex and Ramp and others compete – is a big space and supposedly rather profitable. Is that bearing out for relative latecomer TripActions?
- How competitive is TripActions’ core market, and how much recovery juice is left there? We presume that more folks doing more work travel is helping TripActions’ near-term growth story. But! Are we back to 90% of former travel levels? Or 50%?
What We Hope to Learn from Instacart’s IPO
We could go on, but these are the key stuff we have bouncing around in our heads. Now we merely want to fast-forward and get to the damn numbers.
TripActions
Turning to TripActions, we have a very different list. Here’s our rundown of things we’d like to better understand that the company may help us grok:
- How lucrative is servicing the corporate travel market? We presume that the customer is companies instead of individuals, so there’s good money to be made here. But we don’t know for sure.
- What impact has TripAction’s expansion into the corporate spend market had on its overall business results? Corporate spend – where Brex and Ramp and others compete – is a big space and supposedly rather profitable. Is that bearing out for relative latecomer TripActions?
- How competitive is TripActions’ core market, and how much recovery juice is left there? We presume that more folks doing more work travel is helping TripActions’ near-term growth story. But! Are we back to 90% of former travel levels? Or 50%?
What We Hope to Learn from TripActions’ IPO
We could go on, but these are the key stuff we have bouncing around in our heads. Now we merely want to fast-forward and get to the damn numbers.
Conclusion
The thawing of the IPO market is a welcome sign for startups and investors alike. With Instacart and TripActions set to go public soon, we can’t wait to see what data they provide on the market’s appetite for tech shares. Will it be good news or bad? Only time will tell.
Topics
- EC Market Analysis
- Instacart
- Startups
- The Exchange
- TripActions
- United States