So Klaviyo and Instacart reopened the IPO markets — from a 20 year low. We are back. At least, for the very best. Mostly.
Two great leaders, worth almost $10B now and public, and both “priced” at the high end of the IPO ranges.
Klaviyo is the more relevant for us in SaaS, and it’s a monster:
- $650,000,000 in ARR (!)
- Growing a stunning 56.5% at this scale (!!)
- 119% NRR from SMBs
- Profitable, and only burned $15m net to date
- 130,000 total customers
That’s really just about as good as it gets in SaaS, folks. It has a few risks. It’s dependant on Shopify, and growth in some of its core customer segments have slowed as it’s dominated those markets. But other than that, it’s just about as good as it gets.
Instacart also IPO’d the same week, and while not SaaS, is one of the more impressive B2C scale-ups out there. So after an almost 24 month IPO drought, we restarted things with 2 really, really good ones. (I’m not including ARM because it’s so old and established, and a spin-out).
But here’s the thing — they both IPO’d without any real “bounce”. Klaviyo is trading a smidge up from its IPO price, and Instacart a smidge down.
Is that bad? Not for Klaviyo and Instacart themselves. They maximized what they could raise, with the minimum dilution.
But not engineering an IPO pop probably is a net negative for getting the whole IPO engine going again. A little easy money and greed does help restart markets.
We didn’t see that.
Klaviyo and Instacart in the end didn’t leave any money on the table. But no bounce probably leaves the next wave of folks that are strong, but not as strong as Klaviyo or Instacart, in a slightly tougher position.
IPO investors are a weird, thin niche of the market.
After all, you can always just buy the next day, next week or next quarter if you want. We probably learned this week the demand is there in this niche market (buying at the IPO), but it’s not all that deep.
Net, net in short term, I’m a bit more cautious this week than I was last week.
Why?
I’ve got a number of A+ SaaS seed investments that are at $200m+ ARR, with good, efficient growth. But Klaviyo’s metrics are even better. They likely have more work to do to IPO. Such is the way.
I’m still betting it will be an IPO-a-week in 2H’24. But I’m a smidge less confident than I was.
Right now, the IPO window is open again.
But the bar is pretty darn high at the moment. We probably need a little more greed, and perhaps higher multiples, to make IPO’ing really that much easier. We’re not quite there yet.
