As the stock market cooled last year, it led to a dearth of startup IPOs. That could be about to change. The Wall Street Journal reports that Klaviyo, the Boston-based marketing automation startup that has raised more than $775 million, is going to pull the trigger later this year.
If it’s true that the company has hired bankers to prepare a listing, as the article states, Klaviyo could help end a long drought of tech startup IPOs. If its debut goes well, it could help open the gates for other companies that have held back, not wanting to be the first to go public in the current economic climate.
Klaviyo is as good a candidate as any, a company that has raised a boat load of cash. Its most recent fundraise was in May 2021 when it raised $320 million on an eye-popping $9.5 billion valuation. Last August it raised another $100 million from Shopify, per Crunchbase.
But in today’s economic environment, investors are not looking at growth at all costs as they were in 2021. Instead, they want operational discipline, which has led to layoffs at major companies like Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce as tech companies have sought to assuage investor hunger for lower operations costs.
Klaviyo joined the trend when it laid off 140 employees last month, as TechCrunch reported. This could be part of an effort to streamline costs ahead of the possible IPO to make the company more palatable to jittery investors.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the company has reached nearly $600 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), a popular way to measure top line at software companies. The Journal also reports that the company is profitable, though we lack any clarity on what that means; adjusted EBITDA and GAAP net income are different beasts.
There are other names in the mix when we consider which company could break the IPO logjam. Turo, a peer-to-peer car rental service, has kept its public offering documentation warm as TechCrunch recently reported. Reddit, a collection of online communities, and Instacart, a grocery delivery service, are among the list of tech companies that could go public this year. Other candidates could include big-data company Databricks, which boasted a $38 billion valuation last year, and Lime, a scooter unicorn.
The company did not respond to a request for comment on the report.