Nubank, HashiCorp provide startup market with end-of-year IPO wins

The 2021 IPO cycle is winding down this week as HashiCorp and Nubank priced their public debuts and listed. Happily for startup fans and the venture classes, both IPOs went well. Samsara’s IPO will come next week if current calendars hold up, but that’s pretty much it for the year.

We made it to the end! But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have work to do. We do.

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This morning, we’re parsing the final IPO prices of both HashiCorp and Nubank, tabulating their final pre-debut valuations and revenue multiples, and teasing out what we can learn from their early trading. The goal is to get a good handle on how strong the U.S. technology IPO market looks as 2021 ends.

There should be, provided no major shocks, an active 2022 IPO cycle. Our basis for that perspective is that technology valuations for public companies remain far above historical norms and the backlog of yet-private unicorns is at an all-time high. The combination reads like a recipe for a lot of flotations next year.

But we need to grok how 2021 ended to understand where 2022 begins.

HashiCorp’s IPO

HashiCorp anticipated that it would price its IPO between $68 and $72 per share. It wound up selling equity in its public debut at $80 per share, a massive win for the open source-focused software company.

Renaissance Capital noted that at $70 per share, HashiCorp was worth $14.2 billion. Simple math pegs the company’s fully diluted valuation with an $80 per-share price at $16.2 billion. Given that the company was last valued at around the $5 billion mark by private-market investors in early 2020, its IPO price was nothing short of revolutionary, though we might argue that it was simply underpriced in 2020, undercutting how staggering its IPO price really was.