Greg Martin considers Klarna a bellwether for the IPO market restarting. “A company like Klarna would historically already be public,” he says. He thinks it will perform well on its debut and expects it to price conservatively, but “the bar is high” among IPO investors.
Swedish fintech company Klarna has filed paperwork to go public in the United States, on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker KLAR. Rainmaker Securities managing director Greg Martin joins Asking for a Trend to discuss the breaking news.
Klarna’s public listing got a bit closer on Friday as its prospectus filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission was made public…Read Full Article
As TikTok fights to keep its popular video app available in the US, investors in parent company ByteDance Ltd. are being forced to re-evaluate financial prospects for a business valued at more than $300 billion as recently as late last year.
Some of these American shareholders argue that, while a ban will take a near-term toll on their stakes, ByteDance's China business is the real driving force behind the lofty valuation and an eventual payday…Read Full Article
Elon Musk’s social-media platform has apparently made an incredible comeback. That’s a positive for Tesla investors in one crucial way.
Musk’s X, which was called Twitter when he bought it in Oct. 2022, is close to raising money at a valuation of $44 billion, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing sources familiar with the deal.
X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The number represents a remarkable recovery. Musk bought the money-losing platform for about $44 billion. After slashing staff and losing advertisers, that valuation fell to less than $10 billion, based on estimates from Musk’s X co-investors…Read Full Article
Secondary buyers had little interest in X last year, but that has shifted recently, according to Rainmaker Securities.
Buyers have been willing to purchase shares at around the same price Elon Musk paid in 2022.
Banks led by Morgan Stanley have been offloading billions in X debt at face value.
In the last month and a half, Glen Anderson, CEO and co-founder of Rainmaker Securities, has started to see prospective buyers express increased interest in shares of X, formerly known as Twitter… Read Full Article
…"Klarna's partnership with JP Morgan Payments has the potential to move the needle for [Klarna's] business. It's no coincidence that the deal was announced while Klarna is on an IPO roadshow," said Glen Anderson, CEO and Co-Founder of Rainmaker Securities, in an email.
Klarna's other distribution partnerships include Stripe, Adyen and Worldpay, among others, Klarna last year sold its checkout unit as part of a pivot to focus more on partnerships. The Swedish firm has also invested heavily in new forms of artificial intelligence to reduce overhead costs, another factor it can pitch to IPO investors...Read Full Article
Tesla stock couldn’t avoid a fourth day of losses on the Monday after the Super Bowl.
Consumer favorability ratings, steel tariffs, and even OpenAI might have unnerved investors.
Shares of the electric-vehicle maker dropped 3% closing at $350.73, while the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average rose about 0.7% and 0.4%, respectively.
The drop came as Stifel analyst Stephen Gengaro cut his price target to $474 from $492 in a Sunday report. He maintained his Buy rating…Read Full Article
…That amount marks a more-than-40% jump from 2024, when certain private market investors were only willing to acquire ByteDance shares at a price that would suggest a $217 billion valuation. The company got a tailwind from the seemingly improving TikTok situation in the U.S., after President Donald Trump said he would “probably” extend the April 5 deadline for the popular short video platform to be sold or banned, Glen Anderson, cofounder and CEO of U.S.-based broker-dealer Rainmaker Securities, says by email….Read Full Article
Tesla Inc.’s quarterly results this week drove home the lesson that profit and sales numbers don’t seem to matter much for this stock anymore. Instead, it’s Elon Musk’s narrative that’s wooing investors at the moment.
The electric-vehicle maker’s fourth-quarter earnings fell short of analysts’ expectations pretty much across the board. Profit, revenue and margins all missed. Even its sales growth outlook for 2025 was dialed back. Yet, the stock closed up 2.9% on Thursday, as investors shrugged off the disappointing report and instead focused on Musk’s upbeat tone on the robotaxi business, humanoid robots and artificial intelligence.
The so-called Magnificent Seven group of tech stocks have spent the past two years looking invincible, so it’s ironic that the companies worth $18 trillion in total market value were undercut this past week by a Chinese start-up no one on Wall Street had heard of just days earlier.
Such is the power—and vulnerability—of being on the cutting edge.
The new R1 artificial-intelligence model from China’s DeepSeek has comparable performance to some of the world’s best models, and seemingly comes at a lower price to train and run in the cloud…Read Full Article
The entrepreneur Elon Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, in 2002 to reduce space transportation costs so humanity could eventually colonize Mars. While Musk's ultimate dream for the company has yet to become a reality, SpaceX has become one of the world's most valuable start-ups. As of early 2025, it was valued at $350 billion.
SpaceX has been a groundbreaking company over the years. It was the first private company to develop a liquid-propellant rocket that reached orbit, the first to send astronauts to the International Space Station, and the first to achieve a vertical propulsive landing.
SpaceX has a growing commercial operation. It develops and manufactures spacecraft, provides launch services, and operates a commercial satellite-based internet service from its Starlink satellites...Read Ful Aticle
Greg Martin, managing director of Rainmaker securities, shares what to look out for in the IPO market in 2025.
Secondary transactions involving venture-backed startups are on track to hit a new high this year, as companies like OpenAI, SpaceX and Stripe Inc. organize tender offers to get employees paid, and investors look for ways to offload stakes outside of initial public offerings.
Tender offers give staffers, former employees and certain investors a way to sell their shares directly to other investors. It’s a break from past years, when major startups looking for a payday for staff would go public — the traditional route to fame and fortune in the tech world...Read Full Article
The last major IPO of the year has priced on an up note, and IPO investors are hopeful it will mark the end of three painful years of sub-par IPO raises.
ServiceTitan (TTAN), which provides business management software for plumbers, roofers, landscapers and others in the trades industry, will begin trading today on Nasdaq. It is pricing 8.8 million shares at $71, well above the price range of $65 to $67, itself a significant hike from earlier price talk of 8.8 million shares at $52 to $57.
“A window is opening” in the IPO market, Greg Martin, head of Rainmaker Securities, a financial brokerage firm that specializes in private securities transactions, told CNBC...Read Full Article
ServiceTitan (TTAN) surged over 42% in its IPO debut on the Nasdaq on Thursday, gaining from its original stock price of $71 to $101 per share. The company raised nearly $625 million in its initial public offering. Rainmaker Securities managing director Greg Martin joins Asking for a Trend to discuss what it signals for the broader IPO market.
"This is a stellar opening for ServiceTitan," Martin says, though he cautions it's an "excellent company but not a stellar company." He notes that the IPO demonstrates the market is "starved" for new issues and serves as a "benchmark for hopefully a good run for IPOs" moving forward into 2025…Watch Full Video
Time will tell what the next four years will mean for markets, but in the short term at least, it’s clear that at least one investor is benefiting mightily from the advent of the next Trump administration: Elon Musk
This week, Bloomberg News reported that Musk’s rocket and satellite maker SpaceX is in talks to issue new equity in a tender offer that values the company at US$350 billion — an increase from $255 billion U.S. earlier this year.
Greg Martin, managing director at Rainmaker Securities, says the close relationship between Elon Musk and Donald Trump is a factor in both the timing and the valuation of the funding round.
“Musk made a very big bet on Donald Trump,” said Martin in an interview with BNN Bloomberg. He says it’s noteworthy that shares in electric car maker Tesla have risen by almost 50 per cent since the election, despite being in an industry that isn’t poised to benefit under Trump policies…Read Full Article
Glen Anderson says "the story is there was no story" for the 2024 IPO market. However, he shares more enthusiasm for 2025 with large cap names anticipated for a 2025 debut. Glen goes over the companies he has on the radar next year including SpaceX, ServiceTitan, and Databricks.
OpenAI is in talks to raise a new round of funding at an eye-popping $100 billion-plus valuation, sources told The Wall Street Journal this week.
It turns out investors have already proven they are willing to value the company that high to get on OpenAI’s coveted cap table. Multiple companies that track or facilitate secondaries deals — where investors buy shares from existing investors, not directly from the company — have seen investors pay prices that indicate an over $100 billion valuation…Read Full Article
Zhang Yiming, cofounder of TikTok owner ByteDance, has overtaken beverage giant Nongfu Spring chairman Zhong Shanshan as the richest man in China, according to the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List.
Zhang, 40, clinched the crown for the first time with a fortune of $45.6 billion, a tad above Zhong’s $43.3 billion, according to Forbes estimates. He stepped down as chairman of the web giant in 2021 after resigning as chief executive earlier that year.
Zhang continues to derive his net worth from a stake in the privately held company, which Forbes thinks has a valuation of $217 billion based on analyst interviews and data from trading platforms where investors can buy and sell stakes in companies that aren’t publicly listed….Read Full Article