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

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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

The fi ntech world is a tale of two cities.

After a thrashing over the last two years, some big fi ntech startups, such as Stripe and Ramp,have seen their valuations rebound from the lows, as business improves and investordemand rises.

Many other fi ntechs, including Brex, Chime and Plaid, have yet to crystallize a lowervaluation in new fundraisings. But some trades on the secondary market suggest that if thefi ntechs do raise more money—including by going public—they will likely do so at lowervaluations than their last fundraising.

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Greg Martin, managing director at Rainmaker Securities, joins BNN Bloomberg to discuss the outlook for companies with ties to China.

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Greg Martin, managing director of Rainmaker Securities, joins BNN Bloomberg and talks the momentum in the IPO market.

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Elon Musk’s startup is privately held. How do you invest? It’s difficult—but not impossible.

The constellation Monoceros, faintly visible against the Milky Way, has for centuries occupied the heavens as “the unicorn.” The other space unicorn? Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. The billionaire entrepreneur’s onetime side hustle has, in less than two decades, evolved from a novel idea—reusable rockets—into the most highly valued startup in the US. The $180 billion colossus launches satellites, operates the Starlink internet service and counts itself as a critical NASA subcontractor, ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station…Read Full Article

Shares in Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company are a hot ticket for investors, but SpaceX tightly controls access
 
SpaceX has become one of the investing world’s most exclusive clubs.
 
Invites circulate via group chats, word of mouth and emails marked confidential. Investment vehicles providing access to Elon Musk’s closely held rocket and satellite company have generated hefty demand, and fees for those arranging them. For years, the company’s value has only gone in one direction—up.
 
Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX—which flirted with bankruptcy not long after Musk founded the company more than two decades ago—now dominates the launch business.
 
And it has built its satellite-internet division, Starlink, into an industry and geopolitical force…Read Full Article

Rainmaker Securities, a broker/dealer that specializes in the trading of late-stage private equity secondaries, has expanded RainmakerX, its self-service research and trading portal, the company announced in a statement.

RainmakerX’s new capabilities allow the company's brokers to view its global order book and directly place orders on behalf of its global client base, which includes institutions, private equity, high-net-worth investors, and special purpose vehicles. 

RainmakerX will also serve as a centralized management system for brokers’ client and partner lists, enhance cross-team collaboration, and provide advanced research capabilities via Rainmaker’s equity research product…Read Full Article

This year already proved that startups are willing to go public in a less-than-ideal market — and get rewarded for it, too. But bankers, lawyers and investors said the recent IPO successes aren’t enough to foster more than a dozen tech IPOs this year.

“I don’t think we will have the floodgates open like I might have thought,” Greg Martin, co-founder and managing director at Rainmaker Securities, told TechCrunch. “The trickle was delayed; I thought it would happen sooner in Q1. Because of that, I think the floodgates can’t open to 2025, but we could have a healthy flow of 10 to 15 companies for the year.”…Read Full Article

Now that President Biden has signed legislation forcing the sale of TikTok's U.S. operations, any potential deal raises a big question: How much is the popular video-sharing app worth?

Those asking have some huge—and widely varying—numbers to consider. One suitor has suggested $20 billion as a starting price for the U.S. operations. Executives at TikTok parent ByteDance have previously considered TikTok's global operations to be worth about half of the Chinese company's overall value, which would put it above $100 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

Settling on the exact value will be difficult because the tech industry has never seen a sale like this before, and there are several unknowns…Read Full Article

Two months ago, I wrote a story entitled, “The IPO market is looking very shaky and facing challenges galore.” 

Two months later, the IPO market is still shaky, but there are definite signs of improvement. 

First, the broad market is just off new highs, always a good sign for IPOs. 

Second, three $100 million IPOs have filed to go public in the past week, including Viking (the cruise line operator) and Rubrik, a data management platform…Read Full Article 

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The VC vets talk transfer restrictions and ROFRs, gaining access with small cheques, Rainmaker’s model and expansion plans, Chad’s favorite trade, and more in Venture Secondaries!

Social media darling Reddit is set to make its debut on Wall Street later this week, but even if its initial public offering has a red-hot pop after it opens, some are holding out for bigger, better unicorns to file their paperwork before declaring that the IPO market is legitimately back.

Reddit isn’t a bellwether, said Greg Martin, co-founder of Rainmaker Securities, a brokerage firm that specializes in private company investments. Martin notes that the company faces a lot of competition in social media and that its proposed valuation of $6.4 billion, based on the $34 a share top of its price range, seems like a “stretch”…even though it was valued at $10 billion in a private round of financing a few years ago.

Martin said that $5 billion makes more sense, adding that Reddit is likely to be as cyclical a stock as other midsize social media firms, such as Snapchat and Pinterest.

“It’s good that Reddit is going public. But it’s not the most exciting company. The growth has been more pedestrian lately and it’s an advertising revenue driven firm,” he said...Read Full Article

Reddit's closely watched initial public offering is between four and five times oversubscribed, according to a Reuters report.

Citing people familiar with the matter, Reuters reports that the social-media platform is set to at least reach its target price of $31 to $34 a share. The IPO will price Wednesday, the report said.

Reddit declined to comment, citing the quiet period during which companies are not allowed to publicly comment on their IPOs before they start trading.

In an amended filing last week, Reddit said it plans to offer 22 million shares at a price range of $31 to $34. At the top of the price range, and including potential vested options and restricted stock units, the company's total share count would be 188.7 million shares valued at $6.4 billion. This is significantly below its previous valuation of $10 billion...Read Full Article

Reddit's upcoming IPO will be closely watched by a number of companies eyeing public offerings, according to Greg Martin, co-founder of private securities broker-dealer Rainmaker Securities.

"I do think it's noteworthy, people are going to be paying attention to it," he told MarketWatch, adding that it could open the IPO door "a little bit more." Rainmaker Securities does not hold a position in Reddit.

Geopolitical uncertainty, interest-rate hikes and bank failures hindered a hoped-for IPO market rebound in 2023. As a result, a number of companies are eyeing IPO opportunities in 2024. "There's a backlog of companies in the tech sector," said Martin. "There's a significant dust-off of S-1s."…Read Full Article