IPOs of the New Year

A new year means a fresh start and these tech companies are ready to start fresh with a public listing. Not surprisingly all hail from California. 

Credit: Unsplash

• Affirm already filed its S-1 but didn’t make the 2020 cutoff, citing the SEC’s delay. The San Francisco-based company helps consumers pay for large purchase items with their favorable loan options. Peloton, Expedia, and Walmart are some of the companies that most actively use Affirm. 
• Roblox also filed its S-1 but delayed its listing to 2021 after seeing big price shifts with Airbnb and Doordash. The free-to-play online gaming company benefited tremendously from the pandemic, almost tripling its revenue in the first three quarters of 2020 vs. the first three quarters of 2019. Although free to play, players pay money for premium memberships as well as items and clothing for their avatars. The company is headquartered in San Mateo, California. 
• Poshmark filed its S-1 in late December with the intent to go public in 2021. The company offers a secondhand platform to buy and sell used items, taking a percentage of the profit from the sales as a fee. The Redwood City-based company has benefited from a surge in eCommerce usage during the pandemic. Poshmark’s demographics lean towards the younger generation, with 80% falling into the millennial or Gen Z as of Dec. 31, 2019.  The filing also comes when shopping for secondhand items is trending. 
• thredUP is another secondhand clothing marketplace often compared to Poshmark. Although its focus is on women's and children's clothing, it inked a partnership with Walmart in May 2020 and continues to benefit from the boost in eCommerce due to the pandemic. Founded in 2009, the company is headquartered in San Francisco, California.   
• Coinbase confidentially filed for an IPO in December. Despite a rocky year with internal cultural struggles around politics and D&I, the company has still thrived from the Bitcoin boom. It is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.