23 hot startups that want to go public in 2020, and the 2 Silicon Valley venture firms that will clean up up when they do
- According to a new report from CB Insights out Wednesday, 23 tech startups are hoping to go public in 2020 via a traditional IPO or direct listing.
- Popular tech companies like Airbnb, Credit Karma, and DoorDash are joined by several enterprise software companies such as Tanium, Snowflake, and Databricks.
- Tiger Global Management and Sequoia Capital are among the Silicon Valley venture firms poised to make a tidy return in 2020 by backing some of the decade's biggest hits in the earliest stages.
- Most of the startups hoping to go public raised significant venture funding in 2019, and have been fundraising since 2011. Many investors have credited the poor performance of recent IPOs in companies like Uber and Lyft to staying private longer and taking on too much venture capital in the lead up to the public offering.
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Even though 2019 ultimately did not become the IPO windfall many insiders hoped, that hasn't stopped the parade of startups from marching along to Wall Street in 2020.
According to a new report from CB Insights released Wednesday, at least 23 startups are hoping to go public via traditional IPO or direct listing in 2020. The pipeline includes popular hits such as home rental startup Airbnb, financial management tool Credit Karma, and on-demand food delivery app DoorDash.
But among the long list of public hopefuls are several enterprise software startups that have been happily chugging along behind the more notorious consumer companies that have led 2019's disappointing IPO window. There's security software company Tanium, perhaps best known to industry outsiders for its engineers that consulted on hacker TV series "Mr. Robot." There is also Databricks and Snowflake in the data warehousing realm and website creation tool Squarespace.
If even a handful of the companies go public in 2020, however, the biggest winners may not be the founders or early employees, a relief for those feeling the housing crunch and skyrocketing cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Instead, returns will most likely go down the peninsula to the Sand Hill Road offices of Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global Management.
Both firms are poised to make the heftiest returns if and when the current pipeline of startups go public, according to the report. The two have made significant bets across enterprise and consumer startups and have a habit of getting in on the earliest funding rounds for some of the hottest companies. Sequoia, for example, backed gaming engine Unity, a top prospect for a 2020 public offering.
Other Silicon Valley institutions Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and GV (formerly Google Ventures) round out the top five venture firms ready to cash in on the 2020 IPO parade.