E-commerce veteran Marc Lore hasn’t been shy about his food delivery startup’s IPO aspirations. In recent months, he has written on the whiteboards in Wonder’s Midtown Manhattan office the date when it should be IPO-ready: March 31, 2027, according to a person close to the company. First, however, the company will try to tap private investors once more. The eight-year-old owner of restaurant delivery service Grubhub and meal kit service Blue Apron wants to raise a new round of venture capital at a valuation of $11 billion, up from $7 billion last year, people familiar with its plans told me. Beyond the fundraise, the new capital could introduce it to the large asset managers that also typically buy into public offerings, they said.
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E-commerce veteran Marc Lore hasn’t been shy about his food delivery startup’s IPO aspirations. In recent months, he has written on the whiteboards in Wonder’s Midtown Manhattan office the date when it should be IPO-ready: March 31, 2027, according to a person close to the company.
First, however, the company will try to tap private investors once more. The eight-year-old owner of restaurant delivery service Grubhub and meal kit service Blue Apron wants to raise a new round of venture capital at a valuation of $11 billion, up from $7 billion last year, people familiar with its plans told me. Beyond the fundraise, the new capital could introduce it to the large asset managers that also typically buy into public offerings, they said.
Lore, the founder of Diapers.com and e-commerce startup Jet.com, was among the headliners at a conference in Santa Monica, Calif., hosted by the investment bank Jefferies.
Executives from other closely watched IPO candidates, such as Databricks, Deel, Ramp and Faire were also taking investor meetings beachside. (If you know whether their CEOs have any IPO dates written down, please let me know!)
Attendees were relatively buoyant about the prospects for listings for candidates beyond SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI. Lore told me he was optimistic about his IPO timeline, even if there was a lot of work to do.
“I do expect the capital markets to be opened up with SpaceX and Anthropic,” he said. “2027 will be a good year for tech IPOs, maybe even the back half of this year.”
It has been tough, of course, to be sunny about tech IPOs lately. Wars, tariffs and AI uncertainty have all but shut the door on listings so far this year, while most companies waiting in the wings have seemed content to wait-and-see whether SpaceX’s presumed IPO fervor heats up the market. You can’t blame startups for watching public market investors punish newly public Figma, Klarna and Chime, and thinking: No thanks, we’ll stay private.
But this week sentiment seemed to be shifting in real time, as tech investors at the Santa Monica event scurried from meeting to meeting. The Nasdaq-100 was racing to record highs. Even beleaguered investment sectors like software and private credit were starting to bounce back, slightly.
Jefferies bankers told me the bank’s trading desk was seeing mutual funds investing in more individual stocks again, rather than trading more thematically, across diversified exchange-traded funds. That suggests they’re willing to take more chances than hunker down in sector plays.
“Every investor I‘ve spoken to in the last 48 hours has said, ‘We’re risk-on, we're ready for IPOs. We don’t need to wait for SpaceX to happen,’” said Jimmy Williams, a tech banker at Jefferies.
Reading between the lines, I’m expecting that means smaller but notable IPO candidates like chipmaker Cerebras, AI dashcam maker Motive, fitness app Strava and group chat app Discord make moves soon. They’re the closest to the IPO line, with banks hired and prospectuses drafted or filed. Some of them would take advantage of public investor interest in consumer companies, as a hedge to the beating software companies have taken from AI.
Some caveats are in order, of course. Few bankers expect private-equity or venture- backed software firms to make a go of the public markets this year, with so many investors anticipating software companies’ AI extinction. They need more time to disprove investors’ doubts and reignite growth, if they ever can.
But executives like Lore are in a decent position to capture investors’ attention, for now. The company is coming up with new ways for people to get takeout from restaurants, like mixing and matching which celebrity chef-run restaurant customers can pick in one order. “We’re in a good spot,” he said. “We can’t get disintermediated by AI.”
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