To The Moon

Since the inflation rises, the high-interest environment has led to a dismal performance in the US stock IPO market. After the value SPAC boom in 2020-2021, a large number of shell companies are left in the market urgently seeking targets.

When will the US stock IPO market return to normal?

Recently, $Softbank Group Corp(SFTBY)$ conducted an independent IPO for its subsidiary $ARM Holdings Ltd(ARM)$ , receiving oversubscription and surging over 20% on the first day. Similarly, $Instacart, Inc. (Maplebear Inc.)(CART)$ whose valuation had been cut by over 80%, saw its IPO revenue surge over 12% on September 19th after continuously raising the offering price.

$Klaviyo, Inc.(KVYO)$ is also raising its target price.

Which other companies can we look forward to?

Mobile payment company Stripe

Stripe was founded in 2010 and is a company that develops payment software for e-commerce businesses. Stripe was founded by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, and early investors included founders of $PayPal(PYPL)$ such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

Initially, Stripe generated revenue by charging e-commerce clients like $Amazon.com(AMZN)$ $Alphabet(GOOG)$ and $Shopify(SHOP)$ a 2.9% card processing fee and 30 cents per transaction processed. It gradually expanded into areas such as business loans and tax processing, currently serving millions of businesses and non-profit organizations in over 120 countries.

In 2021, Stripe completed a recent round of financing, achieving a valuation of $95 billion, surpassing SpaceX and becoming the highest-valued privately held tech company that year. Earlier this year, there were reports that Stripe had hired Goldman Sachs (GS) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM) to evaluate the possibility of an IPO or direct public offering (DPO).

Home of Meme Stocks - Reddit

Reddit, founded in 2005, is a social forum website with content categories known as subreddits, covering topics such as news, video games, movies, music, books, food, etc. It encourages discussion in themed subgroups, similar to the Chinese forum website Tianya.

While Reddit has had a significant amount of traffic since its launch, it was not a mainstream social media platform. However, after the surge in the US stock market since 2020, its WallStreetBets forum became the hub for retail investors, leading to phenomena like the coordinated trading of meme stocks such as $GameStop(GME)$ and $AMC Entertainment(AMC)$ This brought Reddit into the spotlight and led to a significant increase in its user base.

Reddit was founded not long ago and received angel investment from the well-known startup incubator Y Combinator (which also incubated the now-popular OpenAI company). A year later, Reddit was acquired by Conde Nast Publications, a group that owns several well-known magazines, including "The New Yorker."

In 2011, Reddit became an independently operated company and received investments from institutions such as Sequoia Capital and Coatue Management. The company's most recent financing round occurred in 2021, with a valuation of over $10 billion and $700 million in funding.

In 2016, ByteDance's subsidiary, TikTok, expressed interest in acquiring Reddit through a stock swap, but the deal did not ultimately go through.

In February 2019, $Tencent(00700)$ led a $200 million Series D financing round for Reddit when its valuation had already reached $3 billion.

DataRobot

An artificial intelligence company, was founded in 2012 and is an AI-based machine learning platform. The company provides a predictive analytics platform to help users quickly build and deploy prediction models for the cloud or enterprise.

The DataRobot suite is a portable architecture that can run on cloud platforms, on-premises data centers, or as a fully managed service. It delivers models that provide the most accurate predictions by testing solutions for hundreds or even thousands of problems, meeting customer needs.

DataRobot has executed over 1 million AI projects, built over 2 billion models, and delivered over 1 trillion predictions to global customers, including one-third of Fortune 500 companies and the U.S. Department of Defense.

DataRobot has raised funds in multiple rounds in the primary market and has received investments from well-known institutions such as Intel, NEA, $BlackRock(BLK)$ $Salesforce.com(CRM)$ Tiger Global, and others. The company's latest funding round valued it at $6.3 billion.

Fanatics Sports Goods Company

Fanatics, founded in 1995, is the world's largest licensed sports merchandise retailer, known for sports goods and memorabilia. It currently operates with licenses from over 300 leagues and brands. Fanatics' founder, Michael Rubin, is also a partner in the NBA's Philadelphia 76ers.

Currently, Fanatics' products can be roughly categorized into three main types

1. Proprietary Brands: This includes Fanatics, FansEdge, as well as acquired companies like Kitbag, Majestic, Mitchell & Ness (retro jerseys and merchandise).

2. Licensed Brands Operations: Fanatics operates e-commerce platforms and brick-and-mortar stores for major professional sports leagues such as the NBA, NFL, MLS, NHL, and F1. They also have licensing agreements with over 150 college sports associations and dozens of teams. Fanatics is also the exclusive e-commerce distributor for the US Olympic team and Paris Saint-Germain, and the sole brand sportswear supplier for Walmart.

3. Supplier Brands: Fanatics collaborates with over 1,000 suppliers, including well-known brands like Empire Warehouse, 47brand, Adidas, Nike, Reebok, Under Armour, and more.

In addition to its traditional business, Fanatics entered the trading card business in 2021, securing licenses from multiple leagues, including MLB and NBA, and acquired Topps for $500 million. They also acquired the rights for multiple leagues, such as MLS, UEFA, and F1.

Furthermore, Fanatics ventured into the digital collectibles field, founding the NFT platform Candy Digital, and actively expanded into the sports betting industry.

Fanatics, with its diversified business lines, has seen significant growth since SoftBank's $1 billion investment in 2017, undergoing five rounds of funding, increasing its valuation from $4.5 billion to $27 billion, a six-fold increase. The latest funding round occurred in 2022, with investments totaling $1.5 billion from firms like BlackRock, Fidelity, and MSD Capital.

In March 2021, Fanatics announced a partnership with Hillhouse Capital to establish a joint venture, Fanatics China, with the aim of expanding their offline and online business operations in China. Each party holds a 50% stake in the joint venture, but there is no further information available regarding its progress.

Databricks Cloud Computing Company

Databricks, established in 2013, was founded by members of the Apache Spark founding team and scholars from the University of California. Databricks is an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven data analytics company that builds on the open-source Apache Spark technology. It supports running queries on large raw data sets in data lakes.

Databricks has built an integrated Lakehouse architecture, providing services in data analytics, data engineering, data science, and artificial intelligence for its customers. Unlike its competitor Snowflake, which uses Amazon S3 to create a cloud data warehouse, Databricks has introduced a Lakehouse that combines data lakes and data warehouses, while also focusing on machine learning to enhance its AI capabilities.

In terms of pricing, Databricks differs from Snowflake's bundled pricing by separating the regular underlying cloud provider server leasing costs from the server-based feature charges.

Databricks has conducted a total of nine rounds of financing in the primary market, with the latest round completed in 2021, raising $1.6 billion and valuing the company at $38 billion. Due to the company's long-term annual revenue growth rate of over 30%, it has attracted investments from cloud computing giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and others.

Epic Games

Epic Games was founded in 1991 and is a gaming industry company known for its role as the publisher of "Fortnite." However, the company's business encompasses various aspects of the gaming industry, including game development, game development engine (Unreal Engine), game distribution, and more. It has introduced Epic Games Store, Epic Online Services, and acquired the social video app Houseparty.

In 2021, Epic Games generated $5.7 billion in revenue, primarily from:

- Earnings from games, with the majority coming from in-game purchases of virtual currency V-bucks in the free game Fortnite.

- Charging a certain percentage of game revenue from games running on the Unreal Engine.

- Epic Games Store, which takes around a 12% commission on game sales, offering a profit margin of 50%, although it is 2.5 times lower than Steam's commission.

As a unicorn in the gaming industry, Epic Games has also attracted investments from numerous well-known institutions in the primary market, including Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, Disney, KKR, and Tencent, which holds a 40% stake in the company.

In the first half of 2022, Epic Games completed its most recent round of financing, raising $2 billion from investors including Sony Group and the family holding and investment company KIRKBI, resulting in a valuation of $31.5 billion. In 2021, Epic Games' valuation was $28.7 billion.

Farmers Business Network

FBN was founded in 2014. Through data and technological support, it offers a direct service platform for farmers to reduce information asymmetry and the weaker bargaining power of buyers caused by the high concentration of the upstream agricultural industry. Specifically, this includes:

(1) E-commerce platform: FBN Direct, which includes an expanded portfolio of crop protection products, the introduction of crop input planning tool Acre Pack, logistics expansion, and new variety research and development.

(2) Financial platform: FBN Finance, which includes a digital loan platform, digital crop and livestock insurance platform, grain marketing, and more.

In addition, FBN provides market marketing services (market consulting, crop marketing, brokerage services, etc.), analysis (seed selection, crop protection selection, agronomic analysis, etc.), community services (farmer communication, etc.), and explores carbon emissions markets related to agriculture.

Currently, FBN's business covers over 43,000 farms in the three major agricultural production countries of the United States, Canada, and Australia, spanning over 280 million acres.

FBN has completed nine rounds of financing in the primary market, attracting investments from well-known institutions and companies such as Temasek, Google, Fidelity, ADM, BlackRock, KPCB, and others, with a valuation reaching $4 billion.