Becoming a unicorn is hardly the end of Stax’s eight-year-long journey.
The Orlando-based financial tech firm on March 8 announced it reached a valuation of more than $1 billion after raising $245 million in capital. That means Stax achieved coveted “unicorn” status, the term used for a private startup company worth $1 billion or more.
It’s a big deal locally, as Stax is the only unicorn in Orlando, per CB Insights research.
It’s also major news for the global tech sector, since unicorn founders are overwhelmingly men. Stax is led by siblings and co-founders CEO Suneera Madhani and President Sal Rehmetullah, children of Pakistani immigrants to the U.S.
Only 12.8% of unicorns have at least one female founder, according to a 2021 report by Stanford Graduate School of Business. That report does not say how many unicorns have minority founders, but it’s likely a small number of firms considering 77% of venture capital goes to startups with white founders, according to a 2020 report by RateMyInvestor and nonprofit Diversity VC.
Hitting unicorn status despite these statistics is a major feat, but Madhani and Rehmetullah have made it clear what this milestone is leading to: an initial public offering.
That would add to a small but growing number of Central Florida tech-focused companies that have gone public in the last couple of years, though most have done so by merging with a special-purpose acquisition company, known as a SPAC, that already was publicly traded rather than a traditional initial public offering. Examples include:
- Kalera, an Orlando-based vertical farming company that has entered into an agreement with Cayman Islands-based special-purpose acquisition company Agrico Acquisition Corp. to merge in the second quarter and trade on the Nasdaq
- Orlando-based PureCycle Technologies Inc. last year began trading on the Nasdaq after it merged with SPAC Roth CH Acquisition I Co.
- Orlando-based Luminar Technologies Inc. began trading on the Nasdaq in December after a merger with SPAC Gores Metropoulos Inc.
- Lensar Inc., an Orlando-based medical technology firm, separated from Incline Village, Nevada-based PDL BioPharma Inc. in 2020 and subsequently began trading on the Nasdaq.
Going public can be huge for a company, because it can raise capital quickly by selling shares to the public. This fuels more growth, a point of emphasis for Stax, which is on track to crank up its international expansion, Madhani said. “We’ll continue our global expansion and have Stax customers throughout the world.”
Going public is a next step for many unicorn companies, but they don't all make it to a stock exchange. Between 2014-2018, 118 unicorns went public, compared to 532 unicorns created in the same timeframe, according to data from EY and Crunchbase.
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