Allbirds, Archer Aviation, Freshworks among 11 Bay Area companies poised to go public

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Amplitude Inc., $4 billion: This San Francisco-based mobile analytics unicorn led by co-founder Spenser Skates filed on August 30 to go public by a direct listing. It isn't raising money in the move but took in $150 million in a June venture round led by Sequoia Capital. That brought the total raised by the nine-year-old company to $367 million.

Todd Johnson | San Francisco Business Times

Freshworks Inc., $3.5 billion: This San Mateo customer management software company CEO Girish Mathrubootham filed its plans to go public on August 27, setting a placekeeper target of raising $100 million. That is expected to increase when it sets the price targets for its offering. It has raised about $401 million in funding since it was founded in 2011 from investors who include Accel, Capital G (Alphabet's growth investment arm) and Sequoia Capital India. Freshworks was originally founded in Chennai, India.

Barak Shrama

ForgeRock Inc., $1.9 billion valuation: This San Francisco digital identity management startup led by Fran Rosch set price targets on Monday for an IPO in which it hopes to raise up to $303.6 million. The company is 12 years old and has raised $273 million in funding from investors who include Accel, KKR, Riverwood Capital, NightDragon and CrossContinental Ventures.

Carolyn Seng | San Francisco Business Times

Archer Aviation, $1.7 billion: The co-founders of this Palo Alto air taxi company, Brett Adcock (left) and Adam Goldstein, face a Sept. 14 vote by the shareholders of the blank check company they plan to merge with. The combined companies originally projected a valuation of about $2.7 billion when their deal was announced but that was slashed due some turbulence in the markets and a patent dispute with Mountain View rival Wisk Aero, which is a joint venture of The Boeing Co. and Google co-founder Larry Page's Kitty Hawk autonomous aircraft startup.

Archer Aviation

Allbirds Co-Founders Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger

Allbirds Inc., $1.7 billion: Tim Brown and Joey Zwillinger, co-founders of this San Francisco-based casual footwear unicorn, filed IPO plans on August 31. They put a placekeeper target of $100 million on what they hope to raise and haven't disclosed their price targets yet. Allbirds has raised a little over $203 million since it launched in 2014.

Procept BioRobotics, $989 million: This Redwood City-based medical device company plans to raise up to $152 million in its IPO. It makes surgical robotic systems for minimally-invasive urologic surgery and previously raised about $422 million in funding from investors who include CPMG Inc., Fidelity and Viking Global.

Procept BioRobotics

Healthcare Triangle Inc., $214 million: This Pleasanton-based company CEO Suresh Venkatachari offers a data analysis service for hospitals, health systems and life science companies. It set its target price range on August 30, the same day it first filed for its IPO. It hopes to raise up to $50 million by selling 8 million shares for between $4.50 and $5.50 each.

Healthcare Triangle

Dice Therapeutics Inc., unknown valuation: PitchBook Data has no current valuation estimate on this South San Francisco immunology medicine company led by Kevin Judice. It filed IPO plans on August 21 but hasn't set price targets yet. So it only has a $100 million placekeeper amount for its fundraising target. The company is eight years old and has raised about $240 million in funding from investors who include Northpond Ventures and Agent Capital.

Dice Therapeutics

Brilliant Earth Group Inc., unknown valuation: This San Francisco-based company sells diamonds and jewelry which it says are "ethically sourced," meaning that it is mined in ways that its says have minimal environmental impact. The diamonds are also traceable through blockchain technology to show their origin. The 16-year-old company has only raised about $66 million in private funding, according to PitchBook Data.

Aeya | Thinkstock

AKA Brands Holding Corp., unknown valuation: This is a San Francisco startup led by CEO Jill Ramsay that was launched out of private equity firm Summit Partners in 2018 with the goal of acquiring and accelerating the growth of fashion brands that target Generation Z and millennial customers. It posted a $100 million placekeep target for the IPO and PitchBook has no valuation estimate on the business.

Cyngn Inc., unknown valuation: This Menlo Park autonomous driving technology startup filed its IPO plan on Sept. 3, setting its fundraising target at a very low $36 million. It was founded in 2013 as Cyanogen and originally focused on creating a mobile phone operating system but pivoted to its current focus in 2015. It raised about $115 million and was valued at about $640 million before the pivot, according to PitchBook Data. But it hasn't disclosed any funding since.

Cyngn

By Cromwell Schubarth - TechFlash Editor

September 07, 2021, 08:11am PDT Updated 09/08/2021 10:31 am

Another rush of Bay Area companies is getting set in coming weeks to join the flood of them that has gone public so far in 2021.

None is officially on the calendar yet, but 11 from the region have made public filings in preparations for their Wall Street debuts. Eight plan traditional initial public offerings (IPOs). One is planning a direct listing and another is taking the blank check merger route. Five are expected to hit valuations of $1 billion or more.

Read more about them in the photo gallery that's at the top of this story.

The 11 companies are lined up to join 62 others from the region that have already gone public this year. That's the highest number of public debuts from local startups since the end of the dot-com era 20 years ago.

Bill Smith, CEO and co-founder of Renaissance Capital, said the fall IPO activity is unlikely to match the summer’s pace. His firm manages exchange-traded funds of stocks of companies that have recently gone public.

"August filings were down from prior months, and the year’s weak IPO aftermarket returns serve as a headwind, evidenced by several postponements at the end of July," he wrote in a fall preview last week.

Of the companies that have gone public from the Bay Area this year, two have done so via direct listings, 17 via mergers with special purpose acquisition companies and the rest through traditional IPOs.

Two of this year's newly public companies have more than doubled in valuation since their IPOs. San Francisco-based medical software business Doximity Inc.'s shares (NYSE: DOCS) have shot up by 281%, giving it a market cap of about $18.4 billion. South San Francisco-based biotech Vera Therapeutics Inc., which focuses on treatments for immunological diseases, is up by about 136% with a market cap of about $549 million (Nasdaq: VERA).

Shares of 33 of the Bay Area companies that have gone public this year are trading below where they started on Wall Street. Three have lost more than half of their value:

San Francisco-based auto insurance business Metromile Inc. (Nasdaq:MILE) has dropped by 73% since its blank check merger;
Emeryville-based biotech manufacturing business Zymergen Inc. (Nasdaq:ZY) is down by nearly 54%; and
San Francisco-based webcasting business ON24 Inc. (NYSE:ONTF) has dropped by about 55%.

Also planning a debut is Procept BioRobotics, a Redwood City-based developer of robotic systems for minimally invasive urologic surgery, which set IPO terms to 5.5 million shares at $22-$24. It would have a $1.1 billion fully diluted value, were it to price in the middle, and raised over $400 million from firms like CPMG, Viking Global Investors and Fidelity.