After more than a year of very little activity, the market for initial public offerings cracked open a bit a couple of weeks ago when restaurant group called Cava debuted.
Some observers considered it an early sign of some thawing, but it's still an open question as to when the market for big tech IPOs might resume.
San Francisco-based car sharing company Turo filed for an IPO at the beginning of 2022 and disclosed heavy net losses. And in 2021, San Mateo-based biotech Sagimet Biosciences filed plans to go public. Neither company has debuted yet.
It could be another year before we really start seeing the market open up for those big tech IPOs, but here are a dozen Bay Area companies to keep on eye on in the meantime.
Bay Area IPO Watch 2023/2024
A private market index from Forge Global shows cautious optimism in the tech industry, but there's not likely to be a surge of tech IPOs in the second half of the year, Forge Global's head of investment solutions Howe Ng told me.
There's still very little clarity in the markets, and one of the biggest indicators that the market is ready for some big tech IPOs will actually come from early-stage venture capital rounds, Jason Mok told me.
Mok is the new head of startups at Brex after spending a couple of years as an operating partner at Andreessen Horowitz and nearly two decades at Silicon Valley Bank.
"I'm pretty clear that you won't see big-name companies filing for an IPO until you see other big financings at the series A and the Bs start to happen," Mok told me. "The flywheel needs to start early, and the confidence needs to come from the earlier stage."
That flywheel had ground nearly to a halt. Only two Bay Area companies went public in the first quarter of the year, Fremont-based Nextracker and Structure Therapeutics, and 2022 wasn't much better.
Five Bay Area companies debuted last year, which was a sharp decline from a record high of 64 in 2021.
