Thursday, March 28, 2024
HometechnologyNew York poised for a banner IPO year, showing that Silicon Valley...

New York poised for a banner IPO year, showing that Silicon Valley isn’t the only tech hub

  • Oscar kicked off New York's IPO wave this year and many more are on the way.
  • DigitalOcean is scheduled to go public along with Buffalo-based ACV Auctions in the coming days.
  • "This has been a long time coming for New York tech," said Mitch Wainer, a co-founder of DigitalOcean.

Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.Source: NYSE

Wall Street has long made New York the center of the banking universe. But the city's tech scene is finally having its moment.

After a smattering of IPOs over the last decade from companies like Etsy, MongoDB, Datadog and Peloton, there's a whole roster of New York-based tech businesses lined up to hit the public markets this year.

On the docket for the coming days are New York City's DigitalOcean, a provider of data center and cloud technology, and Buffalo-based auto marketplace ACV Auctions. Real estate brokerage Compass is on file to go public and UiPath's prospectus is expected to land soon.

The 2021 flood comes after a tech IPO boom last year, with Snowflake, Airbnb and DoorDash each raising over $3 billion. The volume of IPOs more than doubled last year to 494, according to FactSet, and the New York Stock Exchange had its busiest year on record.

The biggest offerings and most valuable companies have consistently come from Silicon Valley and San Francisco, the center of the venture capital industry and, along with Seattle, home of the industry leaders. In 2021, New York is poised to capture a larger share of the dollars — and attention.

"This has been a long time coming for New York tech," said Mitch Wainer, co-founder of data center operator DigitalOcean. Wainer left the company in 2018 and began working on other start-ups. "There's been a lot of money, venture capital invested in New York tech over the years."

New York entrepreneurs and investors attribute the strong IPO pipeline to an established ecosystem of successful techies who have reinvested in their peers and helped lure talent to the area. There's also been a new generation of businesses bringing tech to health care, finance and real estate, which are massive industries in New York and New Jersey. And New York has a thriving venture capital community, headlined by names like Union Square Ventures and Insight Partners, helping fuel expansion in the nation's largest city.

In health care, insurance company Oscar began trading on the NYSE earlier this month and is now worth about $6.2 billion. Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital, based in New York, is the biggest shareholder. In finance, online home insurer Lemonade went public last July and is now valued at $6.1 billion. Compass, a tech-powered real estate brokerage, filed its paperwork in early March, following revenue growth last year of 56% to $3.7 billion.

RELATED ARTICLES
- Advertisment -

Most Popular