IPOs Dominate The Unicorns

This week, it’s been all about initial public offerings for unicorns. Two stand out — one that is almost here and another that is on its way, perhaps.

As the tech world knows by now, Nutanix, the enterprise cloud company, is on its way toward a public market debut this week, scheduled for Friday (Sept. 30), and the company boosted the price for its 14 million share offering from $11–$13 to a higher range of $13–$15. There’s also an additional allotment of Class A stock should the demand materialize, for up to 2 million shares, which can be bought by the underwriters.

Interestingly, even at that top of the new range, should pricing remain there, at the close of the day, the market cap of $1.8 billion would represent a down round in the wake of the last funding raise, which valued the firm at $2 billion.

Blue Apron is another firm that is likely to come public, as the on-demand delivery meal kit firm is rumored to be in talks with banks to lead an IPO. Should it actually happen, an IPO could value the firm at as much as $3 billion, according to the financial trade press. Bloomberg noted that a debut by Blue Apron would reverse a long period of silence, after a fashion. The newswire noted that there has not been an IPO of a consumer tech company since Match Group last year.

In non-IPO news, the FinTech unicorn known as Funding Circle has seen a doubling of its operating losses, yet also said this past week that it has lent more than £1.5 billion since its founding in 2010. The firm has also said that its lending efforts have led to the creation of 40,000 jobs.