What 2021’s IPO pops tell us about future flotations and SPACs

News that the SenseTime IPO is on hold leaves the stock market with just one major tech listing on the horizon: Samsara’s public debut, which is currently anticipated to price Tuesday and trade Wednesday. That makes it the perfect moment to sit back and chat through a few of the year’s biggest offerings and how they performed post-debut.

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Two things are on my mind. First, what happened to some of the most famous IPO pops from the last year? With rising retail trading around the world thanks to companies like Robinhood and WeBull, some recent tech offerings have had simply massive early trading sessions. Did those initial gains persist? Or did they evaporate, leaving the IPO mispricing conversation somewhat overblown?

And, second, what happened to the handful of SPACs that we felt made some reasonable sense before their combination was completed? How is Latch doing? And SoFi?

Let’s talk about public offerings now that the IPO season is essentially behind us.

So, what about those insane IPO pops?

If you turn the clock back to one year ago, DoorDash and C3.ai had just gone public, and both racked up simply excellent early returns. As TechCrunch noted on December 9, 2020:

Haters gonna hate, IPOs gonna pop. That’s the story today as richly valued DoorDash and C3.ai, two American technology unicorns, saw their values skyrocket after they began trading today.

DoorDash shares are up just under 83% to $186.51. The company priced its IPO at $102 per share last night, ahead of its raised IPO range of $90 to $95 per share. … [S]hares of C3.ai are up an even sharper 151% to $105.58, after pricing at $42 per share earlier today.

The discourse at the time was that those IPOs were bad in that they were priced incorrectly. That, essentially, bankers had sold their IPO share too cheaply, effectively rewarding their own client base while undercutting the fundraising results of both DoorDash and C3. Well, how have things gone since?