Nine of the 10 possible IPOs this year identified by news provider CNN has corporate venturing backing.
This could be a record. The 10th is Arista Networks, founded and funded by legendary entrepreneurs and angel investors David Cheriton and Andy Bechtolsheim – their trophies include writing the first cheques to search engine Google and server maker Sun.
The 10 are:
Twitter, backed by DST, Mail.ru and JP Morgan
Violin Memory, backed by Toshiba and Juniper
Square, backed by Visa, Starbucks
Xoom, backed by SVB Financial Group
Dropbox, backed by Goldman Sachs
Arista Networks,
Box, backed by SAP Ventures and Salesforce
Marin Software, backed by SAP Ventures
Kabam, backed by Intel Capital, Warner Bros and MGM
Opower, backed by General Electric
There is plenty of trade and consultants arguing that venture-backed companies in general outperform their non-venture-backed peers during and after an initial public offering. And after social network Facebook’s dismal performance post-flotation there is an expected shift to more enterprise-focused entrepreneurial businesses.
But with rising stockmarkets in the US and China, more IPOs in aggregate would beneficial and an optimistic start to the year.