US IPO Weekly Winners & Losers

As always, the US IPO market went dark as fireworks lit up the sky for July 4th.

Now we should get a few weeks of activity before the annual IPO pause in August. Beauty brand ODDITY Tech and biotechs Sagimet and Apogee are good IPO candidates, along with 10 other sizable deals that recently filed or updated. The pipeline has enough deals to produce a solid July, but we’ll need more public filings to maintain this modest pickup into the fall.

Next week Surf Air Mobility (NYSE: SRFM) aims to complete the first direct listing in over a year, after terminating a 2022 SPAC merger. Morgan Stanley is the lead advisor. Surf Air has an ambitious plan to become a major regional airline with small, low-emission electric planes. As a direct listing, there’s no proposed range and the public float will come from existing shareholders. The company instead raised capital from other sources, whose shares convert at a discount to the initial listing price.

Looking at our Master Calendar (IPO Pro Only), the week ahead will see Street research on CAVA and a lock-up release from Skyward Specialty Insurance.

One nano-cap IPO’d on the Nasdaq this week, a Chinese financial firm that was too small for our stats (PWM). Got a bit of déjà vu when it priced at the low end and shot up +254%.

The IPO market had a solid week with the Renaissance IPO Index up +0.3% vs. the S&P 500's -1.2% loss. Top performer Rivian Automotive jumped +48.3% after hitting its production goals. Another winner DigitalOcean rose +14.9% after announcing it’ll acquire Paperspace, the latest M&A in the AI space (M&AI…?). Bottom performer Affirm sold off -11.0% due to an analyst downgrade.