, Columnist
Who’s Hot and Who’s Not in Tech’s Rush to Go Public
The prospects for cloud-software firm Snowflake appear bright. Palantir, on the other hand, has some problems.
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The market for technology initial public offerings is white hot, and a herd of new unicorns is stampeding toward the public markets to take advantage of it. But not all unicorns are created equal.
Certainly the area with the most excitement is software. Investors are bidding up the sector on rising enthusiasm over the digital transformation of companies and the secular shift to cloud computing. According to Bloomberg News, 18 software companies have gone public this year, raising $5.5 billion in aggregate. Impressively, the stocks have generated nearly triple-digit weighted average returns from their offering prices.