‘Traditional’ IPOs Dominate the Week’s Activity  

Through the past week, what might be termed “traditional” initial public offering (IPO) announcements seemed to dominate the headlines, with relatively fewer SPAC-related announcements.

Banking-related listings year to date now stand at 56, while firms dedicated to transforming other companies’ workflows now stand at 44.

To that end, software development platform GitLab, focused on coding and streamlining developer and IT activity, started trading this past week, jumping more than 50% in its debut on the tech-heavy NASDAQ exchange. Drilling into the company’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the firm said that its quarterly revenue run rate was up 69% to a recent $233 million. The firm said it has more than 3,600 base customers.

“We believe in an innovative world powered by software,” the filing noted. “To realize this vision, we pioneered The DevOps Platform, a fundamentally new approach to DevOps consisting of a single codebase and interface with a unified data model. The DevOps Platform allows everyone to contribute to build better software rapidly, efficiently and securely.”

In another platform-related listing, accounts payable (AP) and payment automation platform AvidXchange Holdings, Inc. raised about $660 million in its own listing, garnering an implied valuation, via market cap, of nearly $5 billion. The company works with over 7,000 businesses in North America and counts more than 700,000 firms as part of its network. Its annual transaction volumes are more than $145 billion.

Read also: AvidXchange IPO Raises About $660M on Initial Market Cap of $4.8B 

Separately, online fashion retailer Lulu’s Fashion Lounge Holdings filed for a $100 million IPO, stating in its own S-1 filing that it has 2.5 million customers, with 40% year-to-date net revenue growth. The company also said that 65% of its sales come from repeat customers.

The company said in its filing that a “key differentiator of our business model from traditional fashion retail is our use of data to optimize almost all elements of our business. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in our product creation and curation cycle.” By way of contrast to traditional merchandising approaches – which the firm defined as “risk- and capital-intensive” – Lulu said that it “leverages a ‘test, learn and reorder’ strategy to bring hundreds of new products to market every week” across its platform.

Within the cryptocurrency realm, Stronghold Digital Mining filed for a $100 million IPO. In its S-1, the company noted that “we are a vertically integrated crypto asset mining company currently focused on mining bitcoin. We wholly own and operate a low-cost, environmentally beneficial coal refuse power generation facility” based in Pennsylvania. Total operating revenues were $3.7 million in the three months that ended in March, up from the $876,600 seen in the year-ago period.

And in SPAC-related activity, Finnovate Acquisition, a special-purpose acquisition company focused on the Israeli FinTech sector, has filed with the SEC in hopes of raising up to $150 million in an IPO.

Read more: SPAC Finnovate Acquisition Plans $150M IPO