The IPO Buzz: Alkami’s IPO & COIN’s Direct Listing

Alkami Technology, Inc.  (ALKT proposed), a digital banking platform, is generating early IPO buzz this week – along with the NASDAQ direct listing of Coinbase Global (COIN proposed), the biggest U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange. Bankers expect to raise about $5 billion from eight IPOs this week. That estimated volume does not include the Coinbase direct listing.

The IPO Calendar added three biotech deals early Monday morning –  Akoya Biosciences, Biomea Fusion and Recursion Pharmaceuticals. All three are expected to start trading on Friday.

The price range for Alkami’s IPO was increased early today to $26 to $28 – up from $22 to $25 – reflecting demand for the deal, SEC filings showed. (Source: S-1/A filing dated April 12, 2021.) If priced at the $27 mid-point of its new range, Alkami would have a valuation of about $2.24 billion.

“Valuation is the thing to watch now,” a seasoned IPO pro says, referring to the shift in the IPO market’s mood in late March.

IPO investors are looking much more critically now at valuations after several IPOs had disappointing debuts in late March. Those disappointments were a reality check after several months of significant opening-day gains amid “buy everything” euphoria. (What we didn’t know on March 23-25, of course, was the unraveling of Archegos Capital and its impact on the broader U.S. stock market.)

Speaking of valuation: The Wall Street Journal points out that Coinbase’s valuation is $91.5 billion, based on prices paid for its stock in private transactions earlier this year, according to the company’s prospectus. And how does that compare to the valuations of the major U.S. stock exchanges? The Wall Street Journal does the math in this story by Alexander Osipovich; the story was published April 10, 2021, and headlined: Coinbase’s Lofty Valuation Might Erode as Crypto Markets Mature – WSJ:

“Coinbase is valued at nearly 90 times its trailing 12-month earnings, based on the lower end of its first-quarter estimate. By comparison, Intercontinental Exchange Inc., owner of the New York Stock Exchange, has a multiple of about 31, while Nasdaq Inc. is trading at about 27 times its trailing 12-month earnings.”

The WSJ story points out that the stock price of Coinbase “could suffer if bitcoin crashes, leading to a slump in trading volumes.”

The Week Ahead

Nine deals – eight traditional IPOs and the first big direct listing on the NASDAQ – are set for pricing this week. Let’s take a look.

Tuesday night pricing for Wednesday trading:

Alkami Technology, Inc.  (ALKT proposed) provides a cloud-based digital banking platform for all but the biggest U.S. banks and credit unions. This is an IPO of just 6 million shares at $26 to $28 to raise an estimated $162 million, based on pricing at the $27 mid-point.

Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Barclays,  Citigroup and William Blair are the joint book-runners. This is a NASDAQ listing.

Alkami Technology counts 151 banks and credit unions – ranging in asset size from about $500 million to about $100 billion – among its customers. For perspective, the five biggest U.S. banks have total assets ranging from about $2 trillion to $3 trillion.

The Plano, Texas-based company makes its money mostly through multi-year subscription contracts for its digital banking platform’s SaaS solutions. (SaaS stands for Software-as-a-Service.) Its platform is designed to help small to super-regional banks compete with J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup and the rest of banking’s big boys.

Alkami’s revenue jumped to $112.1 million in 2020 from $73.5 million in 2019, reflecting the increase in digital banking activity during the pandemic lockdown.  Its net loss grew to $51.4 million at Dec. 31, 2020, from $41.9 million at the end of 2019.

Coinbase Global (COIN proposed) is the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange. It earns money on the transaction fees it collects when people buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum and other crypto currencies. This is NOT an IPO. This is a direct listing of 114.9 million shares that are expected to start trading on Wednesday, April 14, on the NASDAQ.

Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Allen & Co. and Citigroup are the financial advisors for Coinbase Global’s direct listing.

Coinbase Global says its Class A common stock sold for $200.00 a share and its Class B common stock sold for $375.01 a share in private transactions during the first quarter of 2021 through March 15, 2021, according to the prospectus.

Note: Coinbase Global said last week that it expects to report $1.8 billion in revenue and net income of $730 million to $800 million for the first quarter of 2021 – eclipsing its performance for all of 2020, when it booked $1.3 billion in revenue and $322.3 million in net income.

Worth noting: Please see this story published March 21, 2021, by Yahoo! Finance:

Coinbase fined $6.5 million over cryptocurrency trading claims (yahoo.com)

Wednesday night pricing for Thursday trading:

agilon health, inc. (AGL proposed) is a Medicare-focused healthcare platform that enables primary care physicians to provide value-based care for senior citizens enrolled in Medicare Advantage healthcare insurance plans. This is an IPO of 46.6 million shares at $20 to $23 each to raise $1.0 billion, if priced at the mid-point.

J.P. Morgan,  Goldman Sachs, BofA Securities, Deutsche Bank Securities and Wells Fargo Securities are the joint book-runners. This is a New York Stock Exchange listing.

Based in Long Beach, California, agilon health provides care in 17 communities through its primary physician groups. Its value-based care is an alternative to the traditional Medicare model of volume-based care on a fee-for-service basis.

Note: agilon health reported $1.22 billion in revenues and a net loss of $60.1 million for the last 12 months.

AppLovin Corp. (APP) offers the AppLovin Platform of its proprietary core technologies and software to help mobile gaming app developers market and monetize their apps. The interest in this IPO is due to its presence in the red-hot mobile gaming space. This is an IPO of 25 million shares at $75 to $85 each to raise $2 billion, if priced at the mid-point. The valuation, based on pricing at the $80 mid-point, would be $28.6 billion – a level that’s stirring some conversation on the Street.

Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, KKR, BofA Securities,  Citigroup, Credit Suisse and UBS Investment Bank are the joint book-runners. This is a NASDAQ listing.

AppLovin Corp., based in Palo Alto, California, is a one-stop shop of app infrastructure to help app developers – especially mobile gaming app developers – run their products on smartphones and tablets, market their digital wares, and make money. The company also owns apps that offer more than 200 free-to-play mobile games, which are run by 12 studios.

Note: The pandemic lockdown helped drive AppLovin’s revenue up 46 percent – to $1.45 billion for 2020, up from $994 million in 2019 – as people turned to mobile gaming to ward off boredom. But the company is not profitable. AppLovin reported a net loss of $125.93 million for the last 12 months, a reversal from net income of $119.04 million in 2019. The company has spent more than $1 billion on acquisitions and partnerships since 2018, the prospectus says.

Karat Packaging, Inc. (KRT proposed) makes and distributes environmentally friendly food packaging. This is an IPO of only 4.0 million shares at $18 to $20 each to raise $75.1 million, if priced at the mid-point.

Stifel, William Blair, Truist Securities, National Securities Corp. and D.A. Davidson & Co. are the joint book-runners. This is a NASDAQ listing.

Karat Packaging, based in Chino, California, counts major casual restaurant chains, including Applebee’s, Chili’s, Chipotle Mexican Grill and TGI Fridays, along with fast-food chains such as In-N-Out Burger and Panda Express, among its customers.

Note: Karat Packaging is profitable. The company reported net income of $17.52 million on revenue of $295.5 million for the last 12 months. Its valuation is about $363.3 million, based on the mid-point of its IPO price range.

TuSimple Holdings Inc.  (TSP) is a startup developing an autonomous freight truck navigation system. This is an IPO of 33.8 million shares at $35 to $39 each to raise about $1.3 billion, if priced at the mid-point.

Morgan Stanley,  Citigroup and J.P. Morgan are the joint book-runners. This is a NASDAQ listing.

TuSimple, based in San Diego, has a partnership with Navistar for the development of its autonomous freight network (AFN).  The company says its software and AFN will improve the safety and efficiency of long-haul trucking. TuSimple was founded in 2015.

Note:  TuSimple reported $1.84 million in revenue and a net loss of $177.87 million for the past 12 months. The company has an accumulated deficit of about $405 million, the prospectus says.

Worth noting: The online story summarizing the CBS “60 Minutes” report on autonomous trucking (first broadcast on Aug. 23, 2020), which raised concerns about highway safety and the economic impact of its potential for wiping out truckers’ jobs:

Automated trucking, a technical milestone that could disrupt hundreds of thousands of jobs, hits the road – 60 Minutes – CBS News

Thursday night pricing for Friday trading:

Akoya Biosciences, Inc. (AKYA proposed) offers spatial biology solutions, including imaging systems, to perform biomarker tissue analysis and phenotyping through its CODEX and Phenoptics platforms – an essential part of clinical research to develop new cancer drugs and other immune-therapies. This is an IPO of 6.58 million shares at $18 to $20 each to raise $125.02 million, based on mid-point pricing.

J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Piper Sandler and Canaccord Genuity are the joint book-runners. This is a NASDAQ listing.

Akoya Biosciences, based in Marlborough, Massachusetts, is focused on partnering with top biopharma companies on clinical trials. The company says its contract research services give biopharma clients access to the Phenoptics platform in a fee-for-service model to support the discovery and validation of predictive biomarkers to improve the understanding of a drug’s mode of action and the underlying biology of disease.

Biomea Fusion (BMEA proposed) is a preclinical biopharmaceutical company developing irreversible small molecule drugs to treat patients with genetically defined cancers. This is an IPO of 7.5 shares at $15 to $17 each to raise $120 million, based on mid-point pricing.

J.P. Morgan, Jefferies and Piper Sandler are the joint book-runners. This is a NASDAQ listing.

Biomea Fusion, based in Redwood City, California, says its irreversible small molecule drug is a synthetic compound that forms a permanent bond to its target protein and offers several advantages over conventional reversible drugs, including greater target selectivity, lower drug exposure and the ability to drive a deeper and more durable response.

Recursion Pharmaceuticals (RXRX proposed) is an AI-driven clinical biotech company focused on “decoding biology by integrating technological innovations across biology, chemistry, automation, data science and engineering, with the goal of radically improving the lives of patients and industrializing drug discovery.” This is an IPO of 18 million shares at $16 to $18 each to raise $306 million, based on mid-point pricing.

Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, BofA Securities, SVB Leerink, Allen & Co. and KeyBanc Capital Markets are the joint book-runners. This is a NASDAQ listing.

Recursion Pharmaceuticals, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, says: “The core principle of our approach to improving the scale and efficiency of drug discovery is to automate and integrate the wet lab to create massive empirical datasets of biology and the dry lab where we leverage machine learning, or ML, to unravel the complex patterns without our datasets.”

Eyes on the Pipeline

The traffic just keeps cruising up to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s filing window. One of the most notable new filings last week landed on Friday from Vaccitech plc (VACC proposed), the startup behind the Oxford University and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. The company warns of the vaccine’s blood clot risk in the prospectus.

Last week was a study in contrasts: The IPO Calendar was lean, with only two biotech deals priced. But the traffic at the SEC’s filing window was robust, with 13 companies filing to go public plus more than a dozen blank-check or SPAC filings.

Week of April 22^nd

UiPath (PATH proposed), the automation software company, is the marquee name among five IPOs scheduled so far for the third week of April. More names are likely to join that parade as the week goes along and more filings flow into the SEC’s filing window.

Stay tuned.

(For more information about these companies, please click the hyperlinks, which will take you to the IPO profiles on IPOScoop.com.)

(Never trade on proposed symbols. You might wind up owning something on the OTC Bulletin Board.)

Disclosure: Nobody on the IPOScoop.com staff has a position in any stocks mentioned above, nor do they trade or invest in IPOs. The IPOScoop.com staff does not issue advice, recommendations or opinions.

Disclaimer: A SCOOP Rating (Wall Street Consensus of Opening-day Premiums), is a general consensus taken, at press time, from Wall Street and investment professionals concerning how well an IPO might perform when it starts trading. The SCOOP Rating does not reflect the opinions of anyone associated with IPOScoop.com. The SCOOP ratings should not be taken as investment advice. The rating merely reflects the opinion of the professionals at the time of publication and is subject to last-minute changes due to market conditions, changes in a specific offering and other factors, such as changes in the proposed offering terms and the shifting of investor interest in the IPO. The information offered is taken from sources we believe to be reliable, but we cannot guarantee the accuracy.