The upcoming TripActions IPO has us hype • TechCrunch

Instacart in Q4 2022, TripActions in Q2 2023? Let’s do it.

The IPO market is still frozen like a Nordic lake dotted with fishing huts, but there are signs that a thaw is now in sight.

News from Insider indicates that TripActions, a unicorn in the corporate travel and expense category, has filed confidential paperwork to go public. Per the publication, the company is targeting a Q2 2023 public debut at around a $12 billion price tag. (Bloomberg’s Katie Roof, a former TechCruncher, first reported that TripActions was eyeing an IPO).

The news warmed our hearts, as we have heartily missed S-1 filings, a particular flavor of startup news that we feasted on during the 2021 boom but were forced to learn to live without this year as falling public-market prices and lackluster returns from some prior debuts slammed shut the IPO window a few quarters back.

Mix in the fact that we are — still — expecting a late-2022 Instacart S-1 filing and perhaps even debut, we now have not merely two IPOs on our dockets, but two potential decacorn public offerings. These are going to be big, noisy, large-dollar transactions that will provide valuable data concerning market appetite for tech shares generally and shed light on two important startup sectors’ respective worth. Hell yeah, we’re excited. Nothing like a little new data to fill in the gaps in our understanding of today’s market.

Today, we’re going to discuss what we hope to learn from each IPO filing and which startups will be impacted by those particular data points.

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Recall that Instacart had a huge pandemic run, growing quickly before swapping CEOs, reaccelerating growth, and sticking to its IPO-timing guns.

TripActions is different. The pandemic didn’t help its business right away — in fact, it roughed it up a little. But the company shook up its model, expanding its product mix in the process, and now, with business travel coming back, is apparently satisfied with its results to the point where an IPO is in the cards.

S-1 hopes, IPO dreams

Starting with Instacart because it’s ground that we’ve trod before, we know that the company’s revenue is accelerating and that it reached terrific scale thanks to COVID-19 shifting consumer behavior closer to its product.

We also recently learned that the company is slowly trimming staff, likely to get its profit metrics in the right spot to sell stock to public-market investors; the word of the day is profit, or perhaps “efficiency instead of merely growth,” after all.