The IPO Buzz: Instacart (CART) Prices IPO at $30 – High End

Instacart (CART ) priced its IPO at $30.00 – the high end of its recently raised price range of $28.00 to $30.00 – on Monday night (Sept. 18, 2023). The online grocery delivery pioneer sold 22.0 million shares – the same number of shares in the prospectus – at $30.00 each to raise $660.0 million in the IPO. The stock is set to start trading Tuesday (Sept. 19, 2023) on the NASDAQ. (Editor’s Note: This column, published Monday night, was updated Tuesday morning with the NASDAQ debut of micro-cap IPO Davis Commodities Ltd.)

Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan led the joint book-runners’ team, which included BofA Securities, Barclays, Citigroup, JMP Securities, LionTree, Oppenheimer & Co., Piper Sandler, SoFi and Stifel.

The high-end pricing gives Instacart a valuation or a market cap of about $8.29 billion.

Instacart had been on IPO investors’ “watch list” for at least two years. The San Francisco-based tech unicorn’s IPO attracted a tremendous amount of interest, especially in the wake of Arm Holdings Ltd.’s(ARM) successful IPO last week.

Early Friday (Sept. 15, 2023), Instacart woke up Wall Street with the news that it had raised its IPO price range to $28.00 to $30.00 – up from $26.00 to $28.00 initially – and kept the number of shares at 22.0 million. (Source: S-1/A filing)

Cornerstone investors, including principal stockholder Sequoia Capital, had indicated interest in buying up to $400 million of stock in the  IPO,  according to the prospectus. The cornerstone investors’ potential orders amounted to about 63 percent of the IPO.

For IPO investors, Instacart’s appeal was simple.

“It makes money,” a seasoned IPO trader says.

Instacart earned net income of $596 million on revenue of $2.9 billion for the 12 months that ended June 30, 2023.

Davis Commodities (DTCK) Prices Micro-Cap IPO at $4.00 – Low End

On the micro-cap side of the IPO Calendar, Davis Commodities Ltd. (DTCK) priced its tiny IPO of 1.1 million shares at $4.00, the low end of its price range. to raise $4.4 million. The stock opened higher in it NASDAQ debut at 10:54 a.m. EDT today (Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2023) – rising to $5.50, up $1.50 or 37.5 percent, on volume of about 268,000 shares, NASDAQ records showed. Univest Securities was the sole book-runner.

The stock in the IPO was offered by the Cayman Islands-incorporated holding company for Davis Commodities Ltd. The underlying business is a profitable Singapore-based agricultural trading company that specializes in sugar, rice and oil and fat products. Davis Commodities serves clients in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Its services include warehouse handling, storage and logistics.

(For more information about these companies, please check the IPO Calendar and the individual IPO Profiles found on IPOScoop.com’s website.)

Note: Never trade on proposed symbols. They have been known to change and you might buy something on the OTC Bulletin Board.

To see what time the NASDAQ IPOs are expected to trade, please log in to: NASDAQTrader.com then scroll down to IPO Message.

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.