The IPO Buzz: Looking for a Lyft

By Jan Paschal:

Will Rogers was fond of saying that “all I know is what I read in the papers.” The latest headlines are buzzing with anticipation that Lyft, the No. 2 ride-share app, will make its confidential filing public sometime this week and beat its giant rival Uber to the IPO punch. Meanwhile, only two deals are scheduled for February’s final week.

If Lyft does indeed make that move, the hope is that Uber and some other big-name unicorns – Slack, Pinterest and PostMates, to name a few – will soon follow it to the IPO racetrack. Pinterest upped the ante with news last week that it had filed confidential paperwork to go public. Other names on hungry IPO investors’ 2019 “wish list” include AirBnB and Peloton.

But the IPO experts tend to snap to attention only when companies go on the record with filing their IPO documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Levi Strauss turned heads with its Feb. 13th filing that it plans to go public again. Beyond Meat, which makes plant-based meat, became another one to watch when it filed IPO plans with the SEC last November.  

February’s Finale

The IPO market will wrap up February with two modest IPOs expecting to raise a total of $125 million.

Assuming that both deals get done, that would bring February’s traffic to nine IPOs – excluding six unit offerings. (IPOScoop does not include unit offerings in its IPO totals.)

Let’s take a look at this week’s IPO Calendar, with the deals organized by pricing and trading dates.

Monday night pricing for Tuesday morning trading

Super League Gaming (SLGG proposed), based in Santa Monica, California, is an amateur esports community and cloud-based content platform catering to Generation Z and Millennials dedicated to playing Minecraft, Fortnite and other video games, the prospectus says. (Generation Z is made up of people born from the year 1997 onward, while Millennials were born in the years 1981 through 1996, according to the Pew Research Center.)

Super League Gaming plans to offer 2.3 million shares at $10 to $12 each on Monday night, Feb. 25th, for trading on NASDAQ on Tuesday morning, Feb. 26th. For the last 12 months, the company had revenues of $1.05 million and a net loss of $20.6 million.

Wednesday night pricing for Thursday morning trading

Kaleido Biosciences (KLDO proposed), based in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a clinical-stage healthcare company dedicated to developing Microbiome Metabolic Therapies, or MMTs, to treat rare genetic disorders and other diseases.  

Kaleido Biosciences plans to offer 4.8 million shares at $20 to $22 each on Wednesday night, Feb. 27th, to trade on Thursday morning, Feb. 28th, on the NASDAQ. For the last 12 months, the company has reported no revenues and a net loss of $61.7 million.

(For more information on these companies, please go to the company profiles on the IPOScoop.com website.)   

A Peek at March 

The IPO Calendar is blank for the first week of March, but anything can happen when the SEC’s filing window opens again for business on Monday morning.

Stay tuned.

Disclosure: Neither the author nor anyone else on the IPOScoop.com staff has a position in any stocks mentioned, nor do we trade or invest in IPOs. The author and IPOScoop.com staff do not issue advice, recommendations or opinion.