The IPO drought was worse than you thought
The massive gap that the American venture market has seen in technology IPOs has stretched on for effectively 1.5 years, making Instacart and Klaviyo’s filings of public-offering paperwork by all the more important.
Exit volume for startups has been weak since the end of the 2021, but it’s easy to become inured to new market conditions and lose track of just how long they have dragged on — and how different they are from what came before.
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Crunchbase data indicates that billion-dollar exits — the sort of startup liquidity event that the onset of the unicorn era post-2013 rendered requisite instead of exotically exceptional — began to fall in frequency in the final quarter of 2021. The decline in the pace of billion-dollar exits for American companies includes a drop from 71 in the third quarter of 2021 to 45 in the final quarter of that year; 19 in Q1 2022; and just 17 in the rest of the year.
The total for 2023 through today is 13.