Hi, it’s Alexandra Sternlicht filling in for Allie today. Figma’s sensational IPO last week resurrected longstanding debates about IPO pricing and first day pops—an unsurprising reaction to the newly listed stock’s 333% surge in its first days of trading. As investors dissect the offering (and as Figma’s stock settles back a bit, falling 27% on Monday), an equally important set of questions are in the air: Will Figma’s debut entice other startups to jump into the fray, bringing an end to the tech industry’s IPO drought? And if so, who’s next?
“Having positive IPOs is a good signal for everybody,” says Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner at Forerunner Ventures, whose portfolio company Chime recently went public and experienced a 37% pop in stock price on its first day of trading. (Forerunner also has investments in public company Hims & Hers and late stage private companies including Oura.)
Green floats the idea of startups thinking of an IPO as the Series A of their new lives in the public markets—a notion she thinks could be “a motivator to people’s willingness, and maybe even eagerness, to go public.” (As if on cue, HeartFlow, a medical technology company, filed an S-1 for its IPO at a $1.3 billion valuation the day after Figma’s debut.)
There’s a long list of late-stage VC-backed tech companies with strong customer bases that Wall Street investment bankers would love to take public. Many of these multibillion-dollar companies, including Databricks, Klarna, Stripe, and SpaceX, have been subjects of IPO speculation for years. And then, of course, there’s the crop of richly valued AI startups, from OpenAI and Anthropic, to Elon Musk’s xAI.
Those companies will likely continue to be in the spotlight, but in conversations I had with several investors following Figma’s debut, other names came up as more likely to IPO sooner including Canva, Revolut, Midjourney, Motive, and Anduril. Click here to read more about the post-Figma IPO watchlist.
Alexandra Sternlicht
X: @iamsternlicht
Email: alex.sternlicht@fortune.com
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