2016 IPO Prospects: BuzzFeed Feeds on Native Advertising

Over the past few years, social media has become an increasingly influential source of gathering news online. According to a PewResearchCenter survey conducted in 2014, nearly half of their Web-using adult users relied on social media sites like Facebook to get news updates. But while social sites may be gaining importance as news sources, the industry is yet to develop an organized method to track performance of digital-only media sources. Thus detailed performance metrics of many of the digital news sources are not known. But that hasn’t stopped valuations within the industry to grow. New York-based BuzzFeed is one such content discovery platform that has managed to successfully leverage social media tools to deliver a highly valued business.

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Oracle Focuses Cloud Effort on MarTech

According to Gartner, marketing technology is one of the fastest growing areas of the $1 trillion enterprise software market and CMOs are expected to spend more than CIOs by 2017. Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) has started the new year with the announcement of its plans to acquire web tracking company AddThis. AddThis will become a part of Oracle’s Data Cloud business and will be used to enhance its marketing cloud efforts—an area that has been the focus of its past few acquisitions.  >>>

2016 IPO Prospects: Avant Will Have to Wait and Watch

The online lending sector may have witnessed intensified scrutiny in the recent past due to unfavorable publicity in the San Bernardino attacks and other legal cases questioning the regulations imposed on the sector. But that does not take away from the fact that analysts expect the volume of loans extended by marketplace lenders to grow 47% annually through 2020. The worrying circumstances have sent valuations of some of the companies like OnDeck and Lending Club declining, but Avant is still making it big and investing in growth.

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2016 IPO Prospects: Automattic Needs to Justify Valuation

According to a W3Techs survey conducted in November last year, 25% of the websites globally use WordPress as their content management system. We are avid users of WordPress and love the product. The open-source platfrom’s market share has increased from 13% back in 2011 to 23.3% by January 2015 before ending the year with 25.6% share. Automattic is looking to increase that share to 50% in the next few years, but it has a long way to go.

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2016 IPO Prospects: AppDynamics May Sustain Unicorn Valuation

According to a Gartner report published last year, the application performance monitoring (APM) market grew at a record pace of 15.8% in 2014 to $2.6 billion. Compuware is the market leader with $326.9 million revenues, followed by IBM at $222.6 million. Newer companies are also making their presence felt. The fastest growing vendor in the space was San Francisco-based AppDynamics which reported an impressive 246.5% growth to end last year with an estimated $79 million in revenues.

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2016 IPO Prospects: Actifio Looks Ready

According to IDC, companies worldwide spend close to $44 billion on storage hardware and software to manage copy data. The copy data management market is estimated to grow 5.4% annually over the period 2013 through 2016. Actifio is a fast-growing company in this field that is expected to go public this year. >>>

2016 IPO Prospects: Airbnb Sees Skyrocketing Valuations

According to a PhocusWright report, US travelers spent nearly $23 billion on vacation rentals in 2012. Online booking of vacation rentals had increased from 12% in 2007 to 24% by 2012. The researcher estimated the online share of the market to grow to 30% by the year 2014. San Francisco-based AirBnB is a fast rising online player in the market and a strong IPO prospect for 2016 as well.

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Zulily Went Away on a Flash Deal

Till a few years ago, the flash deals market was a big deal in itself. Companies like Groupon soared into the Unicorn club, riding high on this hype. Other companies like Zulily (Nasdaq: ZU) made the flash deals offering even more attractive by providing niche products. But soon, profitability pressures coupled with high cost of customer acquisition and retention hurt these companies. Many of them have fallen into the unicorpse* status. Zulily may still be worth over a billion dollars, but its valuation has reduced to a fourth since its golden days.

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Care.com Crashes Even Before Joining the Billion Dollar Club

There are quite a few examples of companies that have crashed and turned into a unicorpse* even before reaching the Unicorn status. One such example is that of Care.com (NYSE: CRCM), which was on its way to be a Billion Dollar Unicorn, but sketchy financials have caused the company’s valuation to fall.

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Billion Dollar Unicorns: Atlassian, A Legitimate One, Delivers A Great IPO

We have seen several Billion Dollar Unicorns burning up cash to acquire new customers and jeopardizing their fundamentals. Collaboration software maker Atlassian is strikingly different in this aspect and when it went public on the NASDAQ under the ticker TEAM, it was lapped up.  >>>