Venture Capital Everywhere Will Be Watching Twilio’s $100m IPO this Thursday

Twilio is going public this week, and when the nine-year-old cloud communications company goes public on Thursday, all venture capital eyes will be on the market’s reaction.  As the first tech company to go public in six months, Twilio is following a string of (generally) unsuccessful tech IPOs, which has put a damper on the mood in venture capital circles in Silicon Valley, in particular where firms have made investment in high flying unicorn-valuation businesses.

Thursday can go one of two ways: A strong opening would suggest that the public market is now more in sync with the private market valuations that have been awarded to fast growing startups. A weak opening would suggest that the public markets are still having a hard time swallowing the valuations coming out of Silicon Valley.  From the perspective of startup founders, the former should reinforce their ability to raise capital on favorable terms, whereas the latter will likely lead to continued valuation compression.

The stock is set to be priced between $12 and $14 per share, raising $100 million for the business, while setting an approximate opening day valuation of $1 billion, which is roughly in line with the reported last round of private funding.