AnalytixInsight

After a few weeks of volatility in Canadian capital markets, last week saw a bit of an uptick in activity. That said, we’re hearing investors are pushing back on some richly valued new issues. We’re excited to see MDA (a Canadian company we’ve known as 15 years as sell side equity analysts) could be a public company once again. In the USA, Robinhood has filed confidentially for a US IPO. Both Robinhood & SoFi have indicated they will let retail investors buy into IPOs. We’re also watching Coursera’s IPO, as many influential investors COVID could forever change education. WeWork could go public via a SPAC. In the US too, recent IPO debuts by Vizio and DigitalOcean suggest investors could be more price sensitive with regards to new issues than in the past few months.

Given market volatility in the technology and growth sectors over the past few weeks, this last week saw a muted level of new growth sector equity financings in Canada once again. That said, new offering pipelines appear healthy, and our contacts at various investment banks suggest there could be up to ten newly minted tech companies in Canada relatively soon. Sophic client, AnalytixInsight (ALY-TSX), could be an interesting stock to watch over the next few weeks, as the company could benefit from increased retail investor trading globally – the company, last week, also announced a new ESG focused offering. In this regard, we are also watching eToro’s SPAC in the USA, as well as public debuts by Deliveroo, Coinbase, Stripe.

As market volatility continued early last week after tumultuous trading the previous week, our discussions with our capital markets contacts suggest new issue pipelines remain exceptionally busy, which, in our view, bodes well for public markets relating to Canadian tech and clean tech. In the Canadian small cap space, we were encouraged to witness Sophic Client Luckbox (LUCK-TSXV), and separately, EMERGE Commerce (ECOM-TSXV) both close recently announced upsized financings. We’re also eagerly anticipating Telehealth provider Dialogue’s IPO. With Bitcoin hitting US$60K over the weekend, we expect crypto to remain an active theme globally. In the USA, Roblox and Coupang, both had strong public market debuts last week, as generally expected.

After three successive weeks of extraordinarily strong capital markets activity by the Canadian technology and clean tech sectors, this past week was impacted by ongoing market volatility as we expected last week. Public markets equity raises were under $100 million by our count. We are keeping an eye out on the performance of TAAL (an interesting Bitcoin SV play) and General Pizza (our due diligence found the pies to be delicious!). In the USA, we’re eager to see public debuts by Coupang, Instacart, Rocket Lab and Cipher in coming weeks/months.