Morning Report: Unicorn IPO Blues As Blue Apron Sinks, Tintri Limps Across Finish Line

Morning Report: While Delivery Hero’s IPO is doing pretty ok in Europe, two American IPOs disappoint.

Welcome to liquidity low-tide.

Shares of Blue Apron, the popular meal-kit company which went public yesterday after dramatically lowering its IPO price, descended beneath its reduced price in regular trading this morning. After pricing at $10, and closing its first day at $10.01, shares of Blue Apron are now worth just $9.79.

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And after a last-minute delay, and price reduction, Tintri went public this morning. Off its reduced price point, shares in the Cloud-ish Cloud-y Cloud Cloud company are up 4.7 percent to $7.33, after pricing at $7. Tintri originally aimed to debut between $10.50 and $12.50. That range was later lowered to $7 to $8, with $7 being the final choice.

Here’s the Tintri chart:

Both Blue Apron and Tintri are posting early trading sessions remarkably close to their IPO price. That’s good and bad. Good in that the newly-public companies likely priced their IPOs near their potential max, raising the most money possible for the firms. And bad in that not posting a decent bump on your first day — something many companies and their ensuing ranks of temporary banking friends engineer — leads to negative coverage, and, likely, internal disappointment.

To the second point, it becomes doubly true when your company goes public at a discount to your last private valuation. Like, say, both Tintri and Blue Apron just did.

(As a quick refresher, Tintri’s last listed valuation was $1.25 billion, according to Crunchbase. It’s worth a few hundred million today, a fraction of that sum. And Blue Apron went public worth around $1.9 billion, several hundred million under its last private valuation of $2.135 billion.)

Yes, two unicorns went public. But their pricing shows the continuing crash of private valuations and public sentiment. And if that’s the case at all-time market highs, what the hell happens when the public markets correct?

From the Crunchbase Daily:

Delivery Hero launches IPO

• Delivery Hero’s valuation topped $5 billion after the food delivery service went public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. The Berlin-based company, which operates in over 40 countries, previously raised $1.75 billion from venture and private equity investors.

Upfront raises $400M for VC fund

• Los Angeles-based venture capital firm Upfront Ventures has raised $400 million for its sixth fund, which will focus primarily on early stage technology companies. The firm raised $280 million for its last fund in 2014. The new fund launch comes amid a booming period for the Los Angeles startup scene, which is seeing a rise in investment and big exits.

East Bay cities raking in venture funding

• Companies in the San Francisco Bay Area raise so much venture capital that even smaller and lesser-known cities in the region outrank major metropolises when it comes to securing investment. Crunchbase News takes a look at some of the cities in the East Bay region that are raking in funding.