Opening Day: Six IPOs To Watch In 2020

The market for many of the highly anticipated 2019 initial public offerings lagged, with Uber (UBER) and Lyft (LYFT) among big names that disappointed. 2020 will bring a new batch of companies planning their market debut, with Airbnb and Postmates among those expected to come public.

Airbnb is one of the highly anticipated IPOs for 2020. The home sharing company's founder Brian Chesky recently told CNBC's Jim Cramer that "most people that are really rushing to go public, the number one reason they do is because they need the money. We don’t need to raise money, and so we haven't been in a rush," also indicating Airbnb might pursue a direct listing versus a traditional IPO.

Online brokerage service Robinhood is another name that many expect to come public next year. The company received more financing for its business over the summer, putting its valuation between $7B-$8B. 

Postmates was expected to come public this year after confidentially filing for an IPO with the SEC back in February, but the S-1 never came about. The company has risen to popularity amid the growing gig economy. At a startup conference earlier this year, Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann said that the company was closely watching the macroeconomy and indicated that other startups caused them to second-guess their timing.

Snowflake is a data warehousing cloud service provider that beat major players such as Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT) to win Capital One's (COF) business. Earlier this year, CEO Frank Slootman said, "You can't just pull the trigger and go public. There's a whole process. We do have the scale and the velocity in the business to go public. But there's a lot of other requirements and we have to mature ourselves to be a public company. The absolute earliest that this could possibly happen is early summer next year. I'm not saying that it will, but that would be the absolute earliest that it could happen. The second thing is, we have elections in the U.S. next year, which creates a huge amount of uncertainty. So we don't know what the world will look like [then]." Slootman joined the company in April after leaving ServiceNow (NOW).

Casper sells mattresses and after a round of funding earlier this year, some analysts estimate its valuation at just over $1B. The company has taken the offensive on social media, with influencers such as Kylie Jenner on the payroll. According to Bloomberg, Casper has been working with Morgan Stanley (MS) and Goldman Sachs (GS) on an IPO that could occur in the first half of 2020.

Called by some the "Uber of China," Didi Chuxing is a notable Chinese company that might IPO in the U.S. in 2020. It operates as a ride-hailing service, having acquired Uber's China business three years ago. Didi Chuxing had planned to debut on the public market in 2019 with a $80B valuation, but failed to pull the trigger. The company’s shareholders include names such as Softbank (SFTBY), Apple (AAPL), Alibaba (BABA) and Tencent (TCEHY).

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Palantir Technologies may be pumping the brakes on going public. According to a report by Bloomberg back in September, the company was in talks with private investors to raise "significant funding." Furthermore, Palantir’s cofounder and chairman, Peter Thiel, told employees the company would not be going public within the next three years, the report noted. The company was founded by Thiel back in 2003 and is a private data analytics and data mining outfit, catering to government clients.