If The Hottest Tech IPOs of 2014 Were Wine Labels

The intersection of wine and technology is an interesting place, from apps that can track what you drink to social media monitoring services for wineries. And then there are interesting efforts to apply tech to terroir that attempt to scientifically map and explain just what that magical ‘sense of place’ truly is.

This article is not about any of those efforts. Instead we’re turning our gaze to the frenzied when-will-they-IPO conversation about eleven of the world’s hottest tech companies. All of these companies have either filed to IPO already or are the subject of intense speculation about when they will go public. We’re not financial analysts, nor are we tech journalists. We just like to talk about wine. So we asked ourselves, what if those companies that we hear about every day were wine brands? What would their labels look like? Here’s our take!

P.S. – If anyone wants a copy of their label to slap on a bottle the day they ring the opening bell downtown at the NYSE or up at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square, get in touch. We’d be happy to help you celebrate!

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Airbnb

Over the last two years, Airbnb has become a monster company. It’s now time to start thinking about how they are impacting their competitors which trade publicly, as well as what this company looks like when it eventually comes public. There’s no way it’s getting bought out now (it’s too big), and they are on a war path to change the hospitality industry for the better. (Estimize)

Airbnb As A Wine Label

Alibaba

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s estimated valuation rose to an average of $153 billion after the Chinese e-commerce company, said to be headed for an initial public offering this year, reported surging sales. Analysts expect Alibaba to hold the biggest IPO since Facebook Inc… (Bloomberg)

Alibaba As A Wine Label

Box

Box, the online storage company, has secretly filed paperwork for an initial public offering, according to a source…Box has already tapped banks, including Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and JP Morgan Chase, to help underwrite it stock offering…The venture-backed firm run by under-30 wunderkind Aaron Levie could be looking to raise about $500 million in an IPO. (Quartz)

Box As A Wine Label

Coupons.com

Coupons.com, a digital network of printable coupons, online coupons, loyalty card promotions and mobile coupons, announced terms for its IPO on Tuesday. The Mountain View, CA-based company plans to raise $130 million by offering 10 million shares at a price range of $12 to $14. At the midpoint of the proposed range, the company would command a fully diluted market value of $1.1 billion. (Nasdaq)

Coupons-dot-com As A Wine Label

Dropbox

Dropbox today announced through an SEC filing that it has raised a $325 million funding round. That’s far more than earlier reports, which expected a $250 million raise at a $10 billion valuation, indicated in January…Quartz reported in February 2013 that the company has already held talks with banks about the IPO — now, over a year later, the IPO rumors have reached a fever pitch. This funding round will almost certainly add to the furor. (Pando)

Dropbox As A Wine Label

GoPro

GoPro is going public. The San Mateo, Calif.-based action camera company announced today in a press release that it had filed confidential initial public offering documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell its common stock. In order to file for a confidential IPO under the JOBS Act, a company must have less than a $1 billion in sales. Last year, Founder and CEO Nick Woodman told FORBES that the company sold 2.3 million cameras, grossing more than $520 million in 2012. (Forbes)

GoPro As A Wine Label

GrubHub

GrubHub, which has changed its name from the awkward ‘GrubHub Seamless’ it used since the two food delivery companies merged last year, has publicly filed for its IPO with the SEC today. The company had confidentially filed last week, according to the WSJ, but now it’s official that GrubHub will seek to list as GRUB on the NYSE following evaluation of its application. The company is seeking to raise $100 million in its initial public offering. (TechCrunch)

GrubHub Seamless As A Wine Label

King (Producer of Candy Crush)

King Digital Entertainment Plc., today filed to raise $500 million in an initial public offering in the U.S. – a figure that’s a placeholder used to calculate fees and may change. The company’s most popular game is “Candy Crush Saga,” which made up 78 percent of cash spent by players at King last year, according to a prospectus disclosed today. Demand for the puzzle game, which features different colored candies, drove an elevenfold surge in revenue in 2013 to $1.9 billion. (Bloomberg)

King (Candy Crush) As A Wine Label

Rubicon Project

At long last, sell-side platform (or do you say “ad exchange” or “marketplace”?) Rubicon Project has filed it’s S-1…in preparation for an Initial Public Offering (IPO). The company is looking to raise $100 million…Rubicon reported revenues of $55.7 million for the first nine months of 2013, up 48 percent from $37.6 million during the same period in 2012…The company’s net loss shrank from $15.4 million in 2011 to $2.4 million in 2012. Its loss for the first nine months of 2013 was $9.2 million. (ad exchanger)

Rubicon Project As A Wine Label

Spotify

Online music streaming service Spotify is recruiting a U.S. financial reporting specialist, adding to speculation that the Swedish start-up is preparing for a share listing, which one banker said could value the firm at as much as $8 billion. (Reuters)

Spotify As A Wine Label

Square

Square, the mobile payments startup created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, has postponed its IPO indefinitely, FOX Business has learned…The San Francisco-based Square had been taking steps towards a public offering, meeting with Nasdaq executives as recently as the fourth quarter of 2013, according to a person familiar with the situation…But in recent weeks, people close to Square have indicated to Wall Street executives that a 2014 offering is unlikely because the company has run into problems with its “revenue run rate,” a key projection of future performance. (Fox Business) * We started working on this project before Square’s not-so-good news hit. We’re sharing the label anyway.

Square As A Wine Label

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