IPO Hopeful 1 – Series A Complete?

This week, I attended a shareholder meeting for a startup I invested in last year. By chance, I got to know them and learned that during the pandemic when the entire travel industry was closed down, they were supported repeatedly by their core group of close to 300 angel investors. Unusual that a startup can accumulate such a strong group and definitely proving that the company has some strong financial underpinnings supporting it.

Now, they’ve reached several key milestones that they promised before. According to their plan, they really did sign a master contract with the top player in the industry, which is a household name that everyone knows. And now they are in the final stages of purchasing their strongest competitor.  These big milestones together with the financial foundation under the company signals the company’s readiness now to enter the arena in a global ‘scale-up’.

I had only made a very small investment initially, but this time they announced that their orders had already exploded, and they complete Series A funding, raising about $12M, in the round, of appx $35M total from inception. According to them, the estimated IPO timeline is  anticipated for 2026, and their share price for the next round of funding has already been increased-all good news.

It reminded me of a project I was involved in back in the day. We completed our A+ round and everyone was saying the IPO was just around the corner. But in the end, we burned through all the money and couldn’t make it happen. That said, I think my current asset allocation is pretty good. The bulk of it goes into passive income, which has good liquidity and stable returns, bringing in money every month. The small amounts I put into these high-risk, high-reward projects are just for fun. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll hit the jackpot, haha. A friend of mine once invested in a startup as a first timer, and it turned out to be a unicorn in one go. So, it’s good to have dreams—what if they come true? (Though it’s probably not going to be me, haha!)

So why did I keep increasing my position with them? I will start sharing all the details next time!