…That amount marks a more-than-40% jump from 2024, when certain private market investors were only willing to acquire ByteDance shares at a price that would suggest a $217 billion valuation. The company got a tailwind from the seemingly improving TikTok situation in the U.S., after President Donald Trump said he would “probably” extend the April 5 deadline for the popular short video platform to be sold or banned, Glen Anderson, cofounder and CEO of U.S.-based broker-dealer Rainmaker Securities, says by email….Read Full Article

Tesla Inc.’s quarterly results this week drove home the lesson that profit and sales numbers don’t seem to matter much for this stock anymore. Instead, it’s Elon Musk’s narrative that’s wooing investors at the moment.

The electric-vehicle maker’s fourth-quarter earnings fell short of analysts’ expectations pretty much across the board. Profit, revenue and margins all missed. Even its sales growth outlook for 2025 was dialed back. Yet, the stock closed up 2.9% on Thursday, as investors shrugged off the disappointing report and instead focused on Musk’s upbeat tone on the robotaxi business, humanoid robots and artificial intelligence. 

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The so-called Magnificent Seven group of tech stocks have spent the past two years looking invincible, so it’s ironic that the companies worth $18 trillion in total market value were undercut this past week by a Chinese start-up no one on Wall Street had heard of just days earlier.

Such is the power—and vulnerability—of being on the cutting edge.

The new R1 artificial-intelligence model from China’s DeepSeek has comparable performance to some of the world’s best models, and seemingly comes at a lower price to train and run in the cloud…Read Full Article

The entrepreneur Elon Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, in 2002 to reduce space transportation costs so humanity could eventually colonize Mars. While Musk's ultimate dream for the company has yet to become a reality, SpaceX has become one of the world's most valuable start-ups. As of early 2025, it was valued at $350 billion.

SpaceX has been a groundbreaking company over the years. It was the first private company to develop a liquid-propellant rocket that reached orbit, the first to send astronauts to the International Space Station, and the first to achieve a vertical propulsive landing.

SpaceX has a growing commercial operation. It develops and manufactures spacecraft, provides launch services, and operates a commercial satellite-based internet service from its Starlink satellites...Read Ful Aticle

Greg Martin, managing director of Rainmaker securities, shares what to look out for in the IPO market in 2025.

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Secondary transactions involving venture-backed startups are on track to hit a new high this year, as companies like OpenAI, SpaceX and Stripe Inc. organize tender offers to get employees paid, and investors look for ways to offload stakes outside of initial public offerings.

Tender offers give staffers, former employees and certain investors a way to sell their shares directly to other investors. It’s a break from past years, when major startups looking for a payday for staff would go public — the traditional route to fame and fortune in the tech world...Read Full Article

The last major IPO of the year has priced on an up note, and IPO investors are hopeful it will mark the end of three painful years of sub-par IPO raises.

ServiceTitan (TTAN), which provides business management software for plumbers, roofers, landscapers and others in the trades industry, will begin trading today on Nasdaq.  It is pricing 8.8 million shares at $71, well above the price range of $65 to $67, itself a significant hike from earlier price talk of 8.8 million shares at $52 to $57. 

“A window is opening” in the IPO market, Greg Martin, head of Rainmaker Securities, a financial brokerage firm that specializes in private securities transactions, told CNBC...Read Full Article

ServiceTitan (TTAN) surged over 42% in its IPO debut on the Nasdaq on Thursday, gaining from its original stock price of $71 to $101 per share. The company raised nearly $625 million in its initial public offering. Rainmaker Securities managing director Greg Martin joins Asking for a Trend to discuss what it signals for the broader IPO market.

"This is a stellar opening for ServiceTitan," Martin says, though he cautions it's an "excellent company but not a stellar company." He notes that the IPO demonstrates the market is "starved" for new issues and serves as a "benchmark for hopefully a good run for IPOs" moving forward into 2025…Watch Full Video

Time will tell what the next four years will mean for markets, but in the short term at least, it’s clear that at least one investor is benefiting mightily from the advent of the next Trump administration: Elon Musk

This week, Bloomberg News reported that Musk’s rocket and satellite maker SpaceX is in talks to issue new equity in a tender offer that values the company at US$350 billion — an increase from $255 billion U.S. earlier this year.

Greg Martin, managing director at Rainmaker Securities, says the close relationship between Elon Musk and Donald Trump is a factor in both the timing and the valuation of the funding round.

“Musk made a very big bet on Donald Trump,” said Martin in an interview with BNN Bloomberg. He says it’s noteworthy that shares in electric car maker Tesla have risen by almost 50 per cent since the election, despite being in an industry that isn’t poised to benefit under Trump policies…Read Full Article

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Glen Anderson says "the story is there was no story" for the 2024 IPO market. However, he shares more enthusiasm for 2025 with large cap names anticipated for a 2025 debut. Glen goes over the companies he has on the radar next year including SpaceX, ServiceTitan, and Databricks.

OpenAI is in talks to raise a new round of funding at an eye-popping $100 billion-plus valuation, sources told The Wall Street Journal this week.

It turns out investors have already proven they are willing to value the company that high to get on OpenAI’s coveted cap table. Multiple companies that track or facilitate secondaries deals — where investors buy shares from existing investors, not directly from the company — have seen investors pay prices that indicate an over $100 billion valuation…Read Full Article

Zhang Yiming, cofounder of TikTok owner ByteDance, has overtaken beverage giant Nongfu Spring chairman Zhong Shanshan as the richest man in China, according to the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List.

Zhang, 40, clinched the crown for the first time with a fortune of $45.6 billion, a tad above Zhong’s $43.3 billion, according to Forbes estimates. He stepped down as chairman of the web giant in 2021 after resigning as chief executive earlier that year.

Zhang continues to derive his net worth from a stake in the privately held company, which Forbes thinks has a valuation of $217 billion based on analyst interviews and data from trading platforms where investors can buy and sell stakes in companies that aren’t publicly listed….Read Full Article

The fi ntech world is a tale of two cities.

After a thrashing over the last two years, some big fi ntech startups, such as Stripe and Ramp,have seen their valuations rebound from the lows, as business improves and investordemand rises.

Many other fi ntechs, including Brex, Chime and Plaid, have yet to crystallize a lowervaluation in new fundraisings. But some trades on the secondary market suggest that if thefi ntechs do raise more money—including by going public—they will likely do so at lowervaluations than their last fundraising.

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Greg Martin, managing director at Rainmaker Securities, joins BNN Bloomberg to discuss the outlook for companies with ties to China.

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Greg Martin, managing director of Rainmaker Securities, joins BNN Bloomberg and talks the momentum in the IPO market.

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Elon Musk’s startup is privately held. How do you invest? It’s difficult—but not impossible.

The constellation Monoceros, faintly visible against the Milky Way, has for centuries occupied the heavens as “the unicorn.” The other space unicorn? Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. The billionaire entrepreneur’s onetime side hustle has, in less than two decades, evolved from a novel idea—reusable rockets—into the most highly valued startup in the US. The $180 billion colossus launches satellites, operates the Starlink internet service and counts itself as a critical NASA subcontractor, ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station…Read Full Article

Shares in Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company are a hot ticket for investors, but SpaceX tightly controls access
 
SpaceX has become one of the investing world’s most exclusive clubs.
 
Invites circulate via group chats, word of mouth and emails marked confidential. Investment vehicles providing access to Elon Musk’s closely held rocket and satellite company have generated hefty demand, and fees for those arranging them. For years, the company’s value has only gone in one direction—up.
 
Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX—which flirted with bankruptcy not long after Musk founded the company more than two decades ago—now dominates the launch business.
 
And it has built its satellite-internet division, Starlink, into an industry and geopolitical force…Read Full Article

Rainmaker Securities, a broker/dealer that specializes in the trading of late-stage private equity secondaries, has expanded RainmakerX, its self-service research and trading portal, the company announced in a statement.

RainmakerX’s new capabilities allow the company's brokers to view its global order book and directly place orders on behalf of its global client base, which includes institutions, private equity, high-net-worth investors, and special purpose vehicles. 

RainmakerX will also serve as a centralized management system for brokers’ client and partner lists, enhance cross-team collaboration, and provide advanced research capabilities via Rainmaker’s equity research product…Read Full Article

This year already proved that startups are willing to go public in a less-than-ideal market — and get rewarded for it, too. But bankers, lawyers and investors said the recent IPO successes aren’t enough to foster more than a dozen tech IPOs this year.

“I don’t think we will have the floodgates open like I might have thought,” Greg Martin, co-founder and managing director at Rainmaker Securities, told TechCrunch. “The trickle was delayed; I thought it would happen sooner in Q1. Because of that, I think the floodgates can’t open to 2025, but we could have a healthy flow of 10 to 15 companies for the year.”…Read Full Article

Now that President Biden has signed legislation forcing the sale of TikTok's U.S. operations, any potential deal raises a big question: How much is the popular video-sharing app worth?

Those asking have some huge—and widely varying—numbers to consider. One suitor has suggested $20 billion as a starting price for the U.S. operations. Executives at TikTok parent ByteDance have previously considered TikTok's global operations to be worth about half of the Chinese company's overall value, which would put it above $100 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

Settling on the exact value will be difficult because the tech industry has never seen a sale like this before, and there are several unknowns…Read Full Article