Basic Catalyst, the powerhouse enterprise agency, is contemplating an IPO, Axios reported Friday morning, citing “a number of sources.”
TechCrunch has reached out to the agency’s managing associate, Hemant Taneja, for remark. Within the meantime, these following Basic Catalyst’s trajectory received’t be stunned by the prospect.
Based 25 years in the past as a small Cambridge, Mass.-based enterprise agency, Basic Catalyst (GC) began with $73 million in capital commitments. A decade later, armed with ballooning belongings and pre-IPO stakes in software program firms like Demandware and Brightcove, Taneja and then-partner Neil Sequeira arrange store in an enthralling yellow constructing with white trim on College Avenue in Palo Alto. There, GC shortly made its mark within the Bay Space, reducing software program offers paying homage to its East Coast successes whereas additionally forging deep ties with Y Combinator that paid off. In 2011, the agency secured a stake in Airbnb. In 2012, it dedicated to backing each Y Combinator startup sight unseen.
That very same 12 months, in July 2012, GC led the Sequence B spherical for Stripe — now Y Combinator’s most profitable alum by valuation, even because the fintech large maintains it has “no immediate plans” to go public.
In the meantime, GC itself has grown exponentially. Although Sequeira left in 2015 to begin his personal store, GC at present has a sprawling group with 20 managing administrators, over $30 billion in belongings, and places of work from San Francisco to Bengaluru. It has additionally expanded far past conventional enterprise investing. As we famous in October after speaking with Taneja for a podcast, the agency is nearly unrecognizable from its former self. Amongst different strikes, it has launched financing merchandise, rolled out a wealth administration enterprise, is within the means of buying a small healthcare system in Ohio, and bought two smaller enterprise companies.
A query Axios asks — and it’s one — is whether or not GC would be the very first enterprise agency to go public. It’s not solely a query of whether or not the agency decides to maneuver ahead, however whether or not the mere discuss of an providing quickens the plans of different heavyweight companies like Andreessen Horowitz, which appear to have their eyes on the identical prize.