14th Annual Funding, Exits and IPO's 2025 - #FEIbabcsf

After two years of subdued activity the 2024 IPO market witnessed a gradual revival with 50% more IPOs in 2024 than in the prior year. And while Financials and Healthcare accounted for approximately 50% of those, the two best performing IPOs of the year were technology companies, Reddit and Astera Labs.
 
With a change of administration, favorable policies, relative economic stability and industry momentum 2025 looks like it should be a better year than 2024. And it seems that there is a backlog of both private equity sponsored companies as well as the usual Venture Capital funded companies seeking exit opportunities this year. Will tech IPOs pick up the pace in 2025?
 
Which tech companies appear most likely to go public this year? We know CoreWeave, backed by Nvidia is planning a substantial public offering in 2025. SymphonyAI just added a seasoned CFO to their team who has taken multiple companies public. Stripe has been a hot contender to IPO for the past few years but will it be beaten to it by Klarna or Revolut? HingeHealth has signalled that it will go public this year. Will this inspire other health and biotech companies to do the same?
 
Join us for an evening of lively, engaging and fun discussions and hear more about how things might work out for the technology community in 2025 and get a chance to ask questions our panel of Venture Capitalists. We will see how accurate their 2024 forecasts were and will see what their predictions are for 2025.


 

PANELISTS:
	RICHARD WATERS West Coast Editor, The Financial Times Richard Waters is the West Coast Editor for the Financial Times. His beat covers the technology industry. Before moving to the West Coast, Mr Waters was based in the FT's New York office for nine years. His roles there included Wall Street reporter, New York bureau chief, and the FT's first information industries editor, overseeing global coverage of technology, telecommunications and media. He previously worked at the FT in London where he held a number of positions, including editor of international capital markets, securities industry correspondent and accountancy and taxation correspondent. Before working for the FT, Mr. Waters worked as a reporter and editor for several financial magazines. He also worked for two years at Lloyd's Bank International and lived in Chile, also working as a teacher. In 2004, he was awarded Corporate Finance Reporter of the Year for his coverage of Google's IPO. He was shortlisted for the Business & Finance Reporter of the Year award at the British Press Awards in 2003 and won the award in 1992 as part of a team covering the BCCI scandal. In 1988, he was named Accountancy Journalist of the Year. He appears regularly on the BBC, CNBC, MSNBC, CNNfn and NPR. Mr. Waters received his Bachelor's degree from St. Edmund Hall, Oxford University
	BILL REICHERT Partner, Pegasus Tech Ventures Bill Reichert is a Partner at Pegasus Tech Ventures, managing investments in the US from the Silicon Valley headquarters. He has helped manage Pegasus investments in AI, robotics, quantum computing, neuromorphics, space, and other sectors. He is also the Chief Evangelist for Startup World Cup, a platform that connects and supports startup ecosystems all over the world.    Bill started his investment career as the co-founder and Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures, and has served on the boards of many startups.  He also has several years of experience as a serial entrepreneur and operating executive. Prior to Garage, Bill was a co-founder or senior executive in several venture-backed technology companies, including Trademark Software, The Learning Company, and Academic Systems. Earlier in his career, Bill worked at McKinsey & Company, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., and the World Bank. He has authored many articles and delivered many speeches on entrepreneurship, venture capital, innovation, and other topics. ​ Bill holds a B.A. degree from Harvard College and an M.B.A. from Stanford University. He has been a member of the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught Venture Finance. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and is a former Chairman of the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley. He is a Beachheads Advisor for New Zealand Trade & Enterprise, and is also an Advisor to the Women's Startup Lab, Nordic Innovation House, and the Korea Innovation Center.
	VALERIE BERTELE General Partner, Yellow Rocks Capital Valerie, a global leader and advocate for female empowerment, she is also an angel investor, VC and an international speaker. She is an alumna of Stanford Graduate School of Business, Nankai University and was previously with Google and Boston Scientific. Currently, Valerie serves as the General Parter at Yellow Rocks Capital, https://yellowrocks.vc/ - San Francisco based early stage VC fund and accelerator, with the current focus in AI companies in Future of Work, Fintech and EdTech.   With a career spanning multiple countries (China, Germany, France, USA, Australia, UAE and KSA) and disciplines, she possesses extensive global multidisciplinary experience.    Valerie is also consulting several governments on Innovation, Investing and building a GovTech community. Together with helping late stage companies attract growth funding and build expansion and exit strategy.    As an active member of community Valerie is organizing events in San Francisco and globally for philanthropy, art and culture, and working with several organizations to empower women in technology, STEM and investing to address gender gap.
	DAVID GERSTER Investment Partner, Fusion Fund David Gerster is an Investment Partner at Fusion Fund, an early-stage venture fund based in Palo Alto. Prior to Fusion, he was an investor at the JLL Spark Global Venture Fund, a $100M early stage proptech fund. At JLL, he led the fund’s efforts to invest in the Series A of OpenSpace, which later raised a Series D at a valuation of more than $900M. He has also invested as an angel, most notably in the first rounds of Cloudera and Alation. Prior to JLL, he was the Vice President of Data Science at BigML, where he promoted the idea that data science is easy by speaking at conferences and teaching workshops. During his time at BigML, he gave talks at CERN, the Predict Conference, ML Prague, Big Data Spain, Papis.io, DataLead (UC Berkeley), DataBeat (VentureBeat), and more than a dozen other venues. At Groupon, he built an elite data science team that trained the first machine-learned models for mobile deal relevance. At Yahoo, he led the project to collect billions of URL clickstreams in Hadoop and use them to improve Yahoo’s main web search algorithm. He holds an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley and a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.
	IAN GOTTS CEO and Founder, Elements.Cloud As CEO of Elements.cloud, he is passionate about providing the tools and training to help customers reduce the risk and improve the adoption of their Salesforce implementations. He’s been a Salesforce customer over the last 20 years and a regular speaker at Dreamforce, World Tour and Dreamin’ events. He was co-founder and CEO of NimbusPartners, a BPM software company for 15 years that was a Salesforce reference customer. He guided the company from a start up to a successful exit into TIBCO. He was on Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Advisory Council for 4 years and spoke in their World Partner Conference keynote. At TIBCO he was Chief Evangelist reporting to the COO. Prior to that he ran major high risk client programs for Accenture for 12 years. His largest program had a team of 500 in central UK Government which is as challenging as it sounds. Ian is the author of 10 books and a prolific blogger with a rare ability to make the complex seem simple. This makes him a popular and entertaining speaker who challenges his audience to see things differently. He is working on his next book: Tilt Marketing: a sidelong glance at business.