Even as funds continue throwing cash at private companies, sending valuations to record heights -- including Uber Technologies Inc. reaching $40 billion last week -- investors in recent initial public offerings aren’t paying up.
This week, venture-capital-backed startups New Relic Inc. and Hortonworks Inc. are projected to price their IPOs at valuations equal to or lower than their last private funding rounds. The same thing happened to customer-service platform Zendesk Inc. in its May IPO. Other startups, such as Box Inc. and online-dating site Zoosk Inc., have delayed going public, partly out of concern that they can’t fetch the same valuation in the stock market that they did from private investors.