Learn how to invest in Plaid stock when the Plaid IPO arrives. Get access to select pre-IPO startups at Equitybee.
Latest Plaid Stock IPO News
12/07/2022: Plaid lays off 20% of staff
05/17/2022: Plaid Ranked #47 on CNBC’s 2022 Disruptor 50 List
05/12/2022: Stripe takes a swing at Plaid
01/24/2022: Plaid must pay $58 million to users of Venmo, Robinhood
01/20/2022: Plaid Scoops Up Cognito for $250 Million
08/17/2021: Plaid’s $425 Million Series D Round Attracts More Investors
08/17/2021: JPMorgan Bets on Plaid Months After Dimon’s Data Criticism
04/07/2021: Plaid valuation tops $13 billion in first funding after Visa
04/02/2021: Plaid Is Said Close to Financing at About $13 Billion Valuation
03/04/2021: Income verification is white-hot right now, and Plaid wants in
01/21/2021: Plaid Shareholders Field Offers at $15 Billion After Merger Collapse
01/12/2021: Visa abandons takeover of Plaid after DOJ raises antitrust concerns
What is Plaid?
Plaid is a financial technology (fintech) company that enables seamless connections between customers, financial institutions, fintech apps, and developers.
Plaid builds application programming interface (APIs) for the financial industry, including banking, lending, and investing services.
Beyond APIs, Plaid is becoming an analytics company, providing its customers with user insights and data.
The company has become a must-use platform for fintech, empowering developers at startups and legacy financial institutions to deliver a beautiful user experience.
Plaid is one of several fintech upcoming IPOs riding the wave of financial innovation and improved customer engagement.
Plaid was founded in 2013 by Zach Perret and William Hockey. Its headquarters are in San Francisco.
Here’s an overview video of Plaid’s mission:
Is Plaid Publicly Traded?
No, Plaid is still privately owned.
Who Owns Plaid?
The shareholders include founders, early investors (venture capital firms), and employees.
Prominent venture capital investors include Spark Capital, Google Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Goldman Sachs, Mary Meeker, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, J.P. Morgan, American Express, Altimeter Capital, Silver Lake Capital, Visa, and Mastercard.
Now that the Visa acquisition won’t occur, Plaid must determine its path to a public future.
The company can pursue alternative suitors, conduct a traditional IPO (or direct listing), or solicit offers to go public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
Plaid Valuation
The current Plaid valuation is $13.4 billion.
Plaid has raised more than $734 million of private financing. Its last funding round was a Series D which closed in August 2021. The company raised $425 million led by Altimeter Capital and Silver Lake.
When is the Plaid IPO Date?
The Plaid IPO date is currently unknown. There is speculation that the Plaid IPO date could be sometime during 2022 now that the Visa deal has fallen through.
We won’t get a better sense of when the Plaid IPO will be until one of two things happens:
- The Plaid IPO date range leaks to the financial press
- Plaid submits a confidential S-1 filing to the SEC (and announces/leaks the news)
- The SEC releases a publicly-available Plaid S-1 filing
We may get other clues, such as when Plaid selects a lead underwriter for the IPO. Announcements such as these would indicate the IPO is within six to twelve months.
Even when the company and SEC publicly release the S-1 filing, we still won’t know a firm date. However, the IPO date typically occurs a month or so after the S-1 is released to the public.
Bookmark this page for the latest Plaid IPO news.
What is the Plaid Stock Price?
Since Plaid is not publicly traded on a stock exchange, there is no Plaid stock price yet.
An estimated price range for the IPO won’t be publicized until after the S-1 filing is made with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
What is the Plaid Stock Symbol? Plaid Ticker?
Plaid has not yet submitted public filings to the SEC. Therefore, it is not yet known what the Plaid stock symbol will be. We can only speculate.
Here is one possibility that appears to be available in the U.S.:
- PLAD
Will Plaid Stock be a Motley Fool Stock Advisor Recommendation?
We won’t know until after the IPO if Plaid will be a Motley Fool Stock Advisor recommendation. However, Plaid fits the mold of high-growth, disruptive business models that the Fool typically recommends.
When the Motley Fool recommends a company, there is usually an immediate spike in the price. Fool newsletter subscribers are notoriously long-term minded and rarely sell, meaning the stock price will continue to rise.
Plaid may also receive a recommendation by the Motley Fool Rule Breakers (Rule Breakers review) newsletter or other premium services. Both services have handily beaten the broader market since the early 2000s.
Read this Motley Fool Stock Advisor review to learn about the stock selection methodology and about how you can participate in excellent returns.
Stock Advisor is currently half-off at just $99 for an annual subscription.
How to Buy Plaid Stock
Generally, it’s challenging to acquire shares of high demand IPOs. Most investors will need to settle for buying the stock after it begins trading.
IPO underwriters typically give their best customers access first, then allocate shares to certain institutions and brokers often tied by professional relationships.
When the largest brokers receive IPO shares, they divvy them up amongst their eligible customers, prioritizing their most valued customers first (wealthiest).
For high-demand IPOs, most investors will not get shares. But there are a few ways to own the stock headed into the IPO and afterwards.
With that, here are three potential ways to own Plaid Stock:
- Access shares via pre-IPO investing platforms
- Buy Plaid stock after it begins trading
- Buy Plaid stock in the Plaid IPO through a broker
1. Access shares via pre-IPO investing platforms
Founders, early employees, and investors often find themselves in a difficult predicament. They own valuable shares of a company that doesn’t trade publicly.
These shareholders might have multi-million dollar net worth’s because of their stock holdings, but the stock is not liquid because it doesn’t trade on an exchange.
A few platforms have evolved to gives these individuals a way to liquidate their holdings before the IPO.
Equitybee provides accredited investors access to pre-IPO startups by funding employee stock options. In exchange, investors gain a portion of the future stock value.
The ARK Venture Fund is a new offering that empowers all U.S.-based investors to own pre-IPO companies. The fund is exclusively available on the Titan investing app.
Cathie Wood, ARK Invest Founder, and Chief Investment Officer, invests in disruptive, innovative private companies. Watch this fund to see if Plaid becomes a holding.
Other prominent investing platforms include Linqto, EquityZen, and Forge Global.
Learn more about pre-IPO investing.
Both sites bring liquidity to an otherwise illiquid asset. Accredited investors (those with invested assets > $1,000,000) may join these sites and attempt to buy these companies’ shares when they become available.
The shares are only offered to accredited investors because the company’s financials are not publicly filed with regulators yet, increasing the investors’ risk.
For high-profile companies, demand is high, lowering your chances of acquiring shares. The author considers this a low-likelihood way to acquire shares. However, some readers have written with success stories buying shares this way.
2. Buy Plaid stock after the Plaid IPO
Since acquiring IPO shares is almost always challenging for individual investors, the easiest way to own Plaid stock is to wait for the IPO to complete.
Realistically, unless your brokerage account is worth more than $1 million and your broker regularly receives IPO allocations, you are unlikely to get in on high-demand IPOs.
In some cases, patient investors can buy the stock at or below the IPO price. This is not always true.
Uber, which many predicted to rise steeply, actually fell on the IPO date.
Spending significant effort to acquire IPO shares may not be worth it in the end. You may also spend time and effort to obtain shares but only receive a small allocation, limiting upside gain.
Though IPOs can provide one-day gains north of 20%, even up to 100% in rare cases (such as Airbnb and Doordash), the most significant gains will come during the decade following the IPO if the company is genuinely disruptive.
Take, for example, Netflix, Amazon, or Tesla. You could have bought the stock years after the IPO and still experienced gains of more than 1,000%
If you’re an investor that wants to buy Plaid stock for the long-term, consider opening a position after the IPO and averaging down if the stock falls.
Short-term traders may angle to acquire IPO shares and hope for a short-term pop.
3. Buy Plaid stock during the Plaid IPO through a broker
Ambitious investors can position themselves to invest in the Plaid IPO once it arrives.
Your chances of getting IPO shares depends on four factors:
- IPO demand
- Your broker and eligibility
- Your assets under management at the broker
- Propensity to flip shares
As IPO demand increases, the chances of receiving IPO shares decreases. Therefore, the IPOs that are most interesting to the masses are the hardest to access.
Most online brokers do not offer IPO shares. Check directly to see if yours does, or look at our list of best brokers for IPO investing.
Legacy brokers, such as Fidelity and Charles Schwab, have minimum eligibility requirements and penalties for flipping shares (selling shortly after the IPO).
But even if eligible, the brokers must sub-allocate whatever limited shares they receive from the IPO underwriters.
This process is non-transparent, but priority is likely given to the wealthiest investors first.
For example, if your account balance is $500,000, and that makes you eligible according to terms, the broker may only have enough IPO shares to distribute to customers with assets of $3,000,000 or more.
This brings us to ClickIPO.
ClickIPO is a smartphone app that partners with TradeStation and other brokers to deliver IPO access to retail investors.
There is no minimum account value required.
ClickIPO prioritizes IPO share distribution by its Investor Score, which measures how likely an investor is to flip shares. Investors more likely to flip shares are considered to be less desirable IPO beneficiaries (in theory).
Therefore, ClickIPO offers a value proposition to underwriters and newly public companies.
Though quick profits from IPOs is one way the large underwriter reward whale-sized clients.
Regardless of the four factors above, there is never a guarantee that any investor will receive a share allocation.
Where can I find the Plaid S-1 Filing?
The Plaid S-1 filing won’t be publicly available until released. Once it is public, we’ll post it here.
You can find a real-time SEC feed of the latest IPO filings from other companies on the recent S-1 filings page.
What Happened to the Visa Acquisition of Plaid?
On January 13th, 2020, Visa announced it was acquiring Plaid for $5.3 billion. However, in November of the same year, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit to block the deal, citing antitrust concerns.
The DOJ believed that Visa was attempting to acquire Plaid to eliminate a competitive threat.
On January 12th, 2021, the companies abandoned the deal.
The antitrust lawsuit, combined with the perceived increase in Plaid’s valuation (especially in lights of the Airbnb and Doordash IPOs in late 2020), was the likely cause.
Shortly after the announcement to part ways, reports of offers to buy Plaid shares surfaced at a $15 billion valuation.
Will There be a Plaid SPAC Acquisition?
A SPAC is a special purpose acquisition company, also known as a blank check company. They are shell companies designed to help established businesses go public without a traditional IPO.
The SPAC company merges with the established company and takes on the established company’s name. It’s also known as a reverse merger.
SPACs have become popular recently after Virgin Galactic, Lordstown Motors, and Nikola used them to become publicly traded companies.
In the fintech space, SoFi is the latest company merging with a SPAC.
Using a SPAC to go public allows the company to skip the complicated and expensive IPO process. SPAC founders call companies like Plaid to convince them it would be a smart move.
Not all companies are ready to IPO, making SPACs an attractive alternative to an IPO where the company can still raise new funds.
However, the more established a company is, the more resources it can hire to facilitate the traditional IPO process.
Though we haven’t seen detailed financials, Plaid appears to be a financially solvent company with a recurring revenue model and low overhead. At an estimated $15 billion valuation, the company can likely raise more capital before going public, making a SPAC less likely.
When early investors and employees need liquidity, and the company generates more significant revenue, the company will decide on the best way to go public — a traditional IPO, direct IPO, or SPAC merger.
Best Brokers to Buy Plaid Stock
What is the best online brokerage for buying Plaid stock?
If you want to participate in the IPO, TradeStation is the primary low-minimum investment IPO brokers for investors with assets under $100,000.
Robinhood and SoFi have also added IPO access to their platforms in recent years.
See the complete list of best brokers for IPO investing here.
Joining a broker that offers access to IPOs does not guarantee a share allocation, especially in high-demand IPOs. You are probably better off waiting for the company to start trading after the IPO.
* Disclosure: The web page contains affiliate links from our partners. If a reader opens an account or buys a service from a link in this article, we may be compensated at no additional cost to the reader. Opening an account with a broker that provides access to IPOs does not guarantee the customer allocations of specific IPOs. The author is long V, MA, TSLA, ABNB, BYND.