Skydio Stock: Will Skydio IPO Next Year?

Explore the potential to own Skydio stock before and into the IPO. Access select IPOs at TradeStation or browse pre-IPO investing platforms for early equity opportunities.

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Notable Skydio News

11/15/2024: Skydio raises $170 million extension round 
10/30/2024: China’s Sanctions on Skydio
08/10/2023: Skydio closing consumer drone business
02/27/2023: Skydio Raises $230 million Series E
Older News…

About Skydio

Skydio is a premium drone manufacture with a mission to:

…make the world more productive, creative, and safe with autonomous flight.

The company uses autonomous aircraft vehicles to empower creators, governments, and engineers to produce high-quality videos and 3D scanning for endless applicability.

All design, software development, and drone manufacturing are done in the United States, securing the supply chain and making the company a reliable partner of the U.S. government. 

The company was founded in 2014 by two colleagues who met five years earlier at MIT. The company’s headquarters are in Redwood City, California. Another drone startup, Zipline, was founded the same year but is focused on delivery applications. Shield AI is an autonomous drone and AI company for military applications. 

Here’s an example of the Skydio 2+ drone and its beacon functionality that enables autonomous maneuvering and filming. 

Check out what this thing can do! Extraordinary.

Ownership

The shareholders include founders, early investors (venture capital firms, celebrities), and employees.

Skydio has raised more than $562 million since its seed round in 2015. 

Prominent venture capital investors include Andreessen Horowitz, who provided seed funding and led multiple later rounds. Other investors include Next47, NVIDIA, UP.Partners, Linse Capital, Playground Global, Hercules Capital, Axon, Levitate Capital, and the Walton Family Foundation.

IPO Potential

The Skydio IPO date is currently unknown.

As of February 2023, the company is still in startup mode. It raised $230 million in a Series E, providing capital for the next growth stage.

Considering the number of investors involved and its fast growth, an IPO is likely in the coming years. Investors will be looking for an exit. 

We won’t get a better sense of when the Skydio IPO date is until the following things happen:

• The company announces another funding round
• Skydio selects a lead underwriter or banking partner for the IPO
• New information about the Skydio IPO date leaks to the financial press
• Skydio announces (or leaks) that it filed an S-1 confidentially with the SEC
• The SEC releases a publicly available Skydio S-1 filing

All of these milestones and announcements will serve as supporting evidence of progress toward a forthcoming public offering.

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 two after the S-1 is released to the public.

Bookmark this page for the latest Skydio stock and IPO news.

Funding Rounds

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Valuation

The most recent round was a Series E that raised $294 million in February 2023 and May 2024, setting a Skydio valuation of more than $2.3 billion. 

How to Invest in Skydio 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 institutions and online brokers. 

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 deals, most investors will not get shares. 

However, TradeStation is the most likely chance of participating in IPOs for ordinary as it has provided access through its partnerships for more than 400 deals. 

Robinhood is also now offering limited IPO access to specific deals.

1. Acquire shares via pre-IPO marketplaces

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 worths 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 allow these individuals to liquidate their holdings before the IPO.

Some of the more prominent sites include Hiive, Linqto, EquityZen, and Forge GLobal.

Both sites bring liquidity to an otherwise illiquid asset. Accredited investors 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.

2. Participate in the Skydio IPO

Ambitious investors can position themselves to invest in the Skydio IPO once it arrives.  

Your chances of getting IPO shares depends on four factors:

• IPO demand
• Your broker and eligibility
• Your assets under management (AUM) at the broker
• Propensity to flip shares

As IPO demand increases, the chances of receiving IPO shares decrease. 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 the terms, the broker may only have enough IPO shares to distribute to customers with assets of $3,000,000 or more. 

Joining a broker that offers access to IPOs does not guarantee a share allocation, especially in high-demand IPOs. You may have to wait until the company starts trading after the IPO. 

3. Buy Skydio stock after the IPO

Since acquiring IPO shares is challenging for individual investors, the easiest way to own Skydio 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 would 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 who wants to buy Skydio 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.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Is Skydio stock publicly traded?

No, Skydio is not publicly traded. It is still privately owned.

What is the Skydio stock price?

Since Skydio is not publicly traded on a stock exchange, there is no Skydio stock price yet.

The Series E funding round, which was completed in May 2024, took place at $6.03 per share. 

What is the Skydio stock symbol?

Skydio has not yet submitted public filings to the SEC. Therefore, it is not yet known what the Skydio stock symbol will be. We can only speculate.

Here are a few possibilities that appear to be available in the U.S.:

• SKYD
• SDIO

Where is the Skydio S-1 Filing?

The Skydio 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.

Skydio News Archive

02/08/2022: Skydio Wins Production Agreement for U.S. Army Program
03/01/2021: Skydio Announces $170 Million In Series D Funding Led by Andreessen Horowitz
07/13/2020: U.S. Autonomous Drone Maker Skydio Raises $100 Million

* 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 TSLA and ABNB.