Monzo, one of the UK’s most recognisable app-based banks, has appointed Tom Oldman as its new group chief financial officer, prompting speculation that it was laying ground for a public offering in the new year.
Oldman was previously an executive with Latin America’s largest fintech bank Nubank NYSE:NU during a period of expansive growth and oversaw the Brazilian bank’s IPO in New York three years ago.
Monzo praised Oldman for bringing extensive experience in driving growth and innovation and said he will be in charge of overall financial strategy, global financial operations and financial planning for the entire organisation.
The bank had a very successful year, hitting £15.4 million in profits and increasing customer deposits by 88%. It has grown into the UK’s seventh largest bank since its inception in 2015 and has built a customer base of over eleven million users. Its growth plans include expansion into Ireland and later the rest of Europe as well as the US.
The fintech bank’s chief executive TS Anil has not commented directly on the bank’s IPO plans but has said in the past that Monzo “would be a great public company one day.” Oldman will start in his new position in the new year.
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CoreWeave plots $35bn US IPO
Artificial intelligence cloud platform CoreWeave, a start-up backed by NVIDIA NASDAQ:NVDA, is planning to go public in the second half of 2025 and is aiming to hit a valuation of over $35 billion. The company is expanding into a space currently occupied by much larger cloud service providers such as Microsoft NASDAQ:MSFT’s Azure and Amazon.com NASDAQ:AMZN’s AWS, and its links to NVIDIA are providing it with much needed backing.
CoreWeave provides access to data centres and high-performance chips from NVIDIA for AI application. The company recently closed a $650 million secondary share sale with Cisco, Pure Storage and other investors which valued the company at $23 billion. Listing preparations are already underway as the cloud company has engaged investment big hitters Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan to help with its IPO preparations.
CoreWeave’s move aligns with its rapid expansion in the AI infrastructure market, driven by growing demand for cloud-based GPU services. Reuters reported that the New Jersey-based company is aiming to raise more than $3 billion from its shares.
The company recently announced plans to open a new data centre in Texas, bolstering its capacity to support AI workloads for clients like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Stability AI.
Is Odyssey Therapeutics planning a Q1 listing?
Next on the list of companies getting ready to go public is Boston-based Odyssey Therapeutics, a biotech focused on small molecules and protein therapeutics. The company has a pipeline of research looking at diseases that are well understood and have large patient populations with unmet needs. Its most advanced product is a small molecule targeting Crohn’s disease and which is getting ready for phase 2 clinical trials.
Odyssey Therapeutics, valued at $640 million following the latest round of private funding, has already confidentially filed to list with the US Securities and Exchange Commission with the placing date expected in the first quarter of 2025.
Trump’s election win has substantially changed the landscape for biotech company valuations as his tariff decisions are expected to slow down the rate of US interest rate cuts. Biotech companies depend heavily on access to cheap finance in order to support their testing and trial pipelines.
This week Trump tweeted that he would introduce a 25% tariff on all imports from Canada and Mexico once he took power and signalled that he would also bring in a 10% tariff on goods from China. Europe has not yet made it into the twittersphere but this is only an issue of when rather than if.
For Odyssey Therapeutics and its peers this means that they can expect slightly lower valuations when they eventually come to market.
