Blackstone-backed Liftoff Mobile postpones US IPO
Liftoff Mobile postponed its planned Nasdaq IPO this evening amid a selloff of software stocks over investor concerns about the impact of AI on business models, a banker involved in the offering process told IFR.
Goldman Sachs, Jefferies and Morgan Stanley, as joint lead bookrunners, had marketed the sale of 25.4m shares at US$26–$30, an intentionally wide range designed to accommodate differing views on valuation at launch.
“Liftoff ran into an absolute snowstorm,” said one banker who advises clients on IPOs. “The first story was ‘look we’re cheap to the comps’; the story since then is ‘we’re actually not like those guys’”.
The shift in messaging followed Anthropic’s release Monday of legal-automation tools to its Claude AI model, which triggered fears that AI could cannibalize major segments of the software industry.
AppLovin, a software developer focused on marketing and making apps, has tumbled 20.7% this week alone. Gaming software developer Unity Software (-20.2%) and advertising technology provider Trade Desk (-13.5%) were others caught in the carnage.
“In terms of timing, Liftoff couldn’t have had worse luck,” said one senior banker, who confirmed the company’s decision to postpone the IPO. “I have never in my career seen the sentiment this bad toward software stocks.”
Bloomberg first reported Liftoff Mobile had postponed its IPO.
Jointly backed by Blackstone and General Atlantic, Liftoff is phenomenally profitable. In 2025, the advertising technology company generated adjusted Ebitda of US$371.6m–$375.4m on revenue of US$683.2m–$686.6m, a near 55% Ebitda margin.
On those numbers, Liftoff was targeting an enterprise value on the IPO of US$6.6bn, valuing it at 17.6x 2025 Ebitda – that compared favorably to the 40x multiple AppLovin traded when Liftoff launched its IPO, though less favorably to the comp's 29x multiple post sell-off – hard to tell whether analysts have had time to update their numbers, but the re-rating is clear.
Liftoff serves ads across more than 140,000 apps connecting to 1.4 billion users daily globally, evenly split between the Americas, EMEA and APAC. It ticked a lot of traditional software metrics, with net dollar retention of 124% and the number of US$100,000 client spend growing 18% to 362.
Yet serving advertising is a notoriously difficult, fickle business.
“Adtech is the rare business where you can keep margins and continue to grow,” said the software banker. “But it’s not a repeatable business. You have to fight for revenue every single day from customers who are using multiple competing products.”