Fidelity revises its value of stakes in IPO hopefuls Twilio, up by 31%, and Nutanix, down by 10%
Context & Ripple Effects
Fidelity's month-end marks have become a running ledger on late-stage startup valuations: after writing down Snapchat by 25% in Q3 (a 25% haircut to its Snapchat stake) and slashing Zenefits by 48% and Dataminr by 35%, the fund giant's December revision splits its IPO-hopeful portfolio in opposite directions — Twilio marked up 31%, Nutanix marked down 10%.
The split matters because it shows the marks are discriminating rather than uniformly bearish: within weeks, the same book swung again when Fidelity marked Dropbox, CloudFlare, Twilio, and DocuSign lower from December to January, then deepened with markdowns on Cloudera, Dropbox, and Zenefits in March. A one-off up-tick amid that sequence reads as a company-level signal, not a portfolio-wide thaw.
First-order effects
- Mutual fund investors holding Fidelity's funds see Twilio's contribution to net asset value rise 31% while Nutanix's falls 10%, directly moving reported fund performance for the period.
- Twilio enters its IPO window with its largest disclosed mutual-fund holder valuing it materially higher, while Nutanix faces a weaker anchor price for any offering.
Second-order effects
- Other institutional holders of Twilio and Nutanix shares come under pressure to reconcile their own marks with Fidelity's, since divergent valuations of the same private stock invite scrutiny.
- A 31% upward mark on a pre-IPO cloud company sets a higher reference price that competitors and later-round investors must price against, even as the surrounding markdown wave keeps overall sentiment deflationary.
Third-order effects
- Monthly mutual-fund disclosures are turning private-company valuations into a near-public market, stripping away the opacity that let late-stage rounds hold paper prices between liquidity events.
- If the pattern holds, IPO-bound companies face a de facto continuous mark-to-market run by their fund investors before they ever list — separating genuinely repricing businesses from those merely riding stale rounds.
The trend: Mutual funds' required monthly marks are converting late-stage startup valuations into a rolling public scoreboard, with Fidelity's book as the most-watched index.