December is shaping up to be a busy month for tech-related initial public offerings, with Airbnb Inc. likely to be joined by DoorDash Inc., Roblox, Wish and Affirm according to reports today.

Airbnb was reported to be releasing its IPO details for a December listing this week according to a report Nov. 5. Speculation around when the accommodation bookings provider will go public has been ongoing since the company announced that it had filed its U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission paperwork in September 2019.

DoorDash announced that it had submitted its paperwork to go public in February, but little has been heard from the company since then, as some companies chose to defer their listing plans due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The decision by DoorDash to proceed with its IPO is said to be driven by the passing of California Proposition 22, a ballot measure exempting companies that hire drivers from having to classify them as employees. Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. were the biggest beneficiaries of Proposition 22, but the change also affects DoorDash, which like Uber Eats uses independent contractors to make food deliveries.

Roblox is an online gaming company that allows users to program games and play games created by other users. Often compared to the Microsoft Corp.-owned Minecraft, Roblox announced that it had filed its IPO paperwork in October. While somewhat difficult to compare directly to other companies that have gone public recently, the closest comparison is the float of game software maker Unity Software Inc. Sept. 17. Unity shares popped 44% on their first day of trading.

Wish pitches itself as “shopping made fun” but is arguably best known as one of the largest sellers of Chinese knockoff products in the U.S. That said, the company has found success with its model of selling cheap products, having filed for its IPO in August.

The last potential IPO in December, financial technology startup Affirm Inc., stands out because it lends money to consumers to make purchases on other sites. It also counts among its founders Max Levchin, one of the co-founders of PayPal Holdings Inc. Affirm filed its paperwork with the SEC Oct. 8.

Affirm operates in the “buy now, pay later” short-term finance market, a segment of the financial services industry that has become popular over the last few years. There is no direct comparison to Affirm in terms of recent IPOs, but one of its main competitors, Afterpay Ltd., went public in Australia at AU$2.95 ($2.13) in 2017 and is trading as of the time of writing at AU$101.70 ($73.49) with a market cap of $20.93 billion.

The reason all those companies are planning December IPOs is said to be a combination of them holding off going public during the 2020 U.S. election and wanting to proceed before conditions change. “There’s a bunch of pent-up demand,” Kelly Rodriques, chief executive officer of pre-IPO marketplace Forge, told CNBC. “A lot of people were waiting to see how the market would react in a Biden victory.”

While December is shaping up to be a busy month for IPOs, other companies are lining up for public offerings in the new year. Big-data analytics and machine learning company Databricks Inc. is planning to make its stock market debut in the first half of next year, according to a report in October. Kioxia Holdings Corp., formerly known as Toshiba Memory Corp., is also a strong possibility for an early 2021 float after the company delayed its plans to go public in October because of market volatility.

Photo: Pixy