Reddit and Astera Labs’ AI pitches resonated in a great week for tech IPOs

And we’re off.

At least, it’s starting to look that way. Yesterday, Reddit debuted on the New York Stock Exchange and ultimately the social media company’s shares closed almost 50% up. This alone would be green shoots for the IPO market, but if you combine that with AI infrastructure provider Astera Labs’ successful IPO on Wednesday? Now we just may be off to the IPO races.

“Both Reddit and Astera's IPOs are important signals right now,” Andrew Saeta, managing director and head of institutional at Forge, said via email. “These are the gatekeepers and if they are successful—then the gate will stay open.”

It’s impossible to know what will happen from here, but the IPO market right here, right now is looking a whole lot better than it has in a rather long time. And yes, let’s take a breather. We still have to see how Reddit, Astera, and whoever’s up next fare in the coming few weeks and months, so it might take a second for this to coalesce into “we’re back, baby” territory. That all being said, there’s now mounting evidence the exit market’s starting to jostle out of gridlock.

“Ultimately, IPOs that perform well generate liquidity and that’s reinvested,” Saeta added. “It feels like it could be the start of a new cycle.”

Still, part of this does feel like it’s specifically about Astera, Reddit, and AI. I brought this question to Craft Ventures partner Bryan Rosenblatt, who previously worked at Reddit from 2015 to 2018. He joined when there were about 50 employees, and was there as the company grew from a sub-$10 million to $100 million-plus business. The market seems to have bought Reddit’s AI pitch—does Rosenblatt?

“Yes, because they legitimately have some of the most valuable data online,” he told Term Sheet via email. “There’s a reason so many people add ‘Reddit’ to their Google searches. It’s known to produce the best answers on the Internet across any topic you could imagine.”

Rosenblatt has described Reddit as looking like a “dystopian Craigslist,” back when he joined. I don’t know exactly what a dystopian Craigslist looks like, but I’ll be sure to ask Midjourney in the coming days. Either way, it’s illustrative of how far Reddit has come, at a time when the IPO market needed a win.

We’ll have to see what happens from here. (The problem with going public, of course, is that it’s not a one-day endeavor. You are then a public company, with public company problems.) But, who knows, we could soon be off to the IPO races. And I could be being pessimistic—it’s possible the starting gun has already been fired.

In case you missed it…A quick interest rate update: The Fed this week signaled that it still expects to cut interest rates three times in 2024—but, as anticipated, held off on a cut for now.

See you Monday,

Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com