Nine IPOs this week, and two-thirds of the money goes to sellers

Nine IPOs open this week, six of them on the main board, for a combined ₹10,506 Cr. Read the fine print and the week looks different: of the ₹10,288 Cr being raised on the main board, ₹6,958 Cr is an offer for sale. Only Zetwerk (₹2,830 Cr fresh) and Fusion CX (₹500 Cr fresh) are putting money into the business. HD Fire Protect, Bonfiglioli Transmissions, Tonbo Imaging and Sahajanand Medical are selling existing shares and nothing else.

Who is selling

• HD Fire Protect (₹712 Cr): entirely the promoters.
• Bonfiglioli Transmissions (₹2,534 Cr): entirely the Italian parent.
• Tonbo Imaging (₹852 Cr): co-founders, a promoter-group holder and early investors.
• Sahajanand Medical (₹476 Cr): the promoter group and investors.
• Zetwerk (₹5,012 Cr): about ₹1,152 Cr of the offer goes to early investors. Reports put Kae Capital and Accel, who backed the company in its first rounds, at up to 38 times their money at the ₹151 top of the band, which values the company at ₹25,583 Cr.

None of this makes the offers bad. An IPO that is mostly a sale is the normal way a venture investor or a parent takes its return, and the companies are real businesses with public track records. It does say clearly who is on each side of the table in a listing week.

The number that matters is the entry price

Thirty-eight times is not a return the listing week offers anyone. It belongs to a fund that wrote a cheque when Zetwerk was a small, unproven manufacturer. The buyer at ₹151 is buying from that fund, at a price set to clear a ₹5,000 Cr book across institutions, mutual funds and retail.

Tonbo is the other side of the same lesson. It is a genuine defence-electronics business, with thermal imaging and seeker products in service. FY26 revenue was ₹362.65 Cr, down 23% on the year, and profit after tax ₹50.88 Cr against ₹72.76 Cr; the June quarter showed a loss of ₹17.74 Cr. The band is ₹665–700. Whoever buys in the book is buying the sellers' view that this is a good price to leave at.

What this means for a family office

• In a listing week, an office is a price-taker. The band is set to fill the book, not to leave a margin for the buyer.
• The large multiples in these companies were made two to five years earlier, in rounds priced off the business and its listed peers, by investors who accepted illiquidity and a lock-in.
• That is the stage this desk works in: profitable companies a few years from listing, raising a first institutional round. The risks are different and have to be priced; the reward is the gap between a private multiple and a public one.

If the week's books fill, and the quality of the names suggests most will, the money will have moved from thousands of new holders to a small group of early ones. The question for an office is not whether to apply for the shares. It is whether it wants to be the seller next time.