Hortonworks sets IPO price ahead of NASDAQ debut
Hortonworks Inc. seems keen to get on with its upcoming IPO as soon as possible. It just announced an important bit of news ahead of its NASDAQ debut.
Following on from its S-1 filing last month, Hortonworks has issued an update to say it will be trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker symbol “NDP”. It’s also set its IPO price at $78 Million, with six million shares priced at $12 to $14 per share. What that means is Hortonworks would command a market value of some $659 million at the midpoint of its proposed price range, according to Renaissance Capital. Notably, that amount is far lower than what was reported earlier this year, when Hortonworks secured $100 million in funding from BlackRock and Passport Capital on a $1 billion valuation.
It’s not clear why Hortonworks has decided to set its value so low, but Wikibon analyst Jeff Kelly said it probably reflects the reality of the market.
“The entire market for Hadoop distribution software and services is growing at an exceptionally fast clip, but is still relatively small compared to other segments of the Big Data market,” he said. Wikibon forecasts that the market will grow at a 35% compound annual rate through 2017. Kelly said that’s good enough to “support two to three Hadoop distribution vendors over the next three to five years but a $1 billion valuation – let alone Cloudera’s $4 billion-plus valuation – was never realistic in the short term.”
Fortune.com’s Dan Primack suggests that by setting a low IPO price, the company may be looking to guarantee an oversubscribed IPO book and a big first-day payoff.
Hortonworks has already had a few decent pay days to celebrate. Having been founded in 2011, the company has raised more than $248 million in its previous funding rounds, attracting attention from many large tech firms in recent months. The most notable of these was Hewlett-Packard Co., which injected $50 million into the firm in order to integrate its Hadoop offering with its own products and services.
Hortonworks has also signed up numerous partners as the Hadoop train continues to gather pace in the enterprise, including firms like Accenture, BMC Software, EMC’s Pivotal and Red Hat Inc.
The company will be the first of the major Hadoop vendors to go public, beating out rivals Cloudera Inc. and MapR Technologies Inc. Unlike numerous other companies that seem to be dragging their feet, Hortonworks seems keen to move the IPO process along as fast as it possibly can.
photo credit: bfishadow via photopin cc
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