Updated:

In the latest of a series of initial public offerings by enterprise computing companies, Pivotal Software Inc. late Thursday raised $497 million in its IPO, and its shares rose 4.9 percent on their first trading day Friday.

That’s a relatively modest bump compared with 40 percent-plus pops experienced recently by the likes of Dropbox Inc. and Zuora Inc. Pivotal Chief Financial Officer Cynthia Gaylor told SiliconANGLE that the company was pleased with the stability of the price today. “The first day of trading is just one of many to come,” she said.

The company, majority-owned by Dell Technologies Inc., had sold 33.1 million shares late Thursday at $15 apiece. That’s smack in the middle of the $14- to $16-a-share range it announced in a filing early last week. Shares began selling to the public on the New York Stock Exchange Friday morning under the ticker symbol PVTL. They closed at $15.73 Friday.

It’s notable that the offering came in within the range rather than above it, like many IPOs have so far this year. That could be an indication of less demand for the shares than might have been initially expected — perhaps because it’s not clear to investors how Pivotal will be affected by Dell’s machinations to pay off its debt, such as a possible merger with VMware Inc., in which it also has a majority stake. Underwriters do have a 30-day option to purchase up to 5.55 million more shares, so if demand builds, they could sell more.

Still, the modest rise in shares also indicates Pivotal priced the offering about right, leaving little money on the table. The offering also values the company, a maker of software for building cloud computing applications, at about $3.75 billion before the optional shares. That’s above the estimated $2.8 billion of its last private valuation, but well under the $5 billion to $7 billion some observers had expected.

The move is seen partly as a way that Dell can make further strides to reduce massive debt incurred from its 2016 acquisition of EMC Corp. That won’t happen right away, since the money Pivotal is raising will stay with the company and the amount raised is a small fraction of Dell’s overall debt. But the IPO opens options to raise more money later.

Dell has been looking at ways to pay down its $50 billion in debt, including a potential plan to take VMware public, which was revealed in January. Ultimately, longtime analyst and SiliconANGLE Media Inc. co-Chief Executive Dave Vellante said recently, “This is about Dell continuing to de-lever so they can pay down the debt.”

Dell owns about 70 percent of Pivotal’s shares after the offering, but it will retain 96 percent of voting shares. Shareholder General Electric Co. is also selling about 3.9 million shares, about 20 percent of its stake in Pivotal. Other investors include Microsoft Corp. and Ford Motor Co.

At least one analyst sees promise for Pivotal at least from an investor point of view. “Fundamental investors should buy Pivotal at the IPO price,” Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research wrote in a note to clients. “[The] IPO does not mark the peak for the company.” He said the company’s value to its relatively high-spending subscriber companies is that it “takes care of all the hand holding that a customer may need” in using cloud services.

The San Francisco-based company joins a rapidly growing number of technology companies going public lately. Most recently, cloud subscription firm Zuora Inc. went public last week, raising $154 million and seeing its shares jump 43 percent the first day of trading. Dropbox Inc. went public March 23 in a $756 million offering that saw its shares rise 40 percent the first day. The next week, Spotify Technologies AB made an unusual offering of existing shares.

And more are coming. Czech antivirus software firm Avast Software s.r.o. said last week that it aims to raise about $200 million with an early May offering on the London Stock Exchange, valuing the company at about $4 billion when coupled with a planned secondary offering of $800 million, according to a source cited by Reuters. Cybersecurity firm Carbon Black Inc. filed IPO paperwork April 10. And event site Eventbrite Inc. and freelance marketplace Upwork Global Inc. are readying IPOs for later this year, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Like other recent and upcoming tech IPO companies, Pivotal remains unprofitable. It lost $163 million in its fiscal year ended Feb. 2, though that’s down from a $232 million net loss the year before. Gross margins rose from 44 to 55 percent in its last fiscal year. Revenue rose 22 percent, to $509.4 million.

In particular, subscription revenue has been strong, jumping 73 percent, to $259 million, in the latest fiscal year. That’s a positive sign since it’s more regular and predictable than traditional software and services.

CFO Gaylor said the money raised will be used for working capital to continue the company’s expansion. She noted that Pivotal is different from other software-as-a-service companies that are going public lately, since it focuses more on providing a platform and services to a relatively small number of subscription customers — 319, according to its SEC filing.

“We’re in a pretty unique situation,” Gaylord said, often serving customers looking to revamp their application development for the cloud era. “Often it’s a greenfield sale. Customers may not be doing anything, and they know they have a lot of this legacy stuff they need to migrate.”

The company was founded by Rob Mee (pictured) in 1989 as a software consultant. In 2012, it was acquired by storage giant EMC, which combined it in 2012 with Greenplum Inc., the data warehouse provider EMC had acquired in 2010. In 2015, Mee took over the CEO spot again, and when Dell bought EMC, the former became the majority owner in Pivotal, which is considered a leader in the segment of cloud computing known as platform as a service with its Cloud Foundry software.

Photo: Pivotal Software