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In another positive sign for enterprise technology initial public offerings, the analytics industry’s first IPO of the year can be marked down as a success as its shares rose almost 11 percent in their first trading day.
Alteryx Inc., the Irvine, California-based data preparation company that rang the opening bell at the NASDAQ today, raised $126 million from public investors after selling 9 million common shares. The company priced its stock at $14 late Thursday, the top end of the expected range. Goldman, Sachs & Co., JPMorgan Securities LLC and the five other underwriters that handled the IPO also may buy 1,350,000 shares at the initial offering price in the next 30 days.
Their stock options could add as much as $18.9 million to Alteryx’s total haul, but its somewhat turbulent first day of trading may lead the bankers to wait a while before cashing out. The company’s share price jumped 23 percent to $17.50 upon the bell ring this morning and then immediately dropped $15.29 before starting to stabilize. It’s currently hovering around the $15.50 mark.
Venture capitalists and their own investors are hoping this year will reverse last year’s decline in IPOs. The VC research firm CB Insights said in its most recent Tech IPO Pipeline Report that some 369 companies are poised for potential exits — down from 531 last year, but more likely now to find receptive investors.
One of the biggest factors that will influence Alteryx’s stock market performance going forward is how much it spends on driving revenue growth. According to the earnings data that the company released ahead of its stock market debut, annual sales climbed from up from $53.8 million in 2015 to $85.8 million by the end of 2016, but at the cost of mounting expenditures. The data preparation provider’s net losses amounted to $24.3 million in 2016 compared with $21.5 million in 2015.
Many of the other tech companies that have hit the stock market recently are in a similar situation. The most recent example is MuleSoft Inc., which went public last week after losing $50 million on revenues of $188 million in 2016. But the application connectivity provider’s expenditures were still lower than during 2015, which is probably one reason its shares so far have retained much of the 44 percent price gain they saw during their first day of trading.
The fact that Alteryx’s stock ended up stabilizing closer to its opening price can be counted as a victory from a certain standpoint, because it means it didn’t leave too much money on the table. The company’s stock performance in the coming months will no doubt be watched closely by the other enterprise technology companies that hope to enter the stock market this year.
It will be a particularly important indicator for Cloudera Inc., which also competes in the analytics market and has reportedly filed a confidential public offering a few weeks ago. Two other enterprise software companies, Yext Inc. and Okta Inc., also filed recently to go public.
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