Business process management firm Appian Corp. today sold shares to the public for the first time, going out at $12 a share and seeing an immediate pop of nearly 35 percent.

The Reston, Virginia-based company had announced late Wednesday that it raised $75 million in its long-awaited initial public offering. Its pricing was dead center of the company’s initial price guidance of $11 to $13 a share. But clearly the shares were priced to provide margin for a first-day pop, and they were topping $16 a share in early trading. Later in the day, they settled back a bit, up nearly 27 percent to about $15.

The offering included the company offering an initial tranche of 6.25 million shares of its Class A common stock, which will be traded on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol APPN. The underwriters also have an option to purchase up to an additional 937,500 shares. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs & Co. and Barclays are managing the IPO with Pacific Crest Securities, Canaccord Genuity and Cowen and Co. acting as co-managers.

Founded in 1999, Appian offers a software as a service platform that helps business people create enterprise applications, especially for managing business processes, without needing programming expertise. The company is known for its “low-code” approach that allows non-programmers to create applications using building blocks and data, but managed and deployed by developers in a company’s information technology department, all on the same technology platform.

Despite being a small player in a market that includes behemoths such as Salesforce.com Inc. and ServiceNow Inc. as well as IBM Corp. and Oracle Corp., Appian’s fundamentals going into its listing are fairly solid, having booked $135 million in sales for the 12 months ended March 31, albeit at a loss of $12.5 million. Still, that’s a relatively small figure in an age where tech companies go public not only reporting losses in the hundreds of millions but even go as far as saying they may never profitable in the future. The company’s client base includes the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Sprint, Ryder, Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, BUPA North America, CenturyLink and the Department of Homeland Security.

Michael Beckley, co-founder and chief technology officer at Appian, said in an interview today that the company thought this was the right time to go public. “Things are moving so quickly in the low-code software space,” he said. “It was time to announce to the world what we’re doing.”

For nearly its first 10 years, the company took no outside investment. In 2008, it raised $10 million from Novak Biddle Venture Partners, then raised $37.5 million more in 2014 from New Enterprise Associates.

Appian’s successful IPO continues of recent string of public tech offerings this year, including Yext Inc., Alteryx Inc., Mulesoft Inc. and Okta Inc. among the more higher-profile IPOs. So far this year, tech IPOs have come at a much more rapid clip than last year’s record low tally, and most have seen significant pops on the first day of trading.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Appian