The growing wave of tech initial public offerings will be joined at the ringing of the bell Friday morning on the Nasdaq exchange by cybersecurity firm Carbon Black Inc.

On Friday, the company’s shares shot up 30 percent from their offering price at the bell, closing up 26 percent, to $23.94 a share.

Late Thursday, the company had priced its IPO of 8 million shares $19 per share, raising $152 million and valuing it at $1.3 billion. Following a pattern of other enterprise technology IPOs in recent months, the price was at the high end of its anticipated range of $17 to $19 a share, which in turn was raised from its initial range.

Also like other recent offerings, this one was speedy, having been announced only on April 10. It’s clear that many companies that have been waiting often for years for a fortuitous time to go public think the window is wide open for now. The relatively old endpoint security platform provider, founded in 2003 under the name of Bit9, adds to what Box Inc. Chief Executive Officer Aaron Levie recently told SiliconANGLE is a “real wave of IPOs.”

Heading into its float, Carbon Black appears to be well-placed for a decent bounce after both DocuSign Inc. Smartsheet Inc. opened at a 35 percent and 20 percent premium last Friday on their debuts on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, respectively.

“Tech IPO activity in the first half of 2018 remains on track to exceed IPO activity for all of last year,” Rohit Kulkarni, managing director and head of research of SharesPost Financial Corp., told SiliconANGLE. “If equity markets and investor sentiment remain at current levels, we expect the second half of 2018 IPO activity for similar startups to be even stronger than today’s levels.”

In particular, he said, investor appetite and interest in cybersecurity is at record levels thanks to ever-increasing levels of cyberbreaches and their economic impacts on companies big and small. Carbon Black focuses on so-called next-generation endpoint security, aiming to supplant traditional antivirus applications.

The company’s predictive security cloud gathers unfiltered information from endpoint devices from smartphones to personal computers, combines it with analytics and runs that analysis in the cloud, Paul Morville, the company’s vice president of product management, said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. All that, he claimed, is unique in the market.

“Carbon Black’s market opportunity is large,” Kulkarni said. “The company addresses the enterprise endpoint-security market. Its solutions can address an increasing subset of additional use cases in public-cloud security software, IT asset management, and security and vulnerability management.” He noted that industry research firms estimate its primary and adjacent markets will grow from about $19 billion in 2016 to more than $37 billion in 2021.

Carbon Black generated $162 million in revenue last year, with subscription and licensing fees accounting for 92 percent of its revenue, up from 90 percent in 2016. Carbon Black’s revenue growth is slowing, Kulkarni noted, dropping from 65 percent year-on-year growth in 2016 to 39 percent in 2017 to 31 percent in the most recent quarter. But he said that he expects investors will focus on Carbon’s expected revenue growth in 2018 and beyond.

Another, hardly unique issue is that the company continues to lose money, showing a loss of $55 million in 2017. “This is a step-up from $36.6 million in 2015 and $45.6 million in 2016,” he noted. “On the margin, incremental losses have declined, but the ongoing operating losses should be a concern to investors.”

The company plans to use the money to expand operations across the board, in particular expanding sales and creating new products. “Look at what Salesforce has done to offer additional services around customer management,” Tom Barsi, senior vice president of corporate and business development, told SiliconANGLE. “We will do similar additional services in endpoint security.”

It’s hard to assess exactly how much Carbon Black has raised, since the company is now a combination of several former companies. Axios pegged the figure at $230 million from investors that include Accomplice, Highland Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Point 406 Ventures and the Blackstone Group. Kulkarni said the top institutional holders own more than 55 percent of the company, a factor that could result in lower volatility in Carbon’s post-IPO stock performance.

Chief Executive Patrick Morley owns about 5.25 percent of the company. Top institutional investors are Atlas Capital (17 percent), Highland Capital Partners (14.9 percent), Sequoia Capital (9.9 percent), Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (8.8 percent), and Point 406 Ventures (7.7 percent), according to Kulkarni.

The shares trade under the ticker symbol CBLK.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Carbon Black