Though Medallia Inc. isn’t as high-profile as some of the other tech firms that have gone public recently, its stock market debut made a big splash this morning.

The customer analytics provider opened on the New York Stock Exchange at $34 per share, a sizable 62% gain over the pricing of its initial public offering late Thursday.

Medallia sold 15.5 million at $21 apiece to investors yesterday afternoon. The company came away from the IPO with a $326 million haul, adding to the at least $325 million in private funding it had raised before.

San Francisco-based Medallia is one of the biggest software providers in the customer experience management market. The company’s product, Medallia Experience Cloud, enables brands to obtain a big-picture view of the customer feedback they receive online. The platform aggregates sentiment data from surveys, contact centers, social media and review sites such as TripAdvisor.

Retailers such as Sephora USA Inc. use Medallia Experience Cloud to assess the quality of the service at their stores. Major hospitality brands rely on the offering to measure customer satisfaction across their properties. Medallia also has big-name users in other segments, including Delta Air Lines Inc., Lego AS and Mercedes-Benz.

Across all of its 500-plus customers, the company generated revenues of $313.6 million in the fiscal year ended April 30. That amounted to a 20% increase over the previous 12 months. Losses widened 16.8%, to $82.2 million, in the same period.

Medallia’s strong first-day showing on the NYSE isn’t too surprising given recent market sentiment. CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. and Slack Technologies Inc., two companies that are likewise unprofitable but boast rapid revenue growth, received a warm reception on Wall Street after going public last month. 

Earlier, Medallia competitor SurveyMonkey raised $180 million in a September public offering. Fellow customer experience specialist Qualtrics International Inc. had planned to hit the stock market as well last year but it canceled the IPO to accept a $8 billion acquisition offer from SAP SE.

Now that it’s publicly traded, Medallia will have more resources to invest in winning market share from its rivals. Shares of the company are currently trading at $36.80 a share, a 75% premium to the IPO price. 

Photo: Medallia