Following through on an announcement it made in February, database management system provider MariaDB plc went public today on the New York Stock Exchange through a merger with Angel Pond Holdings Corp.

Ordinary shares and warrants began trading under the symbols “MRDB” and “MRDB WS,” respectively. The combined firms are an Irish public limited company renamed MariaDB plc. with headquarters in Redwood City, California, and Dublin, Ireland. No management changes are planned, the company said.

Shares started trading today at $11.55. At the close of trading, they were down nearly 40% to $6.70, after falling as low as $5.98 earlier in the day. The company’s market capitalization was $368 million at today’s opening price, well below the $672 million valuation that was estimated in February.

Chief Executive Michael Howard (pictured) said he wasn’t concerned about the first-day performance. “The fundamentals are sound,” he said, noting that technology shares took a beating across the board today. “If you look at it from a balanced perspective we got out relatively unscathed.” He noted that most shareholders are locked up from trading, which made today’s volume of fewer than 30,000 shares a misleading measure of investor interest.

“It’s sort of artificial right now,” he said, adding that the company raised a substantial amount of money in the run-up to the IPO. “You could say it’s equal to the amount we raised over the last eight years. You’re talking at least $120 million.”

The alternative of remaining private and begging investors for cash is “a horrible place to be right now,” Howard said. “As a public company you have vastly greater resources to think strategically over the long term,” he said. “We are afforded optimality in terms of how to ensure the integrity of our strategy. That’s extremely important in a world of such volatility.”

The IPO was facilitated by a transaction known as a special-purpose acquisition company in which a publicly held shell company is formed to acquire another company and take it public. The business has no operations but sells shares to investors who want to buy into the acquired firm.

SPACs soared in popularity over the past few years as a faster and less risky alternative to conventional initial public offerings. But activity has slowed this year amid a broad market downturn after raising nearly $162 billion in 2021.

Howard said that despite overall declining interest in SPACs, the vehicle was right for his company. “The SPAC as a concept is irrelevant,” he said. “What’s relevant is the complementary nature and the channel expansion and the people you are working with.” Among the parties involved in the transaction were a group of founders of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the investment firm Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and venture investor Ted Wang, “which opened doors in the financial sector,” he said. “It was a combination of channel and knowledge to form a symbiosis to go forward.”

For the company, the IPO is a “renaissance,” Howard said. “It’s heartening to see the kinds of things that we are coming out with after many years of building products. We are very disruptive on the technology and cost side and, in a world where you’re competing with goliaths, it’s a reward to be a small company and be this innovative.”

MariaDB sells an enterprise version of the open-source DBMS by the same name. It also has a managed cloud database offering called SkySQL. The company ended fiscal 2022 with over $50 million in annual recurring revenue and has more than 600 customers in over 60 countries.

“MariaDB is a marquis brand in the database world,” Howard said. “It’s a key component of the software stack. Everyone’s going to watch MariaDB and see how it fares over time.”

Photo: MariaDB