Two Silicon Valley Startups Enjoy Strong Debuts on Wall Street


It’s a big day on Wall Street for hardcore tech.


On Friday, two engineering-focused Silicon Valley startups made their public debut: Hortonworks, the big-data outfit spun off from Yahoo, and New Relic, the internet-software monitoring company whose billboards have littered the San Francisco Bay Area in recent months. And both companies made strong starts to life on Wall Street, paving the way for a rather robust generation of startups that aim to reinvent the way the world’s businesses build and operate and monitor and analyze their large online services.


The two companies are trading on different exchanges. Hortonworks, which set a $16 per-share price on Thursday, opened 50 percent higher on the Nasdaq, at $24 a share. Meanwhile, New Relic initially priced at $23 a share and opened 31 percent higher on the New York Stock Exchange, at $30 a share.


These prices exceed the range offered at both companies’ IPO filings: Hortonworks, which raised $100 million in its offering, had proposed to go public for between $12 to $14 per share, while New Relic, which raised $115 million, initially proposed a range of $20 to $22 per share.


Hortonworks, which was founded in 2011, sells support and services for Hadoop, an open source platform that helps companies store, transform, analyze, and make use of massive amounts of online data, while New Relic, founded in 2008, offers a service that monitors websites and other online applications for outages and other performance issues. Hortonworks is showing the way for several other big-data startups, including Cloudera and MapR and Databricks, and New Relic is proving there’s an appetite for companies offering online tools to the world’s software developers. Startups such as GitHub may follow in its wake.



No comments:

Post a Comment