Tiger Global Management, the hedge fund headed by Chase Coleman III disclosed a significant stake in Pure Storage, a flash, enterprise storage array company.
Based on its 13G filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Tiger Global Management, Mr. Coleman III, and Scott Shleifer beneficially own 5, 244, 615 shares or 17.9% of Pure Storage.
The filing also showed that Tiger Global Management’s affiliates—Tiger Global Private Investment Partners VII and Tiger Global PIP Performance VII, and Tiger Global PIP Management VII beneficially own 4,208,676 shares of 14.4% of Pure Storage.
Pure Storage IPO
Pure Storage launched its initial public offering (IPO) on October 7 on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker “PSTG.” The company priced its stock at $17 per share.
Pure Storage ended its first day of trading below its offering price. The company raised $425 million by selling 25 million shares.
The stock managed to recover over the past trading days and managed to go up as high as $20.60 per share. Today, the stock is trading $19.34 per share at the time of this writing around 12:44 in the afternoon in New York. Pure Storage has a market capitalization of approximately $3.58 billion.
In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, David Hatfield, president of Pure Storage said, “We’re really not going to measure our success on one day, and we hope our investors don’t either.” He added, “It’s our job to innovate and disrupt the marketplace, and it’s up to investors to figure out what that’s worth.”
In addition to Tiger Global Management, the other institutional investors of Pure Storage include Fidelity Investments, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, IQT, Institutional Venture Partners, Redpoint, Samsung, Sutter Hill Ventures, and T. Rowe Rice.
The company’s individual investors include Diane Greene, founder, president and CEO of VMWare; Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, founder and chief scientist at VMWare, and Frank Slootman, CEO of Service Now.
Pure Storage CEO’s comments on Dell/EMC transaction
In a blog post, Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen recently commented that Dell’s acquisition of EMC for $67 billion “comes out of weakness, not strength.” He noted that Dell’s move was prompted by the same disruption in the PC and server market that forced IBM to sell its x86 server business to Lenovo, and HP to split its business.
MDietzen suggested that Dell’s decision to acquire EMC was a desperate attempt to stay relevant in the fast-changing enterprise technology sector. He emphasized that the deal signal the end of an era for EMC that lead the market for Tier 1 or performance optimized storage for two decades.
“Just a few years ago, the idea that EMC would be an acquisition target would have been unthinkable.And yet here we are,” according to Dietzen.
