MuleSoft stock skyrocketed by more than 46% on Friday in the company’s initial public offering, pacing it to be one of the top gainers in an IPO year to date. The company offered 13 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange for $17 apiece on Thursday, which was higher than what analysts were expecting.
MuleSoft stock nears $26
According to CNBC, analysts had been expecting the MuleStock offering to be priced between $14 and $16 per share. The stock touched a high near $26 before retreating slightly. Among the tech giant’s funders are Lightspeed Ventures Partners, Salesforce Ventures and other big names. Lightspeed also funded Snapchat parent company Snap, which also skyrocketed more than 40% on its opening day.
However, CNBC suggests that MuleSoft’s IPO may be more vital for Silicon Valley than Snap’s was “because of the number of mid-market enterprise cloud companies that people don’t necessarily get excited about unless MuleSoft does well.” Snap walked away with a hefty $3.9 billion in its opening, but the stock has plunged since then as investors began to reconsider their bullishness on Snapchat’s future.
The offering valued the company at more than $2 billion, much higher than the last private funding round of $1.5 billion it completed, according to TechCrunch.
MuleSoft’s losses fall
MuleSoft has captured investors’ eyes with its fast growth, although like most major tech firms in their early years, it lost money last year. The company reported losses of $50 million on revenue of $188 million last year, although that was an improvement from 2015 when it lost $65 million. Also its revenue surged 70% year over year, according to the regulatory filing for its initial public offering.
The company focuses on enterprise customers and serves some big names such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s Bank of America, Salesforce, Spotify and Unilever. It was founded in 2006 and markets itself as an “integration platform for SOA, SaaS, and APIs,” according to its website. Basically, it assists enterprise customers with APIs to connect its software and services.
