Enterprise tech IPOs continue to roar in 2018. Today, not one but two enterprise tech companies, DocuSign and Smartsheet, saw their share prices popped as they made their debuts the public markets today.
Smartsheet was first out of the gates. Trading on NASDAQ under the ticker SMAR, the company clocked an opening price of $18.40. This represented a pop of 22.7 percent on its IPO pricing of $15 yesterday evening — itself a higher figure than the expected range of $12-$14. The company, whose primary product is a workplace collaboration and project management platform (it competes with the likes of Basecamp, Wrike and Asana), raised $150 million in its IPO and is currently trading around $18.30/share.
Eventually, DocuSign — a company that facilitates e-signatures and other features to speed up contractural negotiations online, competing against the likes of AdobeSign and HelloSign — also started to trade, and it saw an even bigger pop. The stock opened at $38.34, which worked out to a jump of 32 percent on its IPO price last night of $29. Like Smartsheet, DocuSign had priced its IPO higher than the expected range of $26-$28, raising $629 million in the process.
In the case of both companies, they are coming to the market with net losses on their balance sheets, but evidence of strong revenue growth, what seems to be a generally strong market for IPOs at the moment, and the generally positive climate for cloud-based enterprise services (with both Microsoft and Amazon crediting their cloud businesses for their own strong earnings) are part of the rising tide that is lifting these boats.
DocuSign reported $518.5 million in revenue for its fiscal year ending in 2018 in its IPO filings, up from $381.5 million last year and $250.5 million in 2016. Losses were $52.3 million, optimistically cut in half from the $115.4 million in net losses in 2017. DocuSign’s customers include T-Mobile, Salesforce, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America.
Smartsheet reported 3.6 million users in its IPO filings, with business customers including Cisco and Starbucks. The company brought in $111.3 million in revenue for its fiscal 2018 year, but as with many SaaS companies, it’s going public with a loss. Specifically in 2018 it reported a loss of $49.1 million for 2018, up from a net loss of $15.2 million and $14.3 million in 2017 and 2016 respectively.
Other strong enterprise tech public offerings this year have included Dropbox, Zscaler, Cardlytics, Zuora and Pivotal. All of them closed above their opening prices, in what is shaping up to be a huge year for tech IPOs overall.
More to come.
