Domo opens at $23.80/share, a pop of 13%, after raising $193M, valuing the company at around $510M
Domo, the business analytics company based out of Utah, today became the latest enterprise tech company to go public, and it did so with a small pop. Trading on Nasdaq as DOMO, the company opened at $23.80/share, up 13 percent on its initial pricing of $21. Last night, the company announced that it had raised $193 million through a sale of 9,200,000 shares of Class B common stock at the initial price, valuing the company at around $511 million.
Now, the stock is trading at around $25.60. We’ll update this as the day progresses.
It’s a modestly positive start for a company that has seen a rocky road leading up to its IPO: as a startup, the company was valued as high as $2 billion, meaning its IPO valuation saw some 75 percent of that value erased.
There have always been a lot of high expectations for Domo, which was in stealth mode for five years and came out of it with a $1 billion valuation. Josh James, the company’s founder and CEO, previously had founded Omniture, the online marketing and web analytics firm, which was acquired by Adobe for $1.8 billion in 2009.
And Domo itself taps into one recurring theme within the enterprise IT zeitgeist: there are now hundreds of cloud-based services collecting and producing data about our businesses, and so there is a demand for companies that can harness and make sense of that data, and provide good inroads for people to “read” it more easily (companies like Slack also are tapping into this idea, albeit for a different purpose).
Domo itself says that it brings in information from some 500 different sources, by way of APIs and other integrations, to produce data visualizations and other insights into how an organization operates, and while one of its key targets are C-level executives who want “big picture” insights, the product positions itself as suitable for a wide array of users and industries.
But as many have pointed out, this isn’t the whole story. The company has been burning money and its annual recurring revenue hasn’t been that strong compared to how much money it has raised (pre-IPO, nearly $690 million). For the strongest enterprise startups, these are metrics that usually have closer parity, if ARR is not altogether outpacing how much the company has raised. For skeptics, Domo still has to prove itself as a business longer term, and now that it’s going to the public markets for money, it will be doing so with more scrutiny.
According to its S-1 filing, Domo’s revenues in the year that ended January 31 were $108.5 million, up from $74.5 million, with net losses of $176.6 million (versus $183 million for the same period a year before). The company says that as of April 30, 2018, it had more than 1,500 businesses as customers, including 385 with more than $1 billion in revenue. The company makes about 80 percent of its revenues from subscriptions with the rest from professional services.
Developing.
