After filing for an IPO with a $19 to $21 range, Avalara ($AVLR) increased the range to $21 to $23 and then priced above-the-range last night at $24.

It's not surprising because the story behind this enterprise cloud software company…

The information security market keeps growing as customers struggle to adapt to new threats and risks while maintaining a mass of existing technologies, solutions and practices.

Companies have done fairly well protecting their networks but their ability to control the…

We have two business SaaS players coming public tonight. While their businesses are very different we thought it would be fun to compare them using our typical framework for evaluating new companies.

If you don’t already know them DocuSign (DOCU)…

Pivotal Software ($PVTL) went public on Friday at $15/share. The offering didn’t get a resounding vote from the markets. Unlike other recent enterprise software deals, this one ended quietly at $15.75.

We think PVTL is likely to do well from…

Enterprise subscription management software is pretty boring. But the world is shifting from purchase to subscription. Every company now wants “continuous customer relationships” and consumers love subscriptions. In many ways, the subscription economy isn’t new. Even cars were often leased…

The Spotify Deal

Call it what you will (IPO, DPO, simple listing) but Spotify (NYSE: SPOT) will begin trading in the public markets on April 3rd. The shares have a trading and price history that the company includes in their…

The Dropbox (DBX) IPO is well-trod ground at this point. The deal is expected to price on 3/22 and open for trading Friday, 3/23. The company raised the range to $18-20 so we are using the $19 mid-point in our…

In case you haven’t noticed we’ve seen an acceleration of enterprise cloud adoption. Stocks like Nutanix (NTNX), Twilio (TWLO), MongoDB (MDB) and Okta (OKTA) have all taken off in the past few weeks on the back of improving fundamentals.

The…

Last week BioXcel Therapeutics (NASDAQ: BTAI) went public at $11. It looks like a typical biotechnology company with two drugs (BXCL501 and BXCL701) in Phase 1/2 trials for mental disorders and cancer respectively. Both drugs look fairly promising based…

You know it had to come eventually - banks know what you buy with your debit and credit cards and that's information that can be sold! It's a bit sad as ads will intrude into yet another part of your…

NYSE(ADT)Security Monitoring Annual Revenue$4.3B Annual EBITDA$2.3B Shares Outstanding772M Market Cap@MP$14B Debt$10B Price Range$17-19 Pricing TargetThursday PM Lead BanksGoldman & Morgan ADT Introduction

ADT has been around for a long time - they were founded in 1874 and pioneered the current…

Stitch Fix (SFIX) is a service that aims to upgrade your wardrobe right at home. They have embellished the story by talking about "using AI and data science" to make "the future of retail" for clothing. The company is offering…

There’s a growing class of “developer-focused” software infrastructure platforms. It all started with Amazon AWS but since then many companies have taken a similar approach to other areas of software. Other examples included Twilio (TWLO), Stripe (Private), Atlassian (TEAM), MuleSoft…

It's hard to believe that Funko (FNKO), a company that makes bobbleheads, is going public - and they say the IPO market isn't robust! Not only that but the deal is led by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and BofA with five…

[We published this as a subscriber-online note in mid-October.]

Most business applications run on relational databases (RDB) from companies like Oracle. There’s a view that RDB is an “old” technology which is true – it came about in 1970 so…

We sent out the ROKU notes below on September 27th but are providing a few UPDATES here:

"Splitting the difference" turned out to be about right - it suggested $20/share and that's where ROKU settled the first day of trading.…

As promised we are cranking up our “Token Candy” - coverage of crypto currencies in general and the "ICO" phenomenon. Mainly because of the potential for real disruption in traditional equity capital markets and a new way for companies to…

The Beautiful Market

In the words of Jerry Maguire "we work in a business of tough competitors" and that makes it hard for investors to find sustainable returns on invested capital (ROIC). Companies like Amazon keep everyone on edge.

A…

Redfin (RDFN $12-14) is planning to come public this week. The company is basically an online platform for residential real estate sales.

Elephant #1: Zillow

Anyone familiar with this space would know that it's dominated by Zillow (ZG) which has…

PetIQ (PETQ $14-16) is a small (~$350M sales) growth company doing an $85M IPO with Jefferies and William Blair as lead underwriters. The deal looks solid given that the company is gaining share in the large and growing market of…

There’s huge pressure for large companies to modernize their IT infrastructure in the wake of the “Amazon-ification” of infrastructure by AWS.

Tintri (TNTR) is a cloud storage company trying to position themselves as an “enterprise cloud” provider. It’s a smart…

We like to take a look back at an IPO like Trivago (TRVG) six months after pricing and they have a quarter or two under their belt as a public company. This is also the time that IPO share lockups…

UPDATE: The Amazon $AMZN Whole Foods acquisition makes this post ring truer. If home delivered meal kits are a $1B+ business how long do you think it will be before Amazon leverages their purchase with this easy add-on? RIP $APRN…

Enterprise software maker Appian (APPN) priced their IPO at $12 yesterday and it traded to $15. It's a solid deal and still has more upside based on our IV model below. However, we take issue with many of their rather bold claims about…

If you're interested in AI then Veritone (NASDAQ: VERI $14-16) is an IPO you'll want to at least have a look at. It's a small deal led by three smaller banks - Wunderlich, Craig-Hallum and Northland. The larger firms wouldn't touch this…

The used car market is huge - around $700B (yes $B) and super fragmented. The top 100 players only control 7% of the market. It’s mainly structural - used cars have been sold more on a regional basis than nationally.

…

Investors have taken a shine to Floor & Decor (NYSE: FND). The deal was priced way above the $16-18 filing range at $21. The story is fairly simple - FND is like Home Depot for floor products. It’s a massive…

Data Evolves

Exponential growth in data creates new demands for which traditional data management techniques like relational databases are not satisfactory. The pervasive nature of the internet and the so-called IoT has ensured that the exponential growth of data remains…

Just last week we posted that Software Infrastructure is Hot Again (and OKTA priced above the range at $17 and has moved up to $23). Less than a week later we have a story out of the Information about…

Middleware is Back.

Software infrastructure is the gift that keeps on giving. It's arcane to most investors because unless you develop software it's hard to understand. The term "middleware" is often used because it sits behind applications and services that…

The Alteryx (NYSE: AYX) IPO is well-banked with co-leads Goldman and JP Morgan joined by a team of five research-oriented co-manager (PacCrest, Blair, JMP, RayJay and Cowen.) Price talk is $12 to $14 which puts the market capitalization at $750M at…

This week we have the IPO of Canada Goose (NYSE:GOOS). If you live in NYC or Boston you can't help but notice that everyone seems to be wearing these parkas.

How does a company that's been around since 1957 suddenly…

Despite the "retail winter" that Amazon (AMZN) has wrought on the industry, investors remain interested in finding defensible niches in the business. One meme that has gained some momentum is around "brands that control their product, distribution, and destiny." 

J.…

Individual Investor Sentiment

It’s high-noon for Snap and their bankers at the NYSE trading post. The consensus in the capital markets is that the deal will get down and open above the IPO price. Institutions consider Snap an IPO to…

Now that we've had a chance to puzzle over the Snap roadshow (you can see the Snap slides here and we have done a full transcript of the Snap roadshow)…

Snap is two things - 1) a new mobile communication platform that puts the camera and the microphone (rather than the keyboard, mouse and browser) at the center of everything and 2) an advertising company combining their platform technology with…

[UPDATE: May 4, 2017] So Twilio is losing a chunk of business from Uber, their largest single customer. It's a blow and it will impact the next few quarters. The shares took a big hit which is to be expected. At…

The pendulum of funding fashion appears to be swinging back from very large and expensive late-stage private rounds back to public markets. We witnessed the start of this trend in the second half of 2016 when investors marked down the…

Since we originally published a full report on Novan (NASDAQ: NOVN) the company has been delivering good results - recent Phase 2 results for genital warts from HPV were positive and ready for the next step into Phase 3. The…

The main IPO of interest scheduled for this week is Trivago (NASDAQ: TRVG). The $400M deal is being led by JP Morgan, Goldman and Morgan Stanley with 7 co-managers tacked on for good measure. Our Quick IV points to a share…