SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI $17-19) will be returning to the public markets this week after being taken private by private equity firms Silver Lake and Thoma Bravo in February of 2016 in a $4.5B deal. In the middle of the range,…

This week the deal we are digging into is Anaplan (NYSE: $PLAN) which priced last night at $17, well above the proposed range of $13-15. It's a good old-fashioned enterprise SaaS company at the highest end of the "enterprise performance…

The Elastic IPO (NYSE: ESTC) will price tonight. The price was bumped up to $33-35 but given the company position in software infrastructure the shares should still perform well from that level.

We have our summary comments below but investors…

The much-anticipated SurveyMonkey ($SVMK) IPO is scheduled for tonight. The proposed price range remains $9-11. For a relatively small deal (13.5M shares) there are a lot of banks on the cover - 11 in all with JPM, Allen, and BofA…

If you attend conferences, go to meetups or see local talent at smaller venues you have probably used Eventbrite (NYSE - $EB). Their IPO is scheduled for tonight (Wednesday) by Goldman, JPM, Allen and a few others. The proposed price…

Sometimes the title of an IPO note writes itself! 😉

FarFetch ($FTCH) is another online platform for "luxury goods" is preparing to test the IPO market this week. It's a quality deal so it'll get done. The question is what…

A couple of months ago my youngest son (age 11) gave me a copy of his updated wish list and it was a big departure from past years. Instead of a list of assorted items it had a dozen items…

Sonos ($SONO) is ready for their IPO closeup. This week they plan to come to market on Wednesday night and the deal is already well oversubscribed. The current range is $17-19 on 14m shares. Less than half the shares are…

After two decades Opera Software (NASDAQ OPRA $10-12) has launched an IPO in the US. The deal is expected to price today, July 26th for trading tomorrow. Growth is being driven by the new Opera News product which fills a…

Back in 2006 Bloom Energy (NYSE: BE $14-16) made waves after Kleiner Perkins led a $104M Series D VC round in the company. (Bloom has raised over $825M in capital). Bloom was heavily criticised and discounted as some kind of perpetual motion…

Talk about marketing an IPO! The EverQuote ($EVER) IPO roadshow leaves you with the impression that this is a technology company that have made it easy for consumers to get insurance quotes in an online marketplace and buy coverage online.…

Domo ($DOMO) has attracted a fair bit of negative press as their IPO comes to market. Charismatic CEOs tend to be lightning rods for press attention. This deal reminds me a little of Switch (SWCH) or Snap (SNAP).

Some of…

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…