Cybersecurity Firm CrowdStrike Soars in Wall Street Debut -- 2nd Update

By Tomio Geron 

Shares in cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. soared in their first day of trading Wednesday, closing up 71% from the IPO price and highlighting continued investor interest in fast-growing business-software firms.

The results would value the company at roughly $11.6 billion if underwriters exercise all their options to purchase shares.

CrowdStrike shares closed at $58 on the Nasdaq exchange after the company late Tuesday priced shares in its initial public offering at $34 apiece, raising $612 million and surpassing the expected range of $28 to $30 a share.

Last year, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based CrowdStrike was valued at $3 billion. The company previously had raised about $481 million from venture investors including Accel, IVP, Warburg Pincus, and Alphabet Inc.'s CapitalG, according to PitchBook Data Inc. Its largest pre-IPO shareholders were Warburg Pincus, with 30.2% of shares, Accel with 20.2% and CapitalG with 11.1%.

CrowdStrike is the largest "pure-play" cybersecurity IPO by market capitalization on record, according to PitchBook. Other industry newcomers to Wall Street include Tufin Software Technologies Ltd. this year, as well as Carbon Black Inc., Zscaler Inc. and Tenable Holdings Inc. last year, but CrowdStrike dwarfs them all by market value.

CrowdStrike's arrival on the stock market occurs amid one of the busiest IPO markets in years, following high-profile venture-backed tech debuts such as Uber Technologies Inc., Lyft Inc. and Pinterest Inc.

Although several consumer-tech offerings have struggled on Wall Street, the stocks of a number of business-software companies -- such as Zoom Video Communications Inc. and PagerDuty Inc. -- have performed well after their IPOs.

CrowdStrike, led by co-founder and Chief Executive George Kurtz, provides cloud-based security technology, aiming to do for security what other companies have done for human resources, customer-relationship management and other sectors.

Mr. Kurtz compared his company with cloud companies in other sectors such as Salesforce.com Inc., ServiceNow Inc. and Workday Inc. "I think people are seeing this seismic shift in technology from on-premise to the cloud," he said.

The company gained notoriety after revealing that two groups with ties to Russian intelligence had breached the Democratic National Committee's technology during the 2016 presidential campaign.

CrowdStrike said in its prospectus that it generated $249.8 million in total revenue for the 12-month period ended Jan. 31, more than double the $118.8 million in the year-earlier period. The company's net loss for that time frame widened slightly to $140.1 million from $135.5 million.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Barclays PLC are among the underwriters of the CrowdStrike offering.

--Alexander Davis contributed to this article.

Write to Tomio Geron at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 12, 2019 19:04 ET (23:04 GMT)

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