• General
  • September 14, 2019
  • 4 minutes read

Cloudflare Pops On IPO Debut

Cloudflare co-founder and COO Michelle Zatlyn Photograph by Stuart Isett/Fortune Brainstorm Tech Cloudflare, roughly a month after filing for an…

Cloudflare co-founder and COO Michelle Zatlyn

Photograph by Stuart Isett/Fortune Brainstorm Tech

Cloudflare, roughly a month after filing for an IPO, debuted on the public markets yesterday, raising $525 million from the sale of more than 35 million shares. Cloudflare priced its IPO at $15 a share, up from a previous range of between $10 to $12 per share. The company’s stock jumped 20% on its debut to $18 per share, giving the company a market cap of roughly $5.3 billion. This is up from its last private valuation of $3.2 billion.

Cloudflare’s IPO happened at the same time frame another highly-valued private company, SmileDirectClub, debuted on the public markets. SmileDirectClub filed to go public the same week as Cloudflare and also went public the same week the company did. But unlike Cloudflare, SmileDirectClub didn’t pop on its public debut, instead falling 28% below its IPO price. Still, the brace-making company notched a valuation of $6.4 billion [as of Thursday], double its last private valuation of $3.2 billion (notice it’s the same as that of Cloudflare’s?, it’s just a co-incidence anyways).

Cloudflare recorded $193 million in 2018 revenue, but with $87.2 million in losses the same year. In the first half of this year, the San Francisco-based company pulled in $129 million in revenue, but with $37 million in losses. As of Q2 2019 end, Cloudflare, whose popular CDN service is used mostly by non-paying web properties, had 74,000 paying customers. That seems much, but not so compared to some 1.9 million+ customers who use it for free. However, this doesn’t seem like a concern, as a key to Cloudflare’s service is its freemium model.

Prior to going public, Cloudflare raised $332 million in funding. VC firms like NEA, Pelion Ventures, Venrock and Fidelity reaped good returns from its IPO, with 20.4%, 18.8%, 16.2% and 5.5% stakes respectively.


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