Shares will trade on the Nasdaq under the 'BLZE' ticker. “Data is the digital world’s most precious resource. Welcome to my article on backblaze nasdaq thursday 100m ipo 650mnovetcnbc. Our mission is to make storing, using, and protecting that data astonishingly easy,” San Mateo, California-based Backblaze said in the preliminary IPO filing. Almost half a million customersįounded in 2007, Backblaze has almost 500,000 customers worldwide. Its Backblaze Storage Cloud service keeps over 500 billion files available on demand and is designed to store trillions more in the future. In an era of blockbuster market debuts preceded by astronomical private financing rounds, Backblaze is a throwback to a time when sub-billion-dollar companies routinely went public to raise capital and build their profile in an effort to win the trust of customers.It has a global physical infrastructure of nearly 200,000 hard drives and one terabit per second of network capacity, across five data centres that are interconnected by private network infrastructure. In the year that ended June 30, Backblaze's revenue totaled $59.9 million, with second quarter sales up about 17% to $16.2 million, according to the company's prospectus.īackblaze raised just $100 million in its offering, less than one-twentieth the amount raised this year by companies including GlobalFoundries, Robinhood and Bumble. Backblaze shares climbed 24% in their debut on Thursday and another 12% on Friday, lifting the price to $22.31 and giving the company a market cap of around $650 million. Over 100 technology companies have listed on U.S. exchanges this year and, by the standards of its peers, Backblaze is a micro-cap. At least 21 tech companies to debut in 2021 are worth over $10 billion. Coinbase is valued above $70 billion, Roblox is over $50 billion and Affirm topped $40 billion. Those companies all routinely tapped venture investors for hefty amounts of capital on their way to the public exchanges. Rivian raised $2.5 billion in a pre-IPO round in July. Backblaze, by contrast, had raised less than $3 million from outside investors between its formation in 2007 and earlier this year, when it issued $10 million in convertible notes.īut when Amazon went public in 1997, the company was generating $16 million in quarterly revenue. Until about a decade ago, when the private markets started to balloon with new entrants, it was still common for tech companies to go public with valuations below $1 billion.īackblaze executives had other reasons to go public in a highly-competitive market that features the biggest cloud services in the world from Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Backblaze currently stores two exabytes of data - that's 2 million terabytes - and has a half-million paying customers.īudman said the IPO presented a clear opportunity to open Backblaze's books to customers and prove that it's mature enough to be a long-term technology provider. He said the fresh capital will help the company expand its sales team as it faces off against industry heavyweights. Its B2 business, which competes with Amazon's S3 cloud storage offering, grew 61% in the second quarter. "I actually hope us showing this is possible for a mid-market company opens the path for more companies to do this," Budman said. "It used to be that other companies went public at other sized scales. I think people have been scared of it and so waited longer and longer.Lucky-photographer/iStock Editorial via Getty Imagesīackblaze (NASDAQ: NASDAQ: BLZE) launched its public IPO on Thursday, and the cloud company has had a strong start. According to MarketWatch, Backblaze raised $100 million shares by selling 6.25 million shares at $16 apiece. The company saw its stock rise almost instantly, and currently sits at $22.99 as of Monday morning, a 44% increase. This gives the company a market cap of $671 million.
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