CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., CRWD, +86.50% trading opens on a positive note, as shares soared nearly 87% on Wednesday morning following its IPO offering brewed last Tuesday. The trading debut for the cybersecurity firm first began to be executed at 11:28 AM ET for $63.50.
Initially, the firm priced its IPO on Tuesday evening at $34 per share, above the high end of its already raised range of $28 to $30 a share. The company aimed to raise more than $700 million from its initial offering and the Sunnyvale, California-based company have reached its goal following the high jump on Wednesday.
The company offered 18 million shares with underwriters having an option of an additional 2.7 million shares. If these options were taken by underwriters like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Bank of Marica Merill Lynch, and Barclays among other, the company will be holding 199.4 million outstanding shares, which at 87% Wednesday leap would give CrowdStrike a company valuation of $12.7 billion.
CrowdStrike is one of the “unicorns” – usually, tech companies who waited for the right time to offer their initial tradings – from Silicon Valley this year, a Wall Street phenomenon in 2019 that included Uber Technologies, Lyft Inc., Pinterest Inc., and Zoom Video Communications Inc.
Nonetheless, the cybersecurity industry has seen a slowing down in terms of companies listing for IPO with CrowdStrike being the second company this year to offer. So far, only one other cybersecurity firm has gone public in 2019, Tufin Software Technologies Ltd., and with a considerably smaller offering than last year’s.
Founded in 2011, CrowdStrike had already raised $481 million to date even before it started going public. Following the IPO, the firm will offer class A shares, which have one vote each and a set of class B shares with ten votes each share.
CrowdStrike prides its Falcon Security platform as the “first multi-tenant, cloud-native, intelligent security” software-as-a-service platform.
