Elastic — the search technology company powering matches with drivers on Uber and significant others on Tinder — went public on Friday, and roared out of the gate.
The Mountain View, California based company priced its IPO at $36 per share, giving it a market cap of $2.5 billion. At the opening bell, its stock shot up over 90% to about $70 per share — and maintained that momentum through the close, ending its first day as a public company up 94.4% to $70 per share, valuing the company at just shy of $4.9 billion.
With Google dominating consumer search, Elastic, founded in 2012, focused on selling search technology to large-scale business customers like eBay, Barclays, IBM, and Microsoft. Sprint uses it's "Elasticsearch" product for "ingesting, searching, and analyzing" more than 3 billion records and 50 terabytes of data per day, the company said in its S-1 filing.
Elastic's last 12-month revenue (ending in April) was $149.4 million, up 87% from the year prior. The company lost $49 million on that revenue, compared to $47 million in losses the year prior.
At the end of July 2018, Elastic had an accumulated debt of $236 million.
In a statement to Business Insider, CEO and cofounder Shay Banon praised the first-day performance, but said there's work yet to be done. He said:
"It’s been a great day, and it’s an important day in the company’s history. But it is just one day. As for the pricing, I decided that $36 per share was a fair price for our company. It’s a 9.8x multiple. I attribute the big rise in the stock price to the belief in the company. Throughout the roadshow, we saw that our story resonated really well with investors. Looking ahead, we’re going to keep executing and building great products that our customers need."
