Cloud Security Firm Qualys’ IPO Opens At $12/Share, Raising $71.8M

Ingrid Lunden

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... → Learn More

Friday, September 28th, 2012
qualys logo

As of today, one more enterprise cloud startup is now a publicly-listed company. Qualys — trading as QLYS — opened trading today on the NASDAQ with shares priced at $12, in the mid-range of the expected offering of between $11 and $13. After a slow start in the morning, the shares climbed up to $14.85 during the day, to settle down at $14.12 at close. Not quite as much of a rise as Palo Alto Networks when it had its IPO in July 2012 — where it saw a 26% increase on its opening price of $46 — but still an increase of 17.7%.

As Qualys laid out in its investor prospectus published yesterday, it was offering 7,575,000 shares today, 6.7 million of those in shares from the company, and 875,000 from investors. All were sold, raising a total of $71.8 million. Back in June, when Qualys first announced its IPO, it had hoped to raise $100 million.

Executives, directors and pre-IPO shareholders now own 61.2% of the company.

Qualys says that it has some 5,800 enterprise customers using its cloud-based security products. About 70% of its user base is in the U.S. but it has customers in 100 countries. It says it performs some 600 million scans on networks and documents annually. It had revenues of $43.4 million for the first six months of 2012, up 17% from the same period a year ago.

Shareholders who sold shares at IPO included HP — which is also a competitor to Qualys. It sold all of its nearly 500,000 shares in the company. VC investors Trident Capital Partners and GRP Partners held on to their stakes, which are now at 20.81% and 8.30%.


Company: Qualys
Website: qualys.com
Launch Date: 1999

SaaS for vulnerability management, policy compliance, PCI compliance, web application scanning, and malware detection. The Leading Provider of Information Security and Compliance Cloud Solutions The QualysGuard Cloud Platform and integrated suite of solutions helps businesses simplify security operations and lower the cost of compliance by delivering critical security intelligence on demand and automating the full spectrum of auditing, compliance and protection for IT systems and web applications. The QualysGuard® service is used today by more than 6,000 customers in over 100 countries,...

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