Nutanix made its stock market debut with a bang. After pricing shares at $16, the enterprise data storage company saw 131 percent gains on its first day of trading.
With clients like Toyota and Best Buy, Nutanix aims to make it easier for businesses to manage their data centers. Its cloud offerings are making infrastructure “invisible, so the businesses can focus on applications and services,” CEO Dheeraj Pandey told TechCrunch.
Early investor and Storm Ventures partner Anshu Sharma told TechCrunch that “the pragmatic focus on virtual desktop infrastructure for mid-size companies allowed him to focus and grow fast in the early years and ultimately provided a clear path to the much bigger market of virtualizing all storage and computing.”
David Blumberg of Blumberg Capital also invested in Nutanix, saying that he “believed in their strategic vision to bring web scale architecture to the data center.”
Nutanix is not yet profitable, but Pandey remained optimistic because they are operating cash flow positive. “We have a method behind this madness of growth,” he said, and seemed confident that the company will continually improve it financials.
The company posted about $444.9 million in revenue for the year ending in July, an increase from $241.4 million in the same period the year before. Losses came in at $168.5 million, up from $126.1 million.
There have been few tech IPOs this year, but the ones that braved the public markets have done very well. Twilio has also seen its shares rise substantially since its June debut, and many are hoping this means there will be a resurgence in tech offerings.
The company raised $238 million in its IPO and is now valued at about $5 billion. Private investors valued Nutanix around $2 billion.
Nutanix previously raised almost $400 million in venture capital and debt. Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Battery Ventures were also amongst its investors.
“Dheeraj and the team have not only engineered incredible products, but they’ve engineered an incredibly company — a company we think can really scale,” said Ravi Mhatre, partner at Lightspeed.
Like many of the recent tech IPOs, Nutanix opted to list on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Its ticker is “NTNX.”