Enterprise Specialist Rally Software Raises $84M In IPO As Shares Pop 28%, Now Trading At $18

Rally Software today became the latest enterprise software specialist to go public, and in its debut today on the NYSE, shares jumped 28 percent to around $18/share. The Boulder Colorado-based company, which specializes in agile project management software, priced its 6 million shares at $14, raising $84 million at a valuation of $315 million.

Shares popped more than 28 percent in the first hour of trading, under the ticker RALY, and the stock is now trading around $18/share. That brings valuation to around $401 million.

In March, Rally had originally priced the IPO at $11 to $13 for 5.75 million shares but expanded the offering. Deutsche Bank and Piper Jaffray led the offering.

Rally’s products let businesses implement agile software development and lean practices to speed up the rate of innovation and increase agility in the software development process. As CEO Tim Miller explained it, “if you’re a developer, Rally is the first place you log in in the morning. It’s how you know what you have to work on that day, how you pull your work down, pass it along to somebody else. It’s there for the whole process,” he said.

According to the company’s S-1 filing, it has over 1,000 customers, 34 of which are Fortune 100 companies, and there are 168,562 paid users on the service. Big name customers include Intel, Disney, Oracle, McGraw-Hill, and eBay.

The company has continued to grow revenue, from $29.7 million in 2011 to $41.3 million in 2012, a 39 percent jump. Total sales grew again in 2013 to $56.8 million, a 38 percent YOY growth rate. However, this hasn’t been enough to save Rally from yearly losses. In 2013, net losses were at $10.8 million ending January 31.

Rally has raised nearly $70 million since inception in 2001 from VCs like Mohr Davidow Ventures, Greylock, Boulder Ventures, among others. Along the way, Rally has picked up a number of acquisitions including AgileZen, Flowdock, and Agile Adventures.

Miller told TechCrunch in an interview that it plans to use the money raised in the IPO to “increase financial flexibility, continue to invest in growing the business organically (both domestically and internationally), invest in the sales force, and product development.”

Miller also mentioned that the company will continue to make acquisitions along the way as it grows the business.