Big Data Visualization Goes Public: Tableau Software Raises $254M As Shares Pop 58%; Fellow Enterprise IPO Hopeful Marketo Raises $85M
The march of the enterprise software IPOs continues, with not one but two companies debuting on New York stock exchanges today. Business intelligence provider Tableau Software, trading as “DATA”, is one of the more highly anticipated tech IPOs of the year, and so far it has not disappointed. It priced its IPO at $31 per share, and it has popped 58% to nearly $49/share in early trading on the NYSE. Marketo, a cloud-based marketing services company, priced its IPO at about half that, $13 per share. It will be trading as MKTO, but has yet to trade this morning.
Tableau Software is raising some $254.2 million at the $31/share price, after raising that IPO from an initial range of $23-26, with a valuation of $2 billion. Marketo, meanwhile, is raising just under $85 million for a $550 million valuation.
That figure puts Tableau just shy of the $260 million that enterprise security company Palo Alto Networks raised in July 2012, and still a ways behind HR specialist Workday’s IPO in October 2012, which raised $637 million.
Tableau Software’s multi-billion IPO sets the stage for other multi-billion tech IPOs from the likes of Box and Twitter. Tableau had raised less than $40 million prior to this from NEA and Meritech (Crunchbase puts the total at only $15 million, but Geekwire says that NEA’s total investment in the company has been $29 million).
In contrast, Marketo has raised $108 million in six rounds, from investors that include Institutional Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Mayfield Fund, Storm Ventures and Battery Ventures.
Taken together, the two are strong endorsements for the market for enterprise services and some of the still-emerging trends within it.
Tableau Software, as its stock ticker unsubtly hints, is aimed more at a big-data play, offering visualization and analytics that it says are easy enough for non-technical people to use. Up to now, it still offers the majority of its services as downloadable, on-premises software rather than as cloud-based apps. Marketo is positioned as a software-as-a-service, and like a Salesforce for the marketing department, offers its various services — inbound marketing, lead management, social marketing, event management, instant CRM integration, sales dashboards, and marketing ROI reporting and analytics — all in a one-stop-in-the-cloud-shop.
