Procore CEO Tooey Courtemanche rings the bell of the New York Stock Exchange as he took his company public in May 2021.In March 2020, Procore CEO Tooey Courtemanche had his bags packed to go on an investor roadshow to pitch his construction cloud software business to analysts ahead of an initial public offering. Founded in 2002, Procore had taken a long path to IPO. But it would have to wait longer yet, as the Covid-19 pandemic had other plans.
“We are arguably very late to our IPO party, in one way to think about it, so we’ve been ready for a very long time,” Courtemanche said in an interview. “I’ve been doing this for 19 and a half years at Procore, so to me, the delay of the IPO due to Covid was just a blip in time in the overall scheme of things.”
But by early 2020, when Procore looked to initially go out as a public company, the construction industry was put on ice by the pandemic. According to Courtemanche, 78% of Procore’s customers, who use the software to digitize blueprints and paper updates and manage complex construction projects, had projects delayed or disrupted by Covid-19 last year. Not a good time to hit the public markets. “Procore is indelibly linked to the construction economy globally,” Courtemanche says.
Procore opted against a direct listing, its CEO says, as the company wanted to choose its own investors and gain a marketing boost from the traditional IPO process. He says the company never seriously considered another alternative, the special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.