PagerDuty shares jumped more than 50% in their opening day of trading on Thursday in the first notable software IPO of 2019. Shares sold around $38 a piece, leaving PagerDuty with a market capitalization of around $2.7 billion. The stock had been priced at $24 Wednesday at a market cap of nearly $1.8 billion.
PagerDuty, whose software helps technical teams quickly spot problems with applications and respond to incidents such as customer complaints, is used by developers at over 11,000 companies, including Slack, Box, Gap and Netflix. Revenue jumped 48 percent last year to $117.8 million, though the company's net loss widened to $40.7 million from $38.1 million a year earlier.
The so-called DevOps market is expected to reach $10.3 billion a year by 2023, up from $3.4 billion last year, according to research from MarketsandMarkets. Ethan Kurzweil, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, one of PagerDuty's biggest investors, said that these sorts of developer tools are gaining importance as software becomes central to the way more companies do business.
Just more proof that IPOs that aren't pumped by CNBC do well. The ones that get the banker-fueled hype always collapse. CNBC needs to stop being a marketing tool for investment banks that pump and dump. carlquintanilla jimcramer