Shares of Textura Corp, a maker of software for the construction industry, rose as much as 68 percent in their market debut, highlighting investors' love affair with enterprise software makers. Enterprise companies, which sell services to businesses rather than individuals, have risen 37 percent on average in the two years following their IPOs, compared with 13 percent for consumer companies, according to market data firm Ipreo.
Investors have lapped up enterprise start-ups over the past year, partly as a result of disappointing IPOs from internet companies such as Facebook Inc, Groupon Inc and Zynga Inc. "Investors are very hungry for cloud software-as-a-service companies that have top-line revenue increases and that are leaders in their defined market, which this company is," said Francis Gaskins, a partner at IPO research company IPODesktop.com.
Splunk Inc, an analytics company, doubled its IPO price of $17 on the first day of trading in April last year. Strong IPOs followed from firewall security company Palo Alto Networks Inc and human resources software company Workday Inc. Textura, which is valued at more than $500 million, raised the size of its offering by 1 million shares to 5 million on Friday. The IPO was priced at $15 per share, raising about $75 million. Textura is backed by Canadian venture capital firm Northwater Capital Management LLC, First Midwest Bancorp Inc and Aon Risk Services Co Inc, a unit of Aon Plc .
Textura makes on-demand project management software for the commercial construction sector to help in bid management, bill payments and vendor evaluation. The Deerfield, Illinois-based company said its software is used by more than 3,000 general contractors, property developers and architects, mostly in North America. Textura's revenue more than doubled to $21.7 million in 2012. It, however, reported a net loss of $18.8 million.
The company said it expected to benefit from a strong outlook for the construction industry although certain markets across the globe continue to be hurt by a slow economic recovery from the financial crisis, oversupply and credit crunch. Textura was founded in 2004 by three partners from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and is headed by Patrick Allin, a co-founder who was previously the chief financial officer of the global consulting practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Comments
Comments are closed.