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- Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) soared nearly 40% intraday Thursday in its first trading session following an IPO that valued the cloud-storage firm at just under $500M.
- BLZE shot up to as high as a $22.25 intraday, up 39.1% from the stock’s $16-a-share IPO price. Shares later pulled back, but still ended the day ahead 24.4% at $19.90.
- The firm’s initial public offering raised $100M by selling some 6.3M Class A shares at the midpoint of their expected $15-$17/share range. BLZE also granted underwriters the option to buy 937,500 extra Class A shares for overallotments.
- The company also has Class B shares for executives and pre-IPO investors. Class B shares carry 10 votes each vs. one vote for Class A shares, giving insiders about 97% of BLZE’s voting power.
- Backblaze (BLZE) will have a total of about 29.3M Class A and B shares outstanding going forward. Assuming both carry the same price, that valued the company at about $468M on a non-diluted basis as of its IPO. Thursday’s rally boosted that up to about $582.5M.
- BLZE offers cloud-based computer storage and backup services to both businesses and consumers. The company’s subscription-based products compete with larger rivals like the S3 service from Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Azure from Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Google Cloud from Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL).
- The New York Times’ Wirecutter review site recently lauded BLZE as “the easiest to use and the best cloud backup service for most people.”
- BLZE’s pre-IPO investors include London-listed financial firm TMT Investments, which owns about 25% of the company.
- Seeking Alpha’s Donovan Jones lays out a bullish thesis for the stock here.