DigitalOcean, the cloud computing upstart that debut on the stock markets amid much fanfare, did not end its first day on a similar note. The first trading day saw shareholders involving in mass selling, resulting a 10% drop in belo the company’s IPO share price. The stock, which was listed on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, closed at $42.50, or nearly 10% below its IPO price.
The start-up, which is a provider of cloud-based services for software developers, start-ups, and small companies, priced an IPO of 16.5 million shares of common stock at $47 each, finally raising $776 million. That price, at the high end of the expected range of $44 to $47 a share, gave the company a market capitalization of $5.8 billion on a fully diluted basis. The stock started sharing at $41.50 per share, which was well below the range of $44 to $47 per share the company had provided in updates to its IPO prospectus.
The company’s prospectus revealed that the start-up had revenue of $318.4 million in 2020, an increase of 25% from 2019. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization amounted to $95.9 million, a growth of 74%. The company had a loss for the year of $43.6 million, slightly wider than the loss of $40.4 million in 2019.
“Our mission is to simplify cloud computing so developers and businesses can spend more time creating software that changes the world,” the company said its prospectus. “We estimate there are approximately 100 million SMBs [small-and-medium sized companies] globally today and 14 million new businesses started each year across the globe.”
CEO Yancey Spruill said, “We give every customer, regardless of size, a personalized support experience, so we think that making it easy and simple and giving our customers help when they need it is the way to earn every day our developers’ and entrepreneurs’ hearts and minds.” He added the market is large, with over $100 billion in annual cloud spending for small and medium-sized businesses. The start-up claims to have nearly 6, 00, 000 customers, and it focuses on creating easy-to-use tools with transparent pricing and a deep library of support documentation that Spruill says attracts 5 million readers every month. About 70% of the customer base is outside the United States.
DigitalOcean’s investors include Access Industries, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (with a stake of 14.8%), and IA Ventures (with a stake of 14%). AI Droplet Holdings LLC, managed by Access Industries, is the largest stakeholder in the company with a stake of 22%. The start-up challenges giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, providing computing and storage resources that companies can consume to run their software, instead of operating their own data center infrastructure. Most of its revenue comes from the use of droplets, which are virtual slices of physical servers.
Spruill told CNBC on Wednesday that DigitalOcean intends to add data center infrastructure in more places around the world, seeing an opportunity to add analytics software that would enable users to do more with data stored in databases. It already has operates 14 data centers of its own in the U.S. and abroad through leases, and the company intends to continue expanding its presence in the market. Digital Ocean can eventually accelerate its own growth to 30% a year or higher, Spruill added.
