After trimming price, Tintri closes up 4% and raises $60 million

Following a pattern set by earlier IPOs in the enterprise cloud sector, Tintri’s stock rose nearly 4 percent on its first day of trading in the wake of a stock offering valued well below its previous round of private financing.

Tintri debuted its stock on Nasdaq at $7 a share, below the range of $10.50 a share and $12.50 a share that it had initially proposed. The stock closed Friday up 3.9 percent at $7.27, after rising as high as $7.75 a share.

Tintri’s offering, which raised $60.2 million for the company, closes out a disappointing week for tech IPOs. Yesterday, Blue Apron priced its offering at $10 a share, also below its initial pricing range, and closed Friday down 6.6 percent at $9.34. Tintri had also hoped to debut its stock Thursday but changed its plans. Tintri’s offering valued the company at $216 million, below the reported $785 million valuation at Tintri’s last round of private financing in July 2015.

Above: Tintri cofounder and CTO Kieran Harty

Tintri’s enterprise cloud platform uses flash storage systems to offer companies public cloud capabilities on their own systems. The company has more than 1,300 customers, including Chevron, UnitedHealthcare, Sony, Toyota, and Comcast.

“We’re allowing customers to deploy an AWS-like cloud in their datacenter,” said cofounder Kieran Harty in an interview with VentureBeat. Tintri is planning to use proceeds to help expand its technology to include integration of on-premise data centers with the public cloud, as well as new analytics and backup features.

Harty also said the proceeds will help push the company to become cash-flow breakeven and eventually profitable. In its last fiscal year, Tintri posted a negative cash flow of $70.4 million and burned through another $19 million in its most recent quarter. The company had $49 million in cash on hand at the end of April.

Like many startups in the enterprise-cloud space, Tintri is seeing strong revenue growth but also substantial losses. Its revenue rose 33 percent year over year in the three months through April to $30.4 million, while its net loss stayed roughly flat at $30.5 million. Last year, revenue grew 45 percent to $125 million, while net loss grew to $106 million from $101 million in 2015.

“We view it as being a good house in a tough neighborhood,” Harty said. “There are some negative experiences that people have had in the enterprise infrastructure space.”

Other cloud IPOs have gone public at a discount to their earlier, private-round valuations. Cloudera, for example, went public at $15 a share in April, valuing the company around $2 billion — below its $4.1 billion valuation back in 2014. On the other hand, this year’s class of cloud IPOs are trading above their offering prices. Cloudera is up 5 percent from its offering price, while Alteryx is up 49 percent and Appian is up 53 percent.

Morgan Stanley and BofA Merrill Lynch served as lead underwriters on Tintri’s IPO. The company’s largest investors following the IPO are New Enterprise Associates, which owns 16.9 percent; Silver Lake Kraftwerk, owning 15.1 percent; and Insight Venture Partners, owning 14.9 percent.