Big Data Analytics Specialist Tableau Software Raises $254M In IPO, Shares Pop 58%; Marketo Up 65% To $21.48
One year to the day of the troubled Facebook IPO, the climate for tech IPOs in the public markets is significantly less stormy, especially for companies in the enterprise space. Today, not one but two, Tableau Software and Marketo, are debuting on New York stock exchanges. Business intelligence provider Tableau Software, trading as “DATA”, is one of the more highly anticipated tech IPOs of the year, and so far it has not disappointed. It priced its IPO at $31 per share, and it has popped 58% and is at nearly $49/share in early trading on the NYSE.
Meanwhile, Marketo, a cloud-based marketing services company, priced its IPO at $13 per share. It will be trading as MKTO on the NASDAQ exchange, but has yet to trade at the time of writing. It went up by more than 50% in early activity and then continued to creep up: it’s now 68% above the IPO pricing and trading at $21.48. (We’ll keep updating these numbers for both stocks.)
Taken together, the two are strong endorsements for the market for enterprise services and some of the still-emerging trends within it.
Tableau Software, as its stock ticker unsubtly hints, is aimed more at a big-data play, offering visualization and analytics that it says are easy enough for non-technical people to use. Up to now, it still offers the majority of its services as downloadable, on-premises software rather than as cloud-based apps.
Marketo is positioned as a software-as-a-service, and like a Salesforce for the marketing department, offers its various services — inbound marketing, lead management, social marketing, event management, instant CRM integration, sales dashboards, and marketing ROI reporting and analytics — all in a one-stop-in-the-cloud-shop.
Tableau Software raised some $254.2 million at the $31/share price, after raising that IPO from an initial range of $23-26; this gives it a valuation of $2 billion. Marketo, meanwhile, is raising just under $85 million at a $550 million valuation.
(Incidentally, Facebook’s shares have lost some 30% of their value in the last year, and are at around $26.45/share at the moment.)
How does Tableau’s IPO compare to other high-profile enterprise listings? The money raised is just shy of the $260 million that enterprise security company Palo Alto Networks raised in July 2012. It is still a ways behind HR specialist Workday’s IPO in October 2012, which raised $637 million.
Tableau Software’s multi-billion IPO sets the stage for other multi-billion tech IPOs from the likes of Box and Twitter. Tableau had raised less than $40 million prior to this from NEA and Meritech (Crunchbase puts the total at only $15 million, but Geekwire says that NEA’s total investment in the company has been $29 million).
In contrast, Marketo has raised $108 million in six rounds, from investors that include Institutional Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Mayfield Fund, Storm Ventures and Battery Ventures.
See the article here: Big Data Analytics Specialist Tableau Software Raises $254M In IPO, Shares Pop 58%; Marketo Up 65% To $21.48
Online Legal Services Platform Rocket Lawyer Raises $15 Million
Online legal services platform Rocket Lawyer has raised another $15 million in new funding, we’ve confirmed with the company. We’re told that the funding was raised from a “strategic investor,” who is not being named at this time. Rocket Lawyer previously raised $40 million in capital from August Capital, Google Ventures and Investor Growth Capital (IGC).
For background, Rocket Lawyer provides legal documents to consumers and small businesses, and allows consumers to find and reach lawyers as well. Earlier this year, Founder Charley Moore told us that the company is growing revenue by $20 million each year.
Last year, rival LegalZoom sued the company over false and misleading advertising, trademark infringement and unfair competition. Rocket Lawyer has since counter sued LegalZoom (and we’re told some of the charges have been dropped).
Rocket Lawyer is looking to expand beyond just offering documents–the company just bought legal Q&A site LawPivot. While its unclear what the new funding will be used for, it should be interesting to see if Rocket Lawyer makes any new acquisitions in the near future.
Original post: Online Legal Services Platform Rocket Lawyer Raises $15 Million
Deal Management Startup CapLinked Adds New Investors (And $500K) To Its Series A
CapLinked, a startup offering workspaces for managing business deals, announced today that it has closed a $2.1 million Series A.
The company previously said that it raised a $1.6 million round from FF Angel (the seed-stage fund operated by Founders Fund), Siemer Ventures, 500 Startups, and others, so this is basically a $500,000 addition. The new investors include Conversion Capital, Inflection Ventures, The Artesian Group, Googler Chris Harris, and AccessDNA founder Lee Essener.
CapLinked pitches itself as an easier-to-use, cheaper alternative to the big providers of virtual data rooms. It creates online workspaces for managing deals, such as merger and acquisitions and investor reporting, where the various parties can communicate and exchange files securely. Customers include Thomson Reuters, Sun Capital, and NextView Ventures.
And yes, in the funding press release, co-founder and CEO Eric Jackson says he used CapLinked software to manage this very deal. The company has now raised a total of more than $3 million.
Original post: Deal Management Startup CapLinked Adds New Investors (And $500K) To Its Series A
Readying For An IPO, Peer-To-Peer Lending Marketplace Lending Club Raises $125M From Google And Others At $1.6B Valuation
Peer-to-peer lending platform Lending Club is announcing a huge new investor today: Google. Google and existing investor Foundation Capital have put $125 million in Lending Club, which was valued at $1.55 billion in the round. As part of this investment Google will take an observer seat on the Lending Club Board alongside existing Board members including Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker, ex-chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley John Mack and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
The investment by Google came as part of a secondary transaction whereby new and existing investors acquired shares from existing investors. Last year, Lending Club raised $17.5 million from Kleiner Perkins, bringing its total outside investment to just under $100 million. Because this is a secondary round, there is no new money being raised, as Google and Foundation are buying out existing early investors.
Lending Club, which brings together lenders and borrowers who want to cut out banks in the process of investing among peers, has facilitated a total of $1.65 billion in loans. In the last quarter, Lending Club saw $350 million in loans made through the platform, and has generated 22 consecutive quarters of positive returns. Lending Club expects to issue $2 billion in loans this year alone.
The company’s wholly-owned subsidiary LC Advisors, an SEC Registered Investment Advisor, has launched several funds in the last 2 years and now has more than $450 million in assets under management.
To put Lending Club’s growth in context, when peer-to-peer lending began to establish itself about five years ago, there was a lot of excitement. By taking banks out of the equation altogether to connect investors directly with those in need of a loan, p2p lending almost immediately had tons of appeal (for both consumers and investors). However, thanks to heavy scrutiny from the SEC, companies like Lending Club and its main competitor Prosper faced a few challenges. However, the SEC finally greenlit the model, and Lending Club has been growing ever since.
The company announced last year that it is cash-flow positive for the first time. Last year, the company added 50 employees, including the former Visa head of global development and Morgan Stanley CTO John McIlwaine and E-Trade general counsel Russel Elmer. Lending Club is also reportedly gearing up for a potential IPO in the next year or so.
“Lending Club is using the Internet to reshape the financial system and profoundly transform the way people think of credit and investment” said Google’s VP of corporate development, David Lawee. “We are excited to be a part of it.”
Having Google (not Google Ventures) as an investor is a huge deal. It’s not that often that Google makes a corporate and strategic investment in a company. In fact it’s pretty rare. The investment was made through Google’s new last-stage investment arm, headed by Lawee. Most recently, Google participated in Survey Monkey’s recent funding.
“The Google team is excited that Lending Club could transform the banking space,” says CEO Renaud Laplanche. “The company believes that our technology brings better value for consumers.
“By promoting the transparency and democratization of data, Lending Club is opening up tremendous opportunities for disintermediation, which is disrupting the traditional banking model,” said Charles Moldow, general partner at Foundation Capital, which has invested $more than $50 million in the company. He adds that the investment was the one of the few largest in the firm;s 18-year history, which is “a testament to the magnitude of the opportunity” for the company.
Laplanche explains to us that this year will be spent continuing to raise awareness for company and grow fast, specifically focusing on helping borrowers with good credit pay off credit card balances, and access lower interest rates from borrowers.
As for the rumors of an IPO, Laplanche confirms that Lending Club is preparing for a potential IPO and hopes to be ready sometime in 2014 for a public offering.
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ClickTale Raises $17M For Its In-Page Analytics
ClickTale, a company that helps businesses understand what visitors are actually doing on their websites, just announced that it has raised $17 million in Series B funding.
The company tries to go beyond the standard information revealed by most other analytics services, offering things like recordings of visitor sessions, heat maps that show where people moved their mouse and clicked, and a visualizer showing each step towards converting visitors into paying customers or registered users.
ClickTale says it has more than 80,000 customers worldwide, and the ones mentioned on the company website include LinkedIn, Groupon, and Barnes & Noble. ClickTale launched a mobile web version last year, but its marketing still focuses on the desktop web product, ClickTale Core.
The round was led by Amadeus Capital Partners, with participation from Goldrock Capital and Viola Credit, which provided ClickTale with a $3 million credit facility — as ClickTale co-founder and CEO Tal Schwartz noted via email, taking on debt allows the company to “accelerate growth, yet keep dilution to a minimum.” Yoav Andrew Leitersdorf, the managing partner at YL Ventures, said that prior to this round, ClickTale had raised only $800,000 in funding, mostly from his firm (which the company confirmed).
Schwartz said he wants to continue expanding the product lineup (with some announcements lined up for the comings months) and to increase the Tel Aviv-headquarted company’s footprint in the United States and Europe.
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