Pivotal Software, an enterprise cloud computing company spun off from Dell EMC, expects to raise up to $592 million from its IPO as tech sector offerings continue to heat up.
In a revised prospectus, Pivotal said Monday it would sell 37 million Class A shares to the public at a price of between $14 and $16 per share.
According to Silicon Valley Business Journal, the company would be valued at about $4 billion if it prices at the top of its range and its bankers buy all the shares allotted to them. Dell Technologies, EMC, and Michael Dell currently own 80.8% of Pivotal, which has raised $1.7 billion in venture funding since 2013.
“The year was off to a slow start for tech IPOs with just Cardlytics and Zscaler debuting, but now we’re seeing a flurry with Dropbox, Spotify, Zuora and Pivotal,” TechCrunch reported, adding, “Strong performance of both Dropbox and Zscaler has been seen as a favorable sign for tech IPOs.”
Pivotal was founded in 1989 as a small software consultancy. It was spun out of EMC and VMware in 2012 and became a division of Dell after the tech giant bought EMC in 2016.
The company helps software developers build apps for the cloud, offering a “cloud-native” platform called Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) as well as consulting services through Pivotal Labs. According to its prospectus, subscription revenue from PCF has grown from $95 million in 2016 to $259 million in 2018.
Customers include six of the 10 largest carmakers, seven of the top ten banks, and half of the 10 largest insurance companies.
“Despite the widespread availability of private and public cloud infrastructure, many organizations are burdened by legacy technologies and software development processes that prevent them from fully realizing the benefits of cloud-native software,” the IPO prospectus said. “As a result, organizations require an agile development process and a cloud-native platform that can be deployed on every major private and public cloud.”
According to Gartner, spending on cloud application infrastructure services is expected to grow 22% to $29 billion by 2021.
