Impinj raised $67.2 million in an initial public stock offering—the first for a Washington state technology company since 2014—and watched its shares surge upwards of 25 percent in Thursday morning trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market.
On Wednesday afternoon, Seattle-based Impinj (NASDAQ: [[ticker:PI]]) priced 4.8 million shares of its common stock at $14 each, the high end of its anticipated range, bringing in $67.2 million, before expenses. Underwriters of the IPO have an option to purchase 720,000 more shares.
The 16-year-old company filed for an IPO in early June. The last Washington tech company to go public was pet insurance provider Trupanion in 2014. Earlier this year, biotech company PhaseRx completed an IPO. Juno Therapeutics, another Seattle biotech, raised $265 million in an IPO in late 2014.
The tech sector nationally has also seen relatively few IPOs so far this year. Exceptions include Twilio and Acacia.
It was a long road to IPO for Impinj, which has been plugging away at radio frequency identification (RFID) technology and market development through various ups and downs. The company makes RFID chips, readers, and software to enable wireless tracking of virtually any physical object. Last year, it marked the sale of its 10 billionth chip, but the company sees a huge opportunity still ahead of it as the Internet of Things comes into its own.
Impinj expects second quarter revenue to be between $25.3 and $26.3 million, up from $19.1 million during the same period in 2015, according to its updated IPO prospectus. Its anticipated bottom line ranges from a loss of $1.8 million to a profit of $400,000, compared with a profit of $974,000 in last year’s second quarter.
The company brought in $78.5 million in revenue in 2015 and turned a profit of $900,000.
