Wall Street’s hunger for business-tech companies is on display again with the initial public offering of Seattle-based Tableau Software.
Tableau, a provider of data-visualization software, begins trading today (NYSE: [[ticker:DATA]]) at $31 per share. That’s a higher price than Tableau had projected for its shares, even after revising the target twice—a signal of strong demand from stock buyers.
The company had first quarter revenue of $40 million, up 62 percent from the previous year, but posted a $3.7 million loss. Operating expenses more than doubled in the quarter as Tableau rapidly expanded its staff.
Tableau will raise $155 million before expenses from sales of its stock. At $31 per share, the company would be worth about $1.7 billion.
The IPO is a big win for the founders and financiers of Tableau, which traces its roots to Stanford University but moved to Seattle a decade ago. And that trip up the Interstate 5 corridor also makes this public offering a major victory for the Seattle region, which has not seen a tech company IPO since online real estate company Zillow went public in mid-2011.
The Tableau IPO is proof of Seattle’s position as “a leading center of big data overall,” says Tim Porter, managing director at Madrona Venture Group, which has made several investments in the category, most recently in GraphLab.
The Seattle area’s assets include an array of startups, established tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, and a deepening pool of expertise in technologies underpinning big data at the University of Washington.
They are working on everything from the underlying computing architectures needed to handle data at enormous scale, to storage and management technologies, to broad analysis tools such as Tableau’s, to specific data-driven applications, such as INRIX for traffic, and Decide.com for consumer purchases.
With reporting from Ben Romano.
