UiPath IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.
Source: NYSE
UiPath rose 17 percent when the company debuted on the stock market on Wednesday, after the software vendor and its investors fell $ 1.34 billion in the company’s IPO. The shares opened at $ 65.50.
The company, whose software helps companies automate repetitive tasks, sold shares on Tuesday night for $ 56 a piece, over its expected price range of $ 52 to $ 54. At the opening price, UiPath had a market value of $ 34 billion.
If subscribers buy their allotted shares, the UiPath bid will be the third largest ever for a U.S. software company, behind only cloud database provider Snowflake, which raised $ 3.9 billion in September, and Qualtrics, which brought in $ 1.78 billion in January after SAP came out. UiPath is entering the market at a time of rapid growth as healthcare companies and energy producers look for ways to automate operations in their finance, human resources and legal departments.
Revenue increased 81% last year to $ 607.6 million, and the company’s losses fell to $ 92.4 million from $ 519.9 million in 2019. UiPath’s gross margin of 89% is among the largest in the software field.
While UiPath joins a long list of high-growth cloud software companies to go public in the last three years, its debut comes amid a change in investor sentiment. After more than doubling in value last year, the WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund, made up of 58 publicly traded cloud software vendors, fell 6.7% this year, while the Dow Jones industrial average rose 11% to closing Tuesday.
One of the biggest strengths of UiPath is its ability to retain customers and encourage them to increase their spending over time. In its last fiscal year, UiPath reported a net revenue withholding of 145%, which means that the existing average customer increased spending by 45% over the previous year.
UiPath, which ranked 50th on the CNBC 2020 Disruptor 50. list, was founded in 2005 in Romania by Daniel Dines, a former Microsoft engineer. Dines moved UiPath to the United States about a decade later and established a headquarters in New York. About a quarter of the 2,863 full-time employees are based in Bucharest, Romania.
The shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “PATH”. Dines controls 88% of the voting shares and is the largest shareholder, with over 110 million shares valued at $ 6.2 billion, based on the IPO price and including some shares sold in the offering.
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