Morning Report: What 2017’s Best Performing IPO Says To Late-Stage Startups Afraid Of Going Public

Morning Report: Can you guess which 2017 US-listed tech IPO is the best performing to date when compared to its list price?

Don’t worry if you can’t. Appian, interestingly enough, is the best-performing 2017 tech IPO that we track—at least so far. According to our (public!) listing of such companies, Appian is up 111.17 percent from its $12 IPO price to more than $25 per share.

It’s an impressive run, certainly, but one that comes with some interesting caveats. Let’s go back in time a bit to when Crunchbase News covered Appian. From our Daily blurbs on May 25:

$130 million in revenue isn’t a huge amount for a company going public. Indeed, Box was substantially larger, to draw a historical comparison. But the company went public all the same. Its IPO march, however, had an interesting wrinkle.

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Indeed, these pages later noted that Appian had been forced to list for a smaller valuation than it had achieved from private market investors. It was, therefore, a down IPO. Here’s what we did with the company’s past in June, summing its pre-IPO, IPO, and then-current post-IPO valuations:

Adding a final note to that list, according to Yahoo Finance and other sources, Appian is worth around $1.5 billion today. That’s near-certainly north of its last private valuation, and, as noted before, more than 100 percent higher than the per-share price at which it went public. So it’s a win regardless of where you set the measuring stick.

I highlight all of this as Appian is a firm that did what was thought to be bad: going public underwater from its last private valuation. And yet, the firm did just that and has quickly bested its last private number.

What excuse do these other late-stage companies have?

From the Crunchbase Daily:

Amazon seeks second HQ

• Amazon plans to invest over $5 billion to open a second headquarters in a yet-to-be-determined city in North America. The Seattle e-commerce giant is soliciting proposals from local and state governments interested in serving as a location for the facility, which it estimates will provide up to 50,000 jobs.

Deere buys Blue River for $305M

• Deere & Co., the most famous brand in tractors, announced that it is acquiring Blue River Technology, a developer of machine learning and robotics technology for agriculture, for $305 million. Silicon Valley-based Blue River previously raised about $30 million in venture funding.

Wuxi NextCode raises $240M

• Genomics firm Wuxi NextCode has closed a $240 million Series B financing led by Sequoia China and joined by Temasek, Yunfeng Capital, and 3W Partners.

Podcast startups get little VC love

• Although podcasts are pretty popular, podcasting startups have not been a hit with investors. Over nearly a decade, venture backers have put less than $160 million into various podcast-focused companies, according to a Crunchbase News analysis.

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• We’re inviting investors for a no-holds-barred chat with Alex Wilhelm at TechCrunch Disrupt SF this September. Get your special $500 discount for being a Crunchbase subscriber.