Carbon Black Shoots 30% Higher After Pricing IPO At Top Of Range

Late last night cybersecurity shop Carbon Black priced its IPO at $19 per share, the top end of its raised range.

This morning, shares in the company opened at $24.70 — up 30 percent — and are trading at the time of writing for $25.16 per share, or a gain of just over 32 percent.

The company, now flush with over $150 million in new capital, is having a good day. Indeed, the firm at its IPO price was worth around $1.25 billion (MarketWatch puts the figure at $1.27 billion, perhaps inclusive of greenshoe shares), a figure that is sharply higher than its $692 million valuation set in 2016.

And now up double-digits, it’s worth even more. But enough about the numbers, how does the company itself feel?

Notes From The Ground

Crunchbase News spoke with the CEO of Carbon Black, Patrick Morley (he’s not on Twitter, so that’s a link to a Carbon Black tweet mentioning him! Morley is on Twitter, here. Not sure how I couldn’t find him before, but here we are.) about the company’s performance during its opening hours as a public shop.

I was most curious about the sophistication of public market investors in regards to cybersecurity as a concept, and especially endpoint security itself (what Carbon Black focuses on). Per Morley, the investing public seems pretty well keyed-in on the topic. The CEO mentioned continued news coverage of security fails as one reason that investors get why it matters during our conversation, which seems super reasonable given, say, yesterday’s news.

Morely, who joined Carbon Black back in 2007, told Crunchbase News that the day felt a bit “surreal,” noting that he’d felt that Carbon Black was a winner for some time (his CEO tenure now reaching decade-length), making it fun to see other people figure that out as well. (Given today’s market reaction to the firm’s IPO, it’s fair to say that a goodly chunk of public investors shares his optimism.)

We also riffed on the size of Carbon Black’s market, with Morley saying that endpoint security itself has a total addressable market (TAM) of $6.5 billion. That should be plenty of space for Carbon Black to grow into, given that its current revenue is a few points off that figure.

We’ll have more from its first earnings report, but at least for now, the company is enjoying a strong debut during a day that initially saw stocks fall.