Morning Report: Market Welcomes Newly-Public Cloudera With 26% IPO Pop

Morning Report: The repricing of Cloudera is complete. The company’s new valuation isn’t as large a disappointment as it could have been. It’s also true that the company’s new valuation is still a disappointment.

Cloudera, a Hadoop-focused enterprise-facing software company, started trading this morning under the ticker symbol “CLDR.” Currently, Cloudera is worth $18.91 per share, a 26.1 percent gain.

The former-startup sold equity in its IPO at $15 per share, above its proposed $12 to $14 range. Its final valuation was around $2 billion at its IPO price, a number it is now comfortably above.

As you have read by now, the firm was valued at over $4 billion several years ago when Intel made a large investment in the business. When Cloudera filed to go public, it was obvious that it would not be able to defend its prior valuation. Using market comps as a measuring stick, Cloudera was worth far less than its valuation. And, after some rumors about attempts at a flat-price valuation IPO, things shook where they are today.

As these pages have been critical concerning Cloudera over the past few weeks (from a valuation perspective), let’s give the company a moment of peace. Here’s TechCrunch from about 10 hours ago:

Since Cloudera is also offering 15,000,000 shares with an optional 2,250,000 for underwriters, they will follow in Carvana’s footsteps and raise a little over $250 million assuming all shares are purchased.

Cloudera did the smart thing and went public when the market was willing to accept it—pricing above range, raising a bundle of new capital for its business, and delivering a strong first-day result. No, it’s not perfect. But imagine how this would have gone if the Nasdaq was 1,000 points lower.

From the Crunchbase Daily:

Cloudera, Carvana launch IPOs

• Two venture-backed companies – Cloudera and Carvana – launched their IPOs today. Shares of Silicon Valley-based Cloudera, which provides enterprise data services, priced at $15 Thursday night and were up about 20 percent in early trading. Phoenix-based Carvana, which offers an online platform and network of “vending machines” for buying used cars, also priced shares at $15, but the stock fell about 13 percent in initial trading.

Didi confirms $5.5B fundraise

• Didi Chuxing, also known as the Uber of China, confirmed that it raised $5.5 billion in fresh funding to fuel its global expansion and invest in emerging areas like artificial intelligence. Investors reportedly include Softbank Group, Silver Lake, China Merchants Bank and Bank of Communications. The deal is said to value Didi at more than $50 billion.

Many tech giants don’t buy startups

• Large cap technology companies have a reputation as the go-to buyers for startups. But many tech giants actually do little or no acquiring. Crunchbase News looked at M&A data spanning over a decade to come up with a list of big companies least likely to buy your startup.