Pricing values company at $9.1 billion
Confluent Inc. priced its initial public offering late Wednesday well above its forecast range as it seeks to expand its footprint in the data-management sector.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based “data-in-motion” platform priced its shares at $36 apiece. Last week, Confluent CFLT had estimated shares to be priced between $29 and $33 apiece. With 23 million shares being offered, the company stands to raise about $828 million, and with about 252.4 million shares outstanding after the offering, that would value the company at $9.1 billion.
Confluent shares are scheduled to begin trading Thursday on the Nasdaq under the ticker “CFLT.”
Confluent said it’s gunning for an estimated $50 billion market opportunity within the application infrastructure and middleware, database management systems, data integration tools, and analytics and business intelligence markets.
The company’s platform operates on the principle that data is no longer a commodity that can be stored in traditional databases because it is constantly changing as interactions between businesses and their customers happen on a real-time basis. Rather than being a way of linking containers of data together, Confluent said it sees itself as a central nervous system for a given customer’s ever-changing data flow.
The almost-7-year-old company’s IPO comes as the stocks of recently public companies are struggling. Year to date, the Renaissance IPO ETF IPO, +1.11% has ticked up nearly 2%, while the S&P 500 index SPX, -0.11% has gained 13% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +0.13% has advanced nearly 11%.