Dynatrace, a cloud computing firm backed by Private Equity firm Thoma Bravo, launched a successful initial public offering (IPO) on August 1, 2019, raising roughly US$570 million.

The stock rose 49% in its market debut on the New York Stock Exchange, closing at US$23.85 on Thursday, August 1, from its offer price of US$16, giving the company a market value of US$6.71 billion.

Dynatrace sold 34 million shares. Owners of stocks uploaded another 1.6 million shares. According to IPO filings, private equity firm Thoma Bravo will remain Dynatrace’s controlling shareholder, owning 71% of the company’s stock, or 200 million shares.

The offering was led by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup, and Dynatrace plans to use the IPO proceeds for general corporate purposes as well as to pay down debt. On a net basis, the company has a little over US$500 million in debt, according to IPO filings.

Dynatrace, which is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, specializes in software-intelligence.

The company provides a monitoring platform that simplifies enterprise cloud complexity and accelerates digital transformation. The Dynatrace all-in-one platform aims to modernize and automate enterprise cloud operations, and help organizations release quality software faster and deliver improved digital experiences to their customers.

Dynatrace has three patented technologies:

• The OneAgent technology, which uses “a single agent to collect and unify all operational and business performance metrics for all types of entities within [an] application environment … across each layer of [the] technology stack”;
• The Smartscape visualization technology, which “maps everything running in [an] environment and detects all causal dependencies between websites, applications, services, processes, hosts, networks, and cloud infrastructure”; and
• The PurePath technology, which “captures timings and code level context for application transactions end to end, across all supported technologies, from cloud to mainframe.”

Dynatrace was founded in 2005 in Linz, Austria but later moved its headquarters to the US. The company was purchased in 2011 by Compuware for US$256 million.

Dynatrace separated from Compuware in December 2014 after being sold into private equity firm Thoma Bravo for US$2.4 billion. Thoma Bravo established Dynatrace as a standalone company and people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that the private equity firm had been considering an IPO or the sale of Dynatrace as early as May 2018.

Dynatrace Bought Swiss Regtech startup Qumram for 20.8 million USD

In November 2017, Dynatrace acquired Swiss regtech startup Qumram for an aggregate purchase price of US$20.8 million, according to IPO filings. Total cash consideration net of cash acquired was $11.3 million. Therefore it seems no Dynatrace equity was given to Qumram stockholders, in case we interpret this here right.

In the IPO filling Dynatrace says: “We may acquire other businesses, products or technologies in the future which could require significant management attention, disrupt our business, dilute shareholder value and adversely affect our results of operations.”

In fiscal year 2018/2019, Dynatrace had about 2,000 employees and US$431 million in sales. Dynatrace CEO John Van Siclen told Forbes that the company has about 2,400 customers, including more than 1,500 using its signature software intelligence platform.

Featured image by the New York Stock Exchange, @NYSE, via Twitter.