Atlassian soars in IPO debut
Australian enterprise software maker Atlassian shares soared 32 percent during its market debut on the NASDAQ on Thursday.
The company whose shares were priced at $21, closed at $27.78, giving it a market capitalization of almost $5.8 billion.
The maker of workplace collaboration software products like JIRA, Confluence and Hipchat, has more than 50,000 customers including Audi, Dow Jones, NASA, Tesla and Twitter.
“Exciting day for Atlassian, exciting for our employees and our customers. I guess the excitement in the public markets is a reflection of the business that we have worked really hard to build over 13 years. I think it’s a pretty unique and special business and so feel pretty good,” said Jay Simons, president of Atlassian.
Atlassian bucked the downward trend of many tech IPOs this year. One reason investors are attracted to the company is because it has been profitable for the last ten years, which is rare for many tech businesses who tend to see red on their balance sheets for years.
Simons said the company was started in 2002 at a time when there was sort of a “nuclear winter” for tech and as a result the company had to think differently on how to reach customers.
“We pioneered a new way of selling software to businesses online rather than the traditional model with sales people,” he said.
“There’s more than 800 million knowledge workers in the world,” Simons said. “We are just in the early innings on what we hope to accomplish.”
Additional production by Praveen Sathianathan.
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