TubeMogul stock soared in its market debut on Friday, with shares of the video-advertising company opening at $8.76, well above the $7 IPO price.
Shares popped more than 25 percent within the first half-hour of trading, and by late-morning trading had jumped more than 45 percent to $10.19.
TubeMogul s opening-day surge was a welcome turn-around from the rough tech market on Thursday, when several companies on their first day of trading saw share prices remain stagnant or even plummet, such as Brisbane biotech company CareDX, which priced its debut batch far less than the suggested price range of $15-$17 and then struggled to command more than $9 per share in trading. Seeing the market gyrations, Emeryville-based TubeMogul on Thursday slashed its IPO range from $11 to $13 to $7 to $8 in SEC documents updated Thursday. The company seemed to be struggling to find a sweet spot on Wall Street, just like rival YuMe, a Redwood City company that priced its shares at $9 last year after stating a range of $12-to-$14 and opened Friday at less than $6.
TubeMogul s IPO raised $43.75 million, a strong debut but far below the $81 million or so the East Bay company had hoped to raise. TubeMogul launched in 2006, after its founders met at the UC Berkeley Haas Business School, and sells a video advertising platform and digital branding services. Its revenue grew 256 percent from 2012 to 2013, and for the first quarter of this year revenue grew four times from the same quarter a year ago. Its losses in 2013 topped $7.4 million — more than double its losses in 2012 — but for the first three months of this year losses had slowed by 60 percent.
TubeMogul is trading on the Nasdaq exchange under the symbol TUBE. It made 6.3 million shares available for trading, and has a market cap of about $287 million.
Image courtesy TubeMogul
