Silver Spring Networks on Thursday became the latest Silicon Valley startup to head for Wall Street.
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Redwood City maker of “smart grid” hardware and software said it plans to sell $150 million worth of its shares in an initial public offering.
Silver Spring — which has raised some $275 million in venture capital from such firms as Foundation Capital and Kleiner Perkins — had been widely expected to IPO last year at a rumored valuation of up to $3 billion. But that never materialized amid a soft stock market.
The recent debuts of local startups, including LinkedIn, Pandora and Solazyme, have given a range of tech companies confidence to press ahead.
Ron Pernick of Clean Edge, a Portland research firm devoted to the cleantech sector, said his index of three dozen public “smart grid” companies is up more than 14 percent in the past year, outperforming the S&P 500.
“If you look at the utility grid, it’s 100 years old,” he said. “It’s reliable, but it hasn’t innovated a lot.”
That said, Pernick cautioned that the industry moves slowly, in part because it’s heavily regulated. Both Google (GOOG) and Microsoft in the past two weeks have dropped their smart grid efforts, he added.
Jim Fulton, co-chairman of the clean energy practice at Palo Alto law firm Cooley Godward, also pointed out that while Silver Spring’s revenues have grown twentyfold in the past year, according to the SEC filings, it isn’t profitable.
“A company like Silver Spring isn’t likely to generate the same valuations as a Zynga,” Fulton said, referring to the online gaming giant that recently announced plans to go public. “But this filing is a positive for companies that are burning money, in that banks believe the IPO markets are receptive.”
That’s important, he said, because green-tech companies require huge amounts of cash to scale up for widespread rollout.
Contact Peter Delevett at 408-271-3638. Follow him at Twitter.com/mercwiretap.
