After a long dry spell, technology initial public offerings took a small step towards a comeback as Rackspace Hosting, a San Antonio, Texas-based company, announced its IPO. The company that will trade on the NYSE under the ticker RAX is selling about 15 million shares at $12.50 each, in the process raising about $187.5 million from the market. That would give the company a valuation of around $1.45 billion. Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and Merrill Lynch are joint bookrunners on this deal. The deal should come as a big win for local VC heavyweights Norwest Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital, too — they own 16.2 percent and 11.6 percent of RackSpace respectively.
The company had wanted to raise around $276 million (by selling up to 17 million shares at $16 a pop), but had to settle for a much lower valuation, one that is reflective of today’s tenuous economy. The fact that Rackspace has gotten out of the gate in the dog days of summer is a good sign for similar high-revenue, high-quality tech companies in the pipeline. In a previous article we noted that Rackspace was raising money to expand its hosting infrastructure, expand rapidly into the fast-growing cloud computing sector and to offer services for small- and medium-sized businesses.
Disclosure: Rackspace is an advertiser on the GigaOM Network.
Way to go.
I really wish we see more of these TECH IPO’s coming in and more money floating around tech.
Cheers, Nag
This is a utility IPO, not a tech IPO. Calling it tech is like saying PG&E is a tech company. True in some sense, but still misleading.
This is amazing. I worked on the failed IPO attempt for Rackspace in 2000. Glad to see they finally got it out.
@Greg Isaacs. Yet another proof point that it takes around 7 years to make it to the finish line “of sorts” for a company. Not easy.
Talk of rackspace got me thinging of media temple alternatives and I came across this ditty.. while playing poker I managed to skim through most of it.. http://www.truth-or-consequences.com/rackspace_sucks/rackspace_sucks_mirror2.html