CloudFlare Enters the Market With a Bang

CloudFlare Inc. (NYSE: NET) entered the market with a bang on Friday. Shares went out at $19.53, well above the announced $15 per share. This ultimately was above where the company originally expected to price its 35.0 million shares, in the range of $10 to $12, with an overallotment option for an additional 5.25 million shares. At the $15 price, the entire offering was valued up to $603.75 million.

The underwriters for the offering are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Jefferies, Wells Fargo, RBC Capital Markets, JMP Securities, Evercore ISI, Needham, Oppenheimer, BTIG and SunTrust Robinson Humphrey.

Cloudflare has built a global cloud platform that delivers a broad range of network services to businesses of all sizes around the world, making them more secure, enhancing the performance of their business-critical applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of managing and integrating individual network hardware. The company provides businesses a scalable, easy-to-use, unified control plane to deliver security, performance and reliability across their on-premise, hybrid, cloud and software as a service (SaaS) applications.

Management believes that its platform disrupts several large and well-established IT markets. The key markets that are addressed by this platform include VPN, internal and external firewalls, web security (including web application firewalls and content filtering), distributed denial of service prevention, intrusion detection and prevention, application delivery controls, content delivery networks, domain name systems, advanced threat prevention and wide area network technology.

In the SEC filing, the firm described its finances as follows:

We have experienced significant growth, with our revenue increasing from $84.8 million in 2016 to $134.9 million in 2017 and to $192.7 million in 2018, increases of 59% and 43%, respectively. As we continue to invest in our business, we have incurred net losses of $17.3 million, $10.7 million, and $87.2 million for 2016, 2017, and 2018, respectively. For the six months ended June 30, 2018 and 2019, our revenue increased from $87.1 million to $129.2 million, an increase of 48%, and we incurred net losses of $32.5 million and $36.8 million, respectively.

The company intends to use the net proceeds from the offering for general corporate purposes, including working capital, operating expenses and capital expenditures.

Shares of Cloudflare traded up 25% on Friday, at $18.79 in a range of $17.50 to $19.53 on the day thus far. About 16 million shares have moved as of noon Eastern.

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