By Inbal Orpaz,
Haaretz
Varonis Systems initial
public offering last week raised about $106 million, with an initial price per
share of $22, but on its first day of trading, on Friday, the share price
doubled, to $44.
Even the initial $22 share valuation was above the price range of
$19 to $21 that had been expected. As recently as February 18, the company
priced its IPO at $17 to $19 per share.
Friday’s Nasdaq close would give the company a value of $955.8
million, putting Varonis in the league of other high-tech firms with an Israeli
connection that have made the headlines in the past year with similar
valuations. They include Ra’anana-based Waze, the mobile navigation application
developer that was sold to Google last year for $1 billion and Viber, the
Cyprus-based, Israeli-run mobile communications app developer that was snapped
up by a Japanese high-tech giant last month for $900 million.
Founded in 2005, Varonis helps organizations manage and analyze
their unstructured data, such as documents, spreadsheets and media files. It was
founded by CEO Yakov Faitelson and Chief Technology Officer Ohad Korkus.
Headquartered in New York, it has offices in Herzliya. According to its
prospectus, 224 of the company’s 536 employees are in Israel. At the end of
2010, Varonis had fewer than 200 employees worldwide.
Before last week’s IPO, the company raised around $33 million from
investors that included Accel Partners, Evergreen Venture Partners, Pitango
Venture Capital and EMC Corp. Morgan Stanley and Barclays Capital were the lead
underwriters in the initial public stock offering.
The success of Varonis Systems on Wall Street has sparked optimism
that other Israeli high-tech IPOs offerings planned in the near future will
also fare well. Among them is Borderfree, an Israeli-U.S. firm that provides a
platform through which retailers, particularly in the United States, can offer
their wares to overseas customers in a more user-friendly format, including
pricing in foreign currencies and shipping to foreign American addresses.