SVMK, the US-based owner of online customer research platform SurveyMonkey, floated yesterday in a $180m initial public offering that scored exits for internet technology group Alphabet and enterprise software provider Salesforce.
The company increased the number of shares in the offering from 13.5 million to 15 million and priced them at $12, above the $9 to $11 range it set for the offering earlier this month.
Salesforce agreed to buy another $40m of shares in SurveyMonkey through an adjacent private placement. The company’s shares finished almost 44% up, at $17.24, at the end of the first day of trading.
SurveyMonkey has built a cloud-based software platform with 16 million active users that helps clients design, create and distribute online surveys in order to conduct research and analyse the resulting data.
The company was originally founded in 1999 and purchased by private equity firm Spectrum Equity in 2009 before re-emerging as a private company in 2013 with $444m in equity funding that was raised at a $1.35bn valuation along with $350m in debt financing.
Hedge fund Tiger Global Management and SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg co-led the equity portion, which included internet technology provider Google, now part of the wider Alphabet company, as well as Iconiq Capital, Social Capital and Laurel Crown Partners.
JP Morgan, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and SunTrust Bank supplied the debt financing in the transaction, which was followed by a $250m round in 2014 that included CapitalG, the Alphabet subsidiary then known as Google Capital.
Tiger Global, Iconiq Capital, Social Capital, Laurel Crown, Dave Goldberg, Ryan and Chris Finley and institutional funds and accounts managed by T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley Investment Management and Baillie Gifford also backed the 2014 round.
Neither Google nor Salesforce, which lists SurveyMonkey as a portfolio company, own stakes worth 5% or more of the company, whose largest shareholder is Tiger Global, with a 29.3% stake that was cut to 24.9%.
Philanthropic organisation Sheryl K. Sandberg Revocable Trust owns 8.4% post-IPO and SM Profits and SM Investor, respective holding vehicles for SurveyMonkey founder Ryan Finley and Spectrum Equity managing director Benjamin Spero, hold 7.3% and 7.1%.
JP Morgan Securities, Allen & Company and BofA Merrill Lynch are lead book-running managers for the offering, which took place on the Nasdaq Global Select Market.
Credit Suisse Securities (USA), UBS Securities and Wells Fargo Securities are also book-running managers for the IPO while SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, Code Advisors, Foros, JMP Securities and LionTree Advisors are co-managers.
The underwriters have a 30-day option to buy an additional 2.25 million shares, which would increase the size of the offering to almost $214m.
