He said the fresh capital will help the company expand its sales team as it faces off against industry heavyweights. Backblaze currently stores two exabytes of data - that's 2 million terabytes - and has a half-million paying customers.īudman said the IPO presented a clear opportunity to open Backblaze's books to customers and prove that it's mature enough to be a long-term technology provider. Until about a decade ago, when the private markets started to balloon with new entrants, it was still common for tech companies to go public with valuations below $1 billion.īackblaze executives had other reasons to go public in a highly-competitive market that features the biggest cloud services in the world from Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Backblaze, by contrast, had raised less than $3 million from outside investors between its formation in 2007 and earlier this year, when it issued $10 million in convertible notes.īut when Amazon went public in 1997, the company was generating $16 million in quarterly revenue. Rivian raised $2.5 billion in a pre-IPO round in July. Those companies all routinely tapped venture investors for hefty amounts of capital on their way to the public exchanges. Coinbase is valued above $70 billion, Roblox is over $50 billion and Affirm topped $40 billion. At least 21 tech companies to debut in 2021 are worth over $10 billion. exchanges this year and, by the standards of its peers, Backblaze is a micro-cap. Over 100 technology companies have listed on U.S. Backblaze shares climbed 24% in their debut on Thursday and another 12% on Friday, lifting the price to $22.31 and giving the company a market cap of around $650 million. In the year that ended June 30, Backblaze's revenue totaled $59.9 million, with second quarter sales up about 17% to $16.2 million, according to the company's prospectus.īackblaze raised just $100 million in its offering, less than one-twentieth the amount raised this year by companies including GlobalFoundries, Robinhood and Bumble. In an era of blockbuster market debuts preceded by astronomical private financing rounds, Backblaze is a throwback to a time when sub-billion-dollar companies routinely went public to raise capital and build their profile in an effort to win the trust of customers.
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