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ServiceTitan will begin trading on Nasdaq after IPO

ServiceTitan will begin trading on Nasdaq after IPO

Shares of ServiceTitan rose 42% in their Nasdaq debut Thursday after the provider of cloud software for contractors raised about $625 million in its initial public offering.

The company, which trades under the ticker symbol TTAN, sold shares at $71 apiece on Wednesday, above its expected range. The stock opened at $101. Based on the IPO price, the company’s market cap was approximately $6.3 billion.

ServiceTitan’s IPO is notable because few tech companies have taken the plunge into the public market since late 2021, when rising interest rates and rising inflation pushed investors out of risky assets. ServiceTitan has since become the first major venture capital-backed technology company to go public Rubric’s Debut in April. A month before, Reddit began trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Other companies have hinted that an IPO could happen soon. Chipmaker Cerebras filed to go public in September, but the process was slowed due to a review by the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Last month, online lender Klarna said it had confidentially filed IPO documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

While late-stage startups have been hesitant to take the plunge into the public market, investors are showing a growing interest in technology.

“The reception is great. The water feels wonderful,” said Vahe Kuzoyan, co-founder and president of ServiceTitan, in an interview with CNBC.

On Wednesday, the Nasdaq Composite Index closed above 20,000 for the first time. Tesla, alphabet, Amazon And Meta all closed at record levels, with Apple just shy of its all-time high.

ServiceTitan agreed to “ratcheting interest” in a 2022 funding round that valued the company at $7.6 billion, according to its prospectus. The decision “has placed a test on ServiceTitan to go public as quickly as possible to minimize the impact of dilution,” investors at venture capital firm Meritech Capital wrote in a blog post.

But Ara Mahdessian, co-founder and CEO of ServiceTitan, said Thursday that the conditions had no bearing on the decision to go public now.

“Anti-dilution terms are not uncommon in financings and I suspect if you just did the math yourself and compared it to our growth rate you would get a very different result,” he said.

Kuzoyan and Mahdessian founded ServiceTitan in 2007. Before the company was founded, Mahdessian said, his father was a jack-of-all-trades and Kuzoyan’s father ran a plumbing company. The founders’ parents opened the opening bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, Mahdessian said. Meanwhile, President-elect Donald Trump rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange.

Aimed at companies in plumbing, landscaping, electrical engineering, and other industries, ServiceTitan provides software for managing sales contacts, recording calls, creating quotes, and scheduling jobs. As of Jan. 31, the company had about 8,000 customers with annual billings of more than $10,000.

The company’s preliminary results for the October quarter showed a net loss of about $47 million on revenue of $198.5 million. That suggests revenue growth of about 24% year-over-year, the highest rate since mid-2023. But the company’s net loss widened from about $40 million in the October quarter last year.

“I think we certainly think that investors really value sustained growth,” Mahdessian said. “And of course I think they value positive cash flow, which fortunately we have already done in the last few quarters.”

Bessemer Venture Partners, TPG and Iconiq Growth are among the company’s major shareholders, along with Kuzoyan and Mahdessian.

At its IPO price, ServiceTitan was valued at just over nine times its trailing 12-month revenue. The WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund, a basket of more than 60 publicly traded cloud stocks, currently trades at about 6.4 times sales.

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