Informatica Raises $840 Million in NYSE IPO

Informatica, a longtime leader in enterprise data management, became a public company once again this week when it executed an initial public offering (IPO) of stock on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company, which now trades under the ticker symbol INFA, announced on Tuesday that it would sell up to 29 million shares on the NYSE, at a price of $29 per share. The company went public on Wednesday, raising more than $840 million. Amit Walia, the company’s CEO, was allowed to ring the opening bell.

After two days of trading, the company’s stock is still hovering around $29 per share, giving the Redwood City, California company a market cap in the neighborhood of $8 billion.

Informatica has had its ups and downs. The company, which was founded in 1993 by Gaurav Dhillon and Diaz Nesamoney, was an early leader in data management, providing many of the tools that some of the biggest enterprises in the world relied upon for data tasks like integration, ETL, quality, virtualization, master data management, and governance.

However, as data became more critical for enterprise’s operations, Informatica found itself competing with an array of startups, who typically focused on a small subset of the data challenge. While Informatica’s tools were still highly regarded, many eschewed them in favor of less expensive point solutions, and even open source alternatives.

The rise of the cloud over the past decade has also shook up the data management market in ways that perhaps Informatica didn’t anticipate. Since 2015, the company has invested more than $1 billion in research and development to move its products to the cloud and to shift its business from a license-based to a subscription-based model.

Informatica originally went public in 1999 on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol INFA. In 2015, the company agreed to go private after a group led by Permira and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board in a deal valued at $5.3 billion. With the proceeds of the IPO, the company is expected to pay down nearly $2.8 billion in debt that’s on its books.

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