It was one year ago today that Zillow competed its initial public offering, a milestone that we noted in our story yesterday on the impressive rise of the online real estate company.
Now, two other tech companies are looking to follow in Zillow’s successful path, hoping July 20th marks some magical date. So far, it appears to be working.
Kayak, the online travel search company founded in 2004 by former executives of Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity, took off in trading today after raising $91 million in the public offering. The stock priced at $26 and is now up 27 percent, trading at just over $33 per share.
Meanwhile, Santa Clara, California-based Palo Alto Networks, a competitor to F5 Networks (which you may recall just hired F5’s Mark Anderson), priced its IPO at $42 as it raised $260 million. Shares of the maker of network security products are up more than 30 percent, trading above $55 per share.
There have now been four IPOs in two days, and Yahoo Finance debates whether the drought is over following the “Facebook frozen IPO market.”
“They’re wee little deals. Facebook raised $16 billion. At this time last year, $23.6 billion worth of deals were on the docket. It’s about half that now,” said Jeff Macke, co-host of Yahoo Finance’s The Breakout. He added that “the IPO market is not back, no matter what you read.”
Here’s more of the analysis from The Breakout.
