With the ring of a bell, Petaluma networking equipment maker Cyan completed its journey to Wall Street on Thursday, selling $88 million in stock in its initial public offering.
"It's a big day for the whole company, it really is," said CEO Mark Floyd, who rang the opening bell Thursday at the New York Stock Exchange with Cyan President Mike Hatfield and other executives from the 7-year-old Petaluma company.
"We're extremely positive. The idea of how Cyan has morphed - being in Petaluma, becoming a global networking company out of Petaluma, and really driving the global market changes - it's pretty cool to have your local company do well," Floyd said.
The company sold 8 million shares of stock priced at $11 a share. Its stock opened at $10.05 a share Thursday but bounced back to $11 within the first hour of trading and closed at $11.14. Its shares trade under the symbol CYNI.
The company, which has 44.5 million shares outstanding, was valued at $496 million at the end of the day.
About 150 employees in Petaluma gathered at 6 a.m. Thursday to share breakfast and an "orange juice toast" while watching a webcast of the proceedings at the New York Stock Exchange, said Joe Cumello, chief marketing officer for Cyan. Then the executives in New York used the office robot to chat with employees in Petaluma, answer questions and share their pride in reaching this milestone.
"We honestly thanked them for their hard work," Floyd said. "It really is the work of all the people doing the heavy lifting."
The fast-growing company, which hired 40 people in the first three months of the year, has nearly doubled its sales over the past two years, from $23.5 million in 2010 to $40.4 million last year, according to a registration statement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. But the company has lost nearly $49 million over the past three years, according to the SEC filing.
Executive officers and directors of the company hold about 44 percent of the shares, according to the SEC filing. At the time of the filing, Hatfield owned 2 million shares, or 4.6 percent of the company, a stake valued at $22.7 million on Thursday. Floyd owned 568,153 shares, worth about $6.3 million. The largest shareholder was Palo Alto-based Norwest Venture Partners, which owned about 11 million shares, or 25 percent of the company. San Francisco-based Azure Capital followed with 14 percent of the company.
The additional capital will enable Cyan to expand its global strategy to bring its products to market, and to continue its growth, Floyd said.
"We continue to expand," Floyd said. "We continue to hire people. At the end of the first quarter, we had 259 employees, and the bulk of those are in the (Petaluma) area, and we continue to grow that."
Founded in 2006, the company sells software and optical transport equipment that help telephone companies, data centers and private network operators reduce the cost of moving data quickly across their networks.
Cyan's underwriters were granted a 30-day option to purchase up to 1.2 million additional shares of common stock from Cyan at the IPO price.
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: