Coupa was off to the races when it went public on Thursday. The “spend management” software company priced its IPO at $18 and saw its shares almost double during its first day of trading.
With clients like Nike and Toyota, Coupa helps companies keep tabs on everyday expenditures and competes with divisions of Oracle and SAP. Founded a decade ago, they claim they’ve saved their customers $8 billion to date.
But they’re still not profitable. For the six months ending in July, Coupa lost $24.3 million, which compares to a loss of $25.1 million in the same period last year. Yet revenue is growing, up to $53.2 million from $31.6 million in the same time frames.
CEO Rob Bernshteyn tells us they are more focused on their margins than profitability right now. “For every dollar we burned, we created well over a dollar in recurring revenue,” he told TechCrunch. He says he’s looking to “build this business for the long-term.”
Brian O’Malley at Accel Partners, who invested in Coupa while he was at Battery Ventures, talked about how the company became an early leader in its space. “Spend management had been a core part of enterprise software on premise, so it made sense that someone would take it to the cloud.”
Coupa’s largest shareholders include Battery Ventures and BlueRun Ventures. It listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker “COUP.”
Other tech IPOs have also seen significant gains in recent months. Nutanix, Twilio and Apptio all performed quite well.
