LinkedIn's data streaming spinoff, Confluent, is floating above its range in an offering effectively doubling the valuation of its last funding round to over $9bn.
Confluent, a US-based data streaming software producer spun off by social network LinkedIn, will go public today in an $828m initial public offering on the Nasdaq Global Select Market.
The offering consists of 23 million class A shares priced at $36.00 each, above the IPO’s $28 to $33 range. The price valued the company a little over $9.1bn, twice the valuation at which it last raised venture funding, in April 2020.
Founded in 2014, Confluent has built a cloud software platform which facilitates the streaming of data across an organisation from a range of sources in real time. It made a $323m net loss in 2020 from $237m in revenue.
The company’s $250m series E round in April 2020 was led by investment management firm Coatue and also featured Altimeter Capital, Franklin Templeton and existing backers Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital, and the cash was raised at a $4.5bn valuation.
The only confirmed investment by LinkedIn was part of Confluent’s $6.9m series A round, which was led by Benchmark and backed by Data Collective, in 2014.
LinkedIn has not disclosed the size of the Confluent stake it currently holds. The company’s largest shareholders are Benchmark, with a 13.8% stake diluted from 15.3%, Index Capital (11.8% post-IPO), co-founder Jun Rao (9.6%) and Sequoia Capital (8.5%).
Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, BofA Securities and Citigroup are lead book-running managers for the offering.
Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank Securities, UBS Investment Bank and Wells Fargo Securities are additional book-running managers while Cowen, DA Davidson, JMP Securities, KeyBanc Capital Markets and Piper Sandler are co-managers for the IPO.