Summary
Anaplan staged a successful IPO, pricing at $17, the top end of an upwardly revised range of $15-$17.
Shares have since rocketed up above $24, marking a ~43% gain since the IPO.
Anaplan is now trading at roughly 10.0x forward revenues, which puts it roughly in line with the valuation at which competitor Adaptive Insights was scooped up by Workday.
With continued pressure on technology stocks, a double-digit revenue multiple seems fair for a company growing at ~40% y/y.
In spite of the harrowing correction in technology stocks (the NASDAQ is only a couple points away from being 10% down from August highs, which would mark a bona fide technical "correction"), enterprise software company Anaplan (PLAN) executed an immensely successful IPO, with its ~40% Day 1 "pop" roughly in line with the performance seen in other SaaS IPOs this year. The success of this IPO speaks volumes about Anaplan's appeal to investors. For the past several weeks, technology IPOs, especially those that recently went public in 2018, have slid an egregious amount. Even the year's stalwarts, like DocuSign (DOCU) and Dropbox (DBX), remain more than 20% off recent highs.
Anaplan, however, barreled ahead despite market turmoil. Recall that the company's original pricing range target for the IPO was $13-$15. Shortly before the IPO, Anaplan upped that range of $15-$17 and, ultimately, priced at the very top end of that range. The stock rose even further on its first day of trading in the ~$24 range, where the stock is still trading now:
