San Francisco’s Plumtree Software
, a fixture on the corporate portal
applications scene, went public Tuesday, raising $42.5 million on 5 million
shares priced at $8.50 each.
Plumtree’s software bundles applications and online services into a
corporate portal, giving Web users a central source for
information. Goldman, Sachs & Co., JPMorgan and RBC Dain Rauscher Inc., a
member of RBC Capital Markets, are Plumtree’s
underwriters. Plumtree has granted the underwriters an option to purchase up
to 750,000 additional shares of stock to cover
over-allotments.
With the news, Plumtree became the third tech concern to file an IPO in
three weeks after just one (Loudcloud ) was filed in the bear-market year
of 2001. Plumtree may be a bit of an aberration because it is enterprise-
and software-geared, while the others provide products
and/or services to consumers.
Netflix , which rents DVDs to consumers over the
Internet, went public May
23, offering 5.5 million shares at $15 each to raise
$83 million. Online liquidator Overstock.com filed May
30, raising $39 million at $13 per share for $3 million
shares.
Those firms join the popular PayPal
online payment service as firms to file in 2002, pegged
by many market analysts as a recovery year on the tech
arena.
PayPal has been the real success story thus far: it went public at $13 per
share and is trading at $26.95 as of this writing. Online
travel specialist Orbitz is expected
to go public as well
this year.
Plumtree was trading at $8.55 by mid-afternoon.