Online-polling company SurveyMonkey raised $180 million in an upsized initial public offering, selling the shares above the marketed price range.
SurveyMonkey, the operating name of Svmk Inc., sold 15 million shares for $12 apiece after earlier offering 13.5 million of them for $9 to $11, according to a statement Tuesday. Concurrent with the offering, the company also sold $40 million in stock to Salesforce.com Inc.’s venture capital arm. Based on the IPO price the company will have a market valuation of $1.46 billion.
SurveyMonkey is older than many of its newly public peers, having been founded almost two decades ago. While the company had more than 16 million active users in the past year, according to its IPO filing, only 3.8 percent of those were paying users.
SurveyMonkey has relied on paying users finding the tools through the company’s website or online searches, it said in its filing. It said it expects growth to continue through word-of-mouth from existing customers, and by up-selling existing users.
In the past three years, the company has begun partnering with companies such as Salesforce, Microsoft Corp. and Google, according to the filing.
For the first six months of 2018, SurveyMonkey’s net loss increased to $27.2 million from $19.1 million for the same period last year. In 2017 it had a net loss of $24 million on revenue of $218.8 million. That compared with a net loss of $76.4 million on $207.3 million in revenue in 2016.
SurveyMonkey plans on using the proceeds to pay down debt and meet income tax obligations related to a restricted stock unit settlement, as well as for working capital and general purposes including acquisitions and investing in technology.
Tiger Global Management LLC holds the largest stake in the company with 29 percent of the stock before the IPO. The Sheryl K. Sandberg Revocable Trust holds a 10 percent stake and Facebook Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is on the board. Her late husband, David Goldberg, was chief executive officer of the company.
JPMorgan Chase & Co., Allen & Co. and Bank of America Corp. are leading the offering. The company is expected to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol SVMK.
