A little known cloud security company just raised $192 million in the first big tech IPO of 2018
- Zscaler, an enterprise cloud security company, took its shares public on Friday.
- The company set its share price at $16, and shares shot up 75% to around $28 on the first day of trading.
- Zscaler is the first of the many tech IPOs expected to come in 2018.
The first big tech IPO of the year is off to a good start.
Zscaler, a San Jose-based cloud security company, is up more than 75% Friday in its first hours as a publicly traded company.
The company, which is listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker "ZS", priced its shares at $16 in order to raise a total of $192.0 million in the public market. The stock was trading at $28 in midday trading on Friday.
The lively reception on Wall Street is a good sign for the tech market, which has several high-profile public offerings coming in the next few weeks. Dropbox said it will set a price on March 22, and Spotify will list its shares on April 3.
Founded by a tech industry veteran
Zscaler was cofounded in 2008 by Jay Chaudhry, a seasoned executive who built and sold four different companies before launching Zscaler.
Chaudhry celebrated the public offering in a blog post Friday where he highlighted how much the enterprise security space has changed since he started his career.
"For decades, enterprises had been building corporate networks to connect users to applications in the data center, and these networks were secured with a multitude of security appliances. The world has changed and network security is becoming irrelevant," Chaudhry wrote.
"We knew that retrofitted security technologies wouldn't work in this new world, so we set out to redefine security. We started with a clean slate-security born in the cloud for the cloud, deep and wide in functionality," he said.
The Zscaler IPO was managed by Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.