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Summary
- Palantir Technologies and Asana Inc made their much-awaited Wall Street debut this week.
- At US$ 10 per share price, data mining firm Palantir’s market valuation stands at US$ 22 billion.
- Workplace app Asana debuted at a price of US$ 27 per share, up 28 per cent from its “reference price” of US$ 21.
Tech startups Palantir Technologies (NYSE: PLTR or PLTR: US) and Asana (NYSE: ASAN or ASAN:US) finally made their big Wall Street debut on the same day (September 30). The companies opted for direct listings on the New York Stock Exchange.
Palantir Technologies stocks started trading at US$ 10 apiece on Wednesday, up nearly 38 per cent from the “reference price” of US$ 7.25. During the day, the stock attained a high of US$ 11.42 and low of US$ 9.11. It closed the day at US$ 9.50, down five per cent from its debut price.
At US$ 10 per share price, Palantir Technologies’ market valuation stands at US$ 22 billion. The figure is that not far away from its private valuation of US$ 20 billion during a fund-raising round in 2015.
Workplace app Asana debuted at a price of US$ 27 per share, up 28 per cent from its NYSE-set “reference price” of US$ 21. The shares surged to US$ 29.96 during the day. It ultimately closed at US$ 28.80, giving it a valuation UD$ 4.86 billion.
What is Palantir Technologies?
After being shrouded in secrecy for 17 years, Palantir’s shares finally went live on the stock market. The company shot into prominence after with was accredited with locating 9/11 attack mastermind Osama bin Laden, a fact the company has never addressed in public.
Palantir is data mining firm, helping organizations derive meaningful analysis from it. Its platform integrates massive data with machine-assisted but human-driven analysis.
The company has three products: Palantir Gotham, Palantir Foundry and Palantir Apollo.
Gotham, structured data into meaningful units, which solves organizational problems and fuses it into a human-centric model. This SaaS (Software as a Service) platform was used by disaster response group Team Rubicon to find the communities in greatest need during Hurricane Florence in September 2018.
The Foundry, also a SaaS platform, breaks complex data into understandable and readable bits for the end user. It restructures complex data by removing the hurdles between back-end and front-end data and then integrate it with subject matter expertise and technical variables.
Apollo is the delivery software powering Foundry and Gotham.
In its 2019 financial statement, Palantir posted annual revenue of over US$ 742.5 million, up 25 per cent year-over-year. It secured US$ 481 million revenue in the first half of 2020, up 49 per cent from the same period last year.
What is Asana?
Asana is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform built to track productivity at workplace. It helps teams collaborate, assign work, map performance, and keep a tab on deadlines.
Founder Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein came up with this workplace app idea while working at Facebook. The company has many developed many team-specific and sector-specific solutions to track workflow and its outcomes. Asana has over 75,000 clients including Google, NASA, Spotify, Deloitte, Uber, Slack, Harvard University, Facebook, DoorDash, AT&T etc.
Asana reported US$ 52 million revenue in its second fiscal quarter 2021 report (ending July 31, 2020), and expects it touch between US$ 53.5 million to US$ 54.5 million in the next quarter.
Upcoming IPOs
The second half of 2020 is heating up for initial public offerings (IPOs).
A flurry of companies is fast-tracking their IPO debut in October, ahead of the US polls on November 3. These include AirBnB, the Ant Group, Robinhood, DoorDash, etc.
Jack Ma’s Ant Group is expected to raise US$ 35 billion in the most-expensive IPO to date.
