In a time where we have S-1 filings that sit for months, Hortonworks proves the exception. After filing its S-1 just last month, the company updated its S-1 today, setting its IPO price, filing a $78M IPO with 6M shares at a price range of $12-14 per share.
At the midpoint of the proposed range, Hortonworks would command a fully diluted market value of $659 million, Renaissance Capital reported.
It’s worth noting that the amount seems low when compared to the valuation reported just last March when the company raised $100M on $1B valuation led by BlackRock and Passport Capital,
As we wrote in November, “Hortonworks offers a big data processing platform that includes the ability to process various types of data including SQL and NoSQL sources then search across data, or use various analytics tools to visualize the data. Hortonworks has a reputation for being a pure Hadoop offering without any proprietary extensions. They released their most recent version of the Hortonworks Data Platform, HDP Version 2.2 in October, which included more 100 new features, according to reports.”
This is a big deal for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s the first Hadoop vendor to go public beating its competitors to market, particularly Cloudera, which has a much higher valuation at over $4B, and unlike some companies that are holding back on IPOs or dragging their feet on following through, Hortonworks appears to be moving the process right along.
The  company showed some impressive growth over the last year in its S-1 filing, which may explain why it’s ready to go public soon. The S-1 indicated it had revenue of $33.38 million, up 109.5 percent from its year-ago, 9 month tally of $15.93 million.
But on the other side, like many companies filing these days, the growth was off-set by some significant losses on the other side of the balance sheet. As we wrote at the time, “The company had a net loss of $86.73 million in the first 9 months of this year, up from, $48.40 million in the year-ago, 9 month period. That represents a 79.19 percent gain.”
The good news is that they are growing faster than they are losing, and they are ready to make a move. When companies announce this type of information, it typically (although not always) means they will be filing in the near future.
