Box may have delayed its IPO but not all enterprise tech companies based around cloud business models are seeing rainy days. Arista Networks today made its debut on the NYSE, and its shares popped 28% at the opening as it raised $226 million in its IPO.
The company — a leader in cloud networking solutions for large data center and computer environments and products to run them such as Gigabit Ethernet switches — had priced its IPO at $43 per share. It opened trading this morning at $55.25, with that number continuing to rise and is now at nearly $59 per share.
The initial public offering price valued the company at $2.75 billion, and was higher than the company originally estimated it would raise when it first announced its intention to go public, last month.
Arista’s performance, along with that of another enterprise startup, Zendesk, is a sign of how the markets continue to be very interested in tech stocks, and enterprise-focused debuts in general, if the signs are pointing in the right direction.
For Arista, the company has has positive net income for the last three years, according to its S-1. And the signs are looking good for 2014. In 2013, the company had net income of $42.5 million in revenue of $361 million; and for Q1 2014 it reported revenue of $81 million and  net income of $12 million — both figures being nearly 100% increases on what Arista brought in for the same period a year ago.
Arista doesn’t seem to have disclosed how much it raised prior to going public but this Reuters report puts it at some $100 million in funding prior to going public. It looks like a large part (if not all of it) came from the founders themselves. The back story to that in itself is pretty interesting. Two of the co-founders of Arista are Andy Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton, who were the very earliest backers of Sergey Brin and Larry Page when they were starting Google. Bechtolsheim was also a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and he also co-founded, with Cheriton, Granite Systems, which was acquired by Cisco Systems.
 
