Qualys pleases investors with $91 million IPO

After announcing its IPO in June, security firm Qualys will start trading its shares on NASDAQ on Friday for a price of $12 each, the company has confirmed.

In the middle of price expectations, the company raised $91 million (£56 million) after offering almost 7.6 million shares. This values the company at just over $400 million.

The IPO filing stated that the company’s prospectus, revenue rose from 65.4 million in 2010 to 76.2 million in 2011, with income at £2 million.  The QualysGuard Cloud Platform was used by more than 5,800 organisations in 100 countries, it said.

With Phillipe Courtot as CEO, the company employs 334 people, including CTO and regular security blogger, Wolfgang Kandek.

After getting a bad name a decade ago during the dot.com bubble, IPOs have steadily come back into fashion, offering small but rapidly-growing firms a way of jumping to another level.

Unless, it’s Facebook, in which case it’s a way of annoying the part of the investment community that thought the company hugely over-valued.

Generally speaking, security companies now go public at very reasonable prices, especially ones such as Qualys that have been around since the late 1990s and have some track record.

Another ‘big-little’ IPO that impressed was application firewall pioneer, Palo Alto Networks, which went public in the summer. Good times are back but perhaps on a smaller scale.