SurveyMonkey sets IPO range to $9 to $11/share, plans to raise $135M at the midpoint of the range and additional $40M via private placement at $1.3B valuation
SurveyMonkey, which operates a freemium online survey service, announced terms for its IPO on Thursday.
Context & Ripple Effects
SurveyMonkey's road to this filing started in January, when reports surfaced of accelerating talks with banks ahead of a planned listing, and firms like Square and MongoDB had already shown the template for venture-backed companies pricing public debuts below their last private marks. In August the company laid out its financials — $121.2M in first-half 2018 revenue against a $27.18M net loss — while seeking up to $100M.
The $9-$11 range now on the table implies a $1.3B valuation, a clear step down from the $2B private mark set in 2014, making SurveyMonkey the latest unicorn to accept a public discount rather than wait for its old number.
First-order effects
- Investors from the 2014 round are being marked down roughly a third from their entry valuation, while the company banks ~$135M at the midpoint plus a $40M private placement that locks in the lower price.
- The modest raise size — small relative to the freemium survey business's revenue base — signals management is optimizing for a clean listing rather than a maximum cash haul.
Second-order effects
- Pricing conservatively invites a demand spike: when trading began, shares opened at $18.75 versus the $12 final price after the deal was upsized from 13.5M to 15M shares, leaving roughly $6.75 per share on the table for selling holders.
- A first-day pop of that size pressures later issuers' bankers to price closer to true demand, since leaving that much upside unpriced becomes a talking point in every pitch book.
Third-order effects
- If the Square-MongoDB-SurveyMonkey sequence holds, late-stage private valuations function as ceilings rather than floors — resetting how growth-stage funds underwrite $2B-class rounds and pushing unicorns toward earlier, smaller public exits instead of waiting out a higher mark.
The trend: Venture-backed software companies are increasingly going public below their peak private valuations, with conservative IPO ranges followed by sharp first-day pops exposing the gap between banker pricing and market demand.