Anaplan, a provider of cloud-based business planning software, closes up 40%+ on its first day of trading after raising $263.5M in its IPO at a ~$2.1B valuation
The markets have been a hot mess this week, but that didn't stop Anaplan's IPO. Anaplan, a cloud company that helps other firms …
Context & Ripple Effects
Anaplan's debut caps a two-year arc the coverage has tracked closely: the company signaled its intent back in 2016 with a $90M raise at a $1.09B valuation led by Premji Invest, then filed for its IPO in September 2018 just one week after CFO Dave Morton arrived from a month-long stint at Tesla (the filing) — an unusually fast finance-team handoff to have in place before pricing.
The first-day pop also echoes a familiar template in this coverage: Apptio, another cloud management-software vendor, closed up 40%+ on its own 2016 debut. And with hindsight the corpus supplies, this listing proved to be the entry point of a longer ownership cycle rather than an endpoint — Thoma Bravo ultimately took Anaplan private in 2022 for $10.7B at $66/share, well above the $50.59 it closed at before the deal.
First-order effects
- Premji Invest's 2016 stake roughly doubles on paper in a day, as the valuation jumps from $1.09B private to a $2.1B-plus public market cap after the $263.5M raise.
- CFO Dave Morton gets immediate validation for leaving Tesla after one month — his first act, shepherding the IPO he was hired to run, lands with a 40%+ first-day close.
Second-order effects
- A 40%+ pop through a week of turbulent markets hands every late-stage enterprise SaaS company a fresh pricing benchmark, strengthening the case for peers like Intapp — which followed with its own Nasdaq IPO in 2021 — to test the window.
- Underwriters and bankers gain evidence that demand for cloud planning software tolerates macro volatility, likely pushing comparable vendors' IPO conversations from 'whether' to 'when.'
Third-order effects
- The full arc — venture-backed at $1.09B, public at $2.1B, taken private by Thoma Bravo at $10.7B — shows public markets systematically underpricing steady-growth SaaS relative to private equity buyers, making IPOs a waystation rather than a destination for enterprise software companies.
- If that pattern holds, expect more cloud-planning and operations-software firms to list for currency and credibility, then consolidate into PE-owned portfolios when their public multiples lag private-market valuations.
The trend: Enterprise SaaS is cycling through a repeatable ownership arc — VC-backed growth, a public listing that pops, then a private-equity take-private once public markets discount the subscription model — with Anaplan as a textbook data point.