*By Carlo Versano*
Shares of SurveyMonkey's parent company SVMK ($SVMK) jumped more than 50 percent in their market debut Wednesday.
The stock opened at $18.75, well above the IPO price of $12, which was already higher than the target range.
It's just the latest sign of strong investor demand for new tech offerings ー SVMK also sold a greater-than-expected 15 million shares in the IPO.
The 20-year old online polling company, part of the original dot-com rush, hopes to ride the wave of strong tech IPOs from the likes of Eventbrite ($EB), Farfetch ($FTCH), and Sonos ($SONO).
"It seems like investors really can't get enough of these IPOs," said the Wall Street Journal's Maureen Farrell.
Farrell has been following the SurveyMonkey road show and told Cheddar Wednesday "there was a ton of excitement," highlighted by a $40 million capital raise from Salesforce Ventures, which also invested in Dropbox ($DBX) in that company's March IPO.
That was "another stamp of approval from the industry," Farrell said.
SurveyMonkey was a pioneer of the "Freemium" model. The company said it had 16 million active users as of June, with 600,000 paying for the premium service. The company is not yet profitable, though ー like with many new tech companies ー that fact has not slowed interest.
The company is also a natural acquisition target, according to Farrell. Cloud computing companies like Oracle ($ORCL) and Salesforce ($CRM) would be obvious suitors, with the latter already showing its interest.
Among SurveyMonkey's largest shareholders is Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who inherited a 10 percent stake when her husband, former SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg, passed away unexpectedly in 2015. Sandberg has said she will donate the entirety of her shares to The Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation.
Joe Zhao, Managing Partner at Millennia Capital, joined Cheddar to discuss the latest stock moves and how the market is being impacted by artificial intelligence.
Wall Street was quiet early following a lackluster session a day earlier as markets await U.S. inflation data and high-profile corporate earnings reports later in the week.
The World Economic Forum says false and misleading information supercharged with cutting-edge artificial intelligence is the top immediate risk to the global economy.
CES 2024 starts this week in Las Vegas. It's set to feature swaths of the latest advances and gadgets across personal tech, transportation, health care, sustainability and more. Here's a list of the coolest announcements so far.
Astronauts will have to wait until next year before flying to the moon and another few years before landing on it. NASA on Tuesday announced the latest round of delays in its Artemis moon-landing program.
The Biden administration has enacted a new labor rule that aims to prevent the misclassification of workers as independent contractors. The labor department rule going into effect Tuesday replaces a scrapped Trump-era standard that lowered the bar for classifying employees as contractors
The KC-46 was to be the ideal candidate for a fixed-price development program. Instead, it has cost Boeing billions, and made industry wary of such deals.
Dave Long, CEO and Co-Founder of Orangetheory Fitness joins Cheddar to chat trends in the industry for 2024. He updates us on the company's plans to expand and what the state of the economy has meant for business.
One of the world's largest renewable energy developers will be getting hundreds of wind turbines from General Electric spinoff GE Vernova as part of a record equipment order and long-term service deal.
