A little more than two years ago, days before Qualtrics was set to go public, SAP swooped in with a deal to acquire the experience management technology company for $8 billion instead. This time around, Qualtrics actually made it to the stock market on its own, raising $1.55 billion in an initial public offering on the Nasdaq on Thursday morning.
The company priced its shares at $30, putting its valuation around $15 billion, up more than 87% from the amount SAP paid in the acquisition. Update: Shares of Qualtrics finished at $45.50/share, valuing the company at more than $27 billion.
Out of about 3,300 employees total, the company has about 800 people in Seattle, which it describes as its second headquarters alongside its longtime home in Provo, Utah. Seattle will “continue to be one of our greatest growth areas,” said Qualtrics CEO Zig Serafin, a former Microsoft executive, in an interview with GeekWire after ringing the Nasdaq opening bell virtually Thursday morning with Qualtrics founder Ryan Smith.
As employees begin to return to physical offices, Qualtrics will proceed with its delayed move into the new downtown Seattle tower at Second Avenue and University Street, Serafin said. The building was renamed Qualtrics Tower in 2019 when the company leased 275,000 square feet across 13 stories in the building. A date for moving in hasn’t been announced.
“It is a true dual-headquarters operation,” Serafin said. “Obviously, the world is a little different. I think people are realizing there’s different ways of working and coming together. But there’s nothing you can do to replace the quality of the human experience and what that does to drive creativity, connection and ideas.
This week, as Qualtrics prepared again to go public, SAP delivered a different surprise, as its CEO Christian Klein, a Qualtrics board member, made upbeat comments about the IPO on CNBC during the traditional SEC quiet period, which required Qualtrics to amend its IPO filing. Qualtrics said in the amended filing, “We do not believe that Mr. Klein’s interview, any of the statements he made or any of the media coverage related to the interview constitutes a violation of Section 5 of the Securities Act.”
In its pre-IPO filings, Qualtrics reported $550 million in revenue for the nine months ended in September (up from $418 million in the same period the prior year), and a net loss of $258 million (improving on its loss of $860 million in the same period the year before). Businesses use the company’s experience management platform to collect data on how customers, employees and others experience their products and services, taking action based on the results.
The company was able to reach “a much larger epicenter of customers” as part of SAP, Zerafin said. Its customer base rose from 9,000 companies to 13,000 companies in the time between its prior planned IPO and the public offering this week.
SAP America remains the majority owner of Qualtrics following the IPO. The company will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol XM.
Qualtrics made a series of executive hires in the build-up to the IPO, including the appointment of longtime Microsoft vice president Brad Anderson as president of products and services.
