The New York Stock Exchange welcomes executives and guests of Klaviyo, Inc. (NYSE: KVYO), on Weds, September 20, 2023, to celebrate its initial public offering. To honor the occasion, Andrew Bialecki, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, and Ed Hallen, C
Klaviyo shares jumped 23% to $36.75 in their New York Stock Exchange debut Wednesday after the marketing automation company held the first notable IPO for a U.S. venture-backed software company since late 2021.
Klaviyo priced 19.2 million shares late Tuesday at $30 a piece, valuing the company at just over $9 billion on a fully diluted basis. Of those shares, 11.5 million were sold by the company, resulting in $345 million in cash added to the balance sheet. Klaviyo was valued at $9.5 billion in a private financing round in 2021.
The listing, under the ticker symbol “KVYO,” comes a day after grocery delivery company Instacart hit the Nasdaq and saw its stock close up 12% following an initial 40% pop. Instacart and Klaviyo are trying to crack open a tech IPO market that’s been virtually shuttered for 21 months. Chip designer Arm went public last week, but that company is based in the U.K. and controlled by Japan’s SoftBank.
The last venture-backed software companies to hold initial public offerings in the U.S. were HashiCorp and Samsara, which both debuted in December 2021, when the Nasdaq was near its peak and investors were paying a premium for growth stocks. Inflation spiked and interest rates rose in 2022, leading to a turn away from risk and the worst year for tech stocks since the 2008 financial crisis.
The Nasdaq has rebounded this year, but less mature and unprofitable businesses are still valued well below their levels from two years ago. Instacart closed Tuesday with a valuation of just over $11 billion, down from $39 billion at its height, and the stock fell 5% on its second day of trading.
Founded in 2012, Klaviyo helps companies store user data and build profiles to target them with marketing via email, text messages and other channels. It got its start in the e-commerce industry by primarily serving online businesses, though Klaviyo said it’s seeing growing demand from companies in other verticals like restaurants, travel, and events and entertainment.
In its prospectus, Klaviyo reported revenue growth of 51% in the latest quarter to $164.6 million. The company has swung to profitability, reporting net income of $10.9 million after losing $11.7 million a year earlier.
One of Klaviyo’s biggest backers and sources of business is Shopify. The e-commerce software vendor owns roughly 11% of Klaviyo’s shares, and invested $100 million in the company last year. As of the end of 2022, about 78% of Klaviyo’s annualized recurring revenue, or value of its existing paid subscriptions, was derived from customers who also use Shopify, the company said.
“We love working with the market-leading platforms,” said Klaviyo CEO Andrew Bialecki, in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday. “When we decided in the early days we were going to focus on retail businesses, consumer businesses first, we said who are the best platforms out there, the most innovative. Obviously Shopify was at the top of that list.”
Bialecki said Klaviyo lets those platforms deal with payment and back-office functions, and “we try to help with the customer experience on the front end.”
Klaviyo said it had more than 130,000 customers as of June 30, up from 105,000 customers a year ago.
Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, speaks during The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, California, on Oct. 21, 2024.
Frederic J. Brown | AFP | Getty Images
Amazon said revenue in its cloud unit increased 19% in the third quarter, just missing analyst estimates.
Revenue at Amazon Web Services totaled $27.45 billion, according to a statement Thursday, while Wall Street was expecting $27.52 billion, based on StreetAccount estimates. Year-over-year growth has accelerated for five consecutive quarters.
The artificial intelligence portion of AWS is in the billions of dollars in annualized revenue, more than doubling year over year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who previously led AWS, said on a call with analysts.
“I believe we have more demand than we could fulfill if we had even more capacity today,” Jassy said. “I think pretty much everyone today has less capacity than they have demand for, and it’s really primarily chips that are the area where companies could use more supply.”
AWS leads the cloud infrastructure market over Google and Microsoft and is an important source of profit for Amazon.
On Tuesday, Google parent Alphabet said revenue from Google Cloud, which includes cloud applications as well as infrastructure, totaled $11.35 billion, up 35%. Microsoft said Wednesday that revenue from Azure and other cloud services grew 33%.
AWS recorded $10.45 billion in operating income, representing 60% of its parent’s profit. Analysts expected $9.15 billion.
The unit’s operating margin came in at 38%, the widest for AWS since at least 2014. Google Cloud reported an operating margin of 17%.
“We’re being very measured in our hiring,” Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s finance chief, said on the call.
“If this is successful, we would love to find more pieces of their application stack that could run well in AWS and help customers do that,” AWS CEO Matt Garman told CNBC in a September interview.
Also in the quarter, AWS announced plans to discontinue some services, including code-repository tool CodeCommit. Garman told TechCrunch that AWS “can’t invest in everything.”
Amazon’s online advertising business brought in $14.3 billion in the third quarter, up 19% year over year, in line with analysts’ estimates of $14.3 billion.
The Seattle tech giant revealed the financial results of its growing advertising unit as part of its latest earnings report Thursday. Amazon’s overall third-quarter sales were $158.9 billion, ahead of analysts’ estimates of $157.2 billion.
Amazon’s online advertising business is still a fraction of the company’s overall business, but its growth over the years has made it a major competitor to Alphabet and Meta, which lead the digital advertising market. Alphabet’s Google currently represents 27.7% of the worldwide digital advertising market, followed by Meta at 22.8% and Amazon with 8.8%, according to data provided to CNBC by Emarketer.
Meta’s third-quarter advertising revenue came in at $39.9 billion, which was up 19% compared with the year prior. That was slightly ahead of analysts’ expectations of $39.49 billion, according to StreetAccount. Ads accounted for 98.3% of Meta’s overall third-quarter revenue.
Alphabet generated $65.85 billion in third-quarter ad revenue, the company reported Tuesday. That was up 10% from $59.65 billion the year prior. Additionally, advertising sales for the company’s YouTube unit rose 12% year over year to $8.92 billion.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger holds an artificial intelligence processor as he speaks during the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan, on June 4, 2024.
Annabelle Chih | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Intel shares rose 9% in extended trading on Thursday after the chipmaker reported better-than-expected revenue and issued quarterly guidance that topped estimates.
Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: Loss of 46 cents adjusted
Revenue: $13.28 billion vs. $13.02 billion expected
Intel’s revenue declined 6% year over year in the quarter, which ended on Sept. 28, according to a statement. The company registered a net loss of $16.99 billion, or $3.88 per share, compared with net earnings of $310 million, or 7 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago.
As part of its cost reduction plan, Intel recognized $2.8 billion in restructuring charges during the quarter. There were also $15.9 billion in impairment charges.
Intel has been mired in an extended slump due to market share losses in its core businesses and an inability to crack artificial intelligence. CEO Pat Gelsinger revealed plans during the quarter to turn the company’s foundry business into an independent subsidiary, a move that would enable outside funding options.
CNBC reported that Intel had engaged advisors to defend itself against activist investors. In late September, news surfaced that Qualcomm reached out to Intel about a possible takeover.
The Client Computing Group that sells PC chips recorded $7.33 billion in revenue, down about 7% from a year earlier and below the $7.39 billion consensus among analysts surveyed by StreetAccount.
Revenue from the Data Center and AI segment came to $3.35 billion, which was up about 9% and more than the $3.17 billion consensus from StreetAccount.
Intel called for fiscal third-quarter adjusted earnings of 12 cents per share and revenue between $13.3 billion and $14.3 billion. Analysts had expected 8 cents in adjusted earnings per share and $13.66 billion in revenue.
During the quarter, Intel announced the launch of Xeon 6 server processors and Gaudi artificial intelligence accelerators.
As of Thursday’s close, Intel shares were down about 57% in 2024, while the S&P 500 index had gained 20%.
Executives will discuss the results with analysts on a conference call starting at 5 p.m. ET.
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