New Relic And Hortonworks See Strong Public Debuts

In early trading, New Relic’s shares are up 31 percent in its first day as a public company. Another technology company, Hortonworks, will begin trading this morning as well.

Update: Hortonworks has opened to a massive gain of more than 40 percent as well. For tech IPOs, today is a huge day.

The two companies are trading on different exchanges, with New Relic selecting the NYSE, and Hortonworks the NASDAQ.

Hortonworks, which raised $100 million in its offering, priced at $16 per share. The company had initially hoped to go public for between $12 to $14 per share. New Relic raised a similar $115 million, pricing its shares at $23, up from its previously proposed $20 and $22 per share. That range itself was up from an initial estimate of $18 to $20 per share.

The company’s offerings come on the back of a quite successful Lending Club IPO that took place this Thursday. Lending Club spiked more than 50 percent in its first day of trading.

As TechCrunch noted at the time of the Lending Club offering, Hortonworks is a bellwether firm of sorts of the IPO market. The company has large losses, and implied long path to profits are a test — if the investing public is willing to finance its growth, short-term losses be damned, other, non-profitable technology firms may be willing and able to hit go on their own offerings.

Box infamously had to delay its offering earlier this year, returning to the private markets for additional capital, when negative reaction came stiff to its own financial performance. Box recently re-filed its documents to go public.

The re-pricing of the Hortonworks offering was a strong indicator for the firm, which had nine-month revenue this year of $33.38 million, up 109.5 from its first three quarters in the year-ago period. Its losses, however, totaled $86.73 million in that period.

TechCrunch is tracking all three recent IPOs, and will update this post at the end of trading with financial performance results.