Forget all the talk about high-profile consumer initial public offerings like Robinhood. Most of the best-performing tech IPOs of this year are enterprise software firms, such as Monday.com, a project management software firm that has soared 160% since its June IPO, and Couchbase, a database provider whose stock has doubled since its July offering.
But not all enterprise software stocks have been hits on Wall Street. The best performing in the past 12 months have been stocks of fast-growing companies that sell software for storing and analyzing data, such as Snowflake and Couchbase, or for helping teams inside companies collaborate on projects, such as Monday.com and Asana. Slow-growing companies, including some that sell other types of business applications and software tools, have fared differently. Sprinklr, which sells software that companies use to manage sales and marketing campaigns on social media, have seen its shares drop slightly since its June IPO even though the IPO was priced below its expected range.
The diverging trajectories put the spotlight on enterprise firm Samsara, which last week announced it had filed paperwork confidentially with the SEC for an IPO. Samsara doesn’t fit neatly into any category: It sells software and hardware for tracking fleets of vehicles and other equipment, and it was valued at $5.4 billion in a private financing round last year.