Tintri CTO and co-founder Kieran Harty
In what doesn't look like a promising sign for its debut on the public markets, storage startup Tintri has lowered its opening price targets and reduced the number of shares it hopes to sell in its IPO.It now plans to sell 8.5 million shares at a price range between $7 and $8 per share, according to updated forms filed with the SEC. That would raise about $64 million for the company at the mid-range price.
Tintri was widely expected to IPO on Thursday, and planned to sell 8.7 million shares at a price range between $10.50 and $12.50/share. At the mid-range, that IPO would have raised about $100 million for the company.
But at the last minute, it cancelled its Thursday IPO.
The cancellation apparently took employees by surprise. One excited employee had tweeted a photo of himself wearing a T-shirt that said 6.29.17 and its upcoming ticker symbol "TNTR," the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Another employee tweeted a photo of employees boarding the plane to New York, presumably for the customary opening bell ceremony, the Chron reports, but that tweet has been deleted.
Tintri offers flash storage products for companies, which is storage built with the same technology used in smartphones and thumb drives. It claims that its storage products work well with applications running on cloud services, like Amazon Web Services (AWS).
But storage companies have not fared well over the past five years, as companies increasingly store their data in cloud services like AWS S3. The one-time giant in the market, EMC, was acquired by Dell. Former startup darlings have had less-than-stellar IPOs, like Pure Storage. And many other flash companies have also struggled.
Tintri had a loss of $100 million on total revenues of $125 million in its last fiscal year, 2017. Plus, year-over-year revenue growth had slowed from 73% in 2016 to 45% by 2017.
The company declined comment.