Big data tech company Talend sees its stock soar over 50% for its IPO

In one of the thinnest tech IPO seasons in recent history, big data startup Talend made its debut on the public markets on Friday and so far investors are loving it.

Talend opened trading at $27.66 after pricing its IPO's 5,250,000 shares at $18 on Thursday, raising $94.5 million, a 53% pop. It priced a dollar above its planned range of $15 - $17 per share.

The stock, which is trading on the Nasdaq under the symbol "TLND," is still currently trading above $25 a share.

In a year that's seen only a handful of tech IPOs, with the first one, Dell's spin-out company, SecureWorks, not well received, tech startups have been watching for signs that investors are ready for them to IPO.

In the past year, the venture markets have turned tighter on startups. There's been a new emphasis on cash flow and profitability instead of rampant growth of revenues at any cost.

Startups are trying to pretty up their balance sheets when it comes to their cash burn rates, particularly on sales and marketing, before talking to public investors.

A classic growth profile

But Talend didn't do that. This big data startup, raised over $100 million in venture funding. It had 2015 revenues of nearly $76 million and a loss of $22 million, much of that thanks to the $49 million it spent on sales and marketing. Its first quarter revenue for 2016 was up 42% over the year-ago quarter, and its sales expenses, and overall operating expenses, were up too.

So the profile is one of a classic growth mode Valley startup. And investors are apparently cool with that.

Talend was born a French company and was backed by one of France's most famous and successful tech founders turned VC, Bernard Liautaud, who is Talend's chairman. (Liautaud founded Business Objects in 1990, took it public in 1994 and it sold to SAP in 2007 for $6.78 billion.)

Talend later moved its headquarters to the Silicon Valley, (Redwood City, California), although it is trading as foreign stock.

Talend offers a service that helps a company take the data stored in all sorts of apps and clouds, clean that data up so it can be used by popular big data software like Hadoop and Spark. It claims over 1,300 enterprise customers including companies like Allianz, Citi, General Electric, Lenovo and Siemens.

It was founded in 2005 by Fabrice Bonan and Bertrand Diard but is currently run by CEO Mike Tuchen. (Both of these founders were out shortly after the new CEO joined and are working on a new startup called Influans, according to their LinkedIn profiles.)

Diard, however, still holds a 3% stake. His 673,632 shares are worth nearly $17 million if Talend's stock price holds at $25.