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At 11 a.m. Eastern time, Coupa was trading above $40, up over 126%.
After initially setting an initial price of $14-$16, Coupa bumped up the price of $18 just before its opening day. Even with that bump, the valuation of the company was $866 million and that was below what its private venture funds had thought it was worth. After its last round of venture funding, it was valued at just under $1 billion.
Coupa offers procurement cloud software, competing with companies like SAP's Ariba.
With its successful IPO, Coupa raised just over $133 million.
This IPO comes a few days after the last tech IPO hit one out of the ballpark, a company called Nutanix. Nutanix was valued at about $2 billion by its venture investors, but it initially priced its stock so low, had the stock not popped, it could have been worth less.
However, its stock soared over 130% by the end of its first day of trading and went even higher on day two. Shares have settled back to about $36, giving it a valuation of over $4 billion.
In the meantime, many other similar tech companies are waiting in the wings, wondering if the time is becoming right to try their own IPOs. (Okta, we're looking at you.)
2016 has been a tepid year for tech IPOs, which was worrisome for the large crop of startups known as "unicorns." These are companies that raised huge amounts of venture funding, at very good terms giving them high valuations. With cash flowing they tended to burn through it, spending it on growth. When investor sentiment towards unicorns cooled, VCs no longer wanted to pour money into them at such good terms, and the public markets were not thrilled with a bunch of startups seeming so far away from a healthy cash flow. These companies seemed stuck, unable to raise more money to continue to fuel their growth.
However, with another couple successful IPOs in the books for 2016, it looks like the IPO winter has thawed.