Slack Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: WORK) shares have finally come public in its direct listing. This isn’t a typical IPO, like we saw with Grocery Outlets earlier Thursday. Instead, Slack has forgone the underwriters and is directly listing its shares on the NYSE.
This go-public method reduces the number of banks involved in the process (and by extension, the fees the company pays out to them) and designates them as deal advisers rather than underwriters.
Originally, Slack intended to list its shares at a price of $26 apiece, but the stock entered the market much higher at around $38.25. There were no details given in how many shares were being offered by the selling stockholders.
It’s worth pointing out that Slack will not receive any proceeds from this offering. Instead, the selling shareholders will.
Slack is a new layer of the business technology stack that brings together people, applications, and data. This company is best known for its online chat application.
It also has more than 1,500 apps in its own directory and integration partnerships with companies, including Google, Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Atlassian. The company claims to have hundreds of thousands of customer-created custom Slack applications and integrations in active use.
Around the world, more than 600,000 organizations in over 150 countries have turned to Slack as the place to communicate, collaborate, and get work done. Over 10 million people inside those organizations collectively spend more than 50 million hours actively using Slack in a typical week on either a free or paid subscription plan.
In a filing to the SEC, the company described its finances as follows:
Our revenue was $105.2 million, $220.5 million, and $400.6 million in fiscal years 2017, 2018, and 2019, respectively, representing annual growth of 110% and 82%, respectively. Our growth is global with international revenue representing 34%, 34%, and 36% of total revenue in fiscal years 2017, 2018, and 2019, respectively. We continue to invest in growing our business to capitalize on our market opportunity. As a result, we incurred net losses of $146.9 million, $140.1 million, and $138.9 million in fiscal years 2017, 2018, and 2019, respectively. Our net losses have been decreasing as a percentage of revenue over time as revenue growth has outpaced the growth in operating expenses.
Shares of Slack were last seen at $41.97, with a range of $38.25 to $42.00 on the day thus far. Also about 77 million shares had moved as of 12:20 p.m. EST.
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