Jive Software (NASDAQ:JIVE), a provider of social collaboration platforms for large businesses priced its initial public offering at $12 a share, valuing the company at about $688 million.
Jive, which is trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol “JIVE”, offered 13,439,600 shares of its common stock to the public at $12 per share Dec. 13. Jive is additionally offering 10,072,463 shares of common stock, while existing stockholders are offering 3,367,137 shares of common stock.
Jive opened at $15.12 per share, up 27 percent from its pricing, and closed Dec. 13 at $15.05.
Often described as a provider of Facebook-like social functionality for the enterprise, Jive makes on-premise and cloud-based software platforms that let company employees host online discussions, publish blogs and host polls, share documents, and post Twitter-like status updates.
Products such as the Jive Social Business Suite have become popular among companies trying to better connect with their clients. Jive counts McAfee, Informatica, Allscripts among its more than 600 customers.
Jive competes with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) SharePoint, IBM (NYSE:IBM) Lotus Connections, Salesforce.com’s (NYSE:CRM) Chatter and dozens of smaller companies, in the competitive market for collaboration and document sharing tools.
Jive posted $54.8 million in revenue through Sept. 30, up from $31.6 million a year ago. Yet the company isn’t profitable and actually posted a net loss of $38.1 million through Sept. 30, up from a net loss $20.9 million a year ago.
Armed with nearly $100 million, Jive has soldiered on and has been prepping for an IPO most of the year, snapping up new funding and board members from Google and Facebook before filing for a $100 IPO in August.
Jive CEO Tony Zingale told the press he doesn’t expect the company to be profitable in the near future, thanks to increased operating and capital expenditures. While prepping for its IPO, Jive has both acquired companies and hired new talent.
Jive priced its IPO during a busy week for public offerings, as companies raise to get publicly traded before the new year. Social game maker Zynga, perhaps the most heavily anticipated IPO, is going public later this week.
