Cloud computing companies that have recently faced turbulence on the public markets can take heart from the strong debut of a new entrant to the marke

Monday.com Shares Jump At IPO, Minting A New Cloud Software Billionaire In Israel

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2021-06-14 09:30:06

Cloud computing companies that have recently faced turbulence on the public markets can take heart from the strong debut of a new entrant to the market, Monday.com.

Shares of the Israel-based software business priced at $155 and were trading at around $174 as of midday Thursday, giving monday.com a market capitalization of about $7.6 billion and making co-CEO Roy Mann a billionaire.

“We really wanted to build a long-term, big company, and an IPO is a milestone on the way,” says Mann, who co-founded the business with Eran Zinman, now monday.com’s co-CEO, in 2012. “It was a time that the company was mature, and the market seemed to be in a great position, so it was perfect timing.”

Originally called dapulse, monday.com (the company styles it without the capitalization) launched out of Tel Aviv, where Mann was an executive at Wix looking for a better way to manage his team through software. He tapped Zinman, then running research and development at mobile company Conduit Mobile, and the two released a product in early 2014 that offered task management and team update boards. In 2017, dapulse rebranded as monday.com, a nod to their international audience (work weeks start on Sundays in Israel). The following year, the company reached a $550 million valuation amid U.S. expansion (it now has offices in New York, as well as London and Sydney).

By the time monday.com tripled its valuation to $1.9 billion in 2019, the company was focusing on integrating other work apps into monday.com, and billing its software more as a no-code, easily customizable work platform to use for projects far from task management or tracking projects. Speaking from Nasdaq’s offices, where the company rang the opening bell on Thursday, Mann argued that the company always envisioned itself as more of a “work operating system” that simply leaned on project management early on to reach customers, who now use the software to run everything from hotels to manufacturing plants. Customers include Oscar, Universal Music Group and the NHL.