It was a busy day for the markets with seven companies starting to trade today on US exchanges after their IPOs. Most of them had a decent first day, like oil pipeline company QEP Midstream Partners, which saw its stock rise by almost 11% on its opening. But by far the star of the day was Cvent, a cloud-based event management platform (think Evite for businesses), which shot up by more than 280% in its debut.
The size of Cvent’s “pop” underlines what we’ve already seen this year: Technology companies geared toward business customers are a market favorite, and certainly more popular with investors than tech firms geared toward consumers. Cvent also had a lot of buzz around it, and its software is integrated with more than 200,000 hotels, so event planners can link directly with them. Another enterprise company that did well in its IPO this year is big data firm Tableau Software, which was up around 65% on its market debut in May. It would have jumped further had it not raised its IPO range, and then priced above the range at $31 just before its shares began trading.