Tintri Cuts IPO Price In Latest S-1

Storage technology developer Tintri made a cut in its expected IPO share price.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Tintri had been widely expected to go public on Thursday but instead filed an S-1 document detailing a price cut. A Tintri spokesperson told CRN that the company could not comment on what happened to its IPO beyond what was stated in the company's latest S-1.

Tintri's S-1 filing said it plans to offer 8.5 million shares of common stock with an anticipated initial public offering price of between $7.00 and $8.00 per share, raising $59.5 million to $68 million. Earlier, the company's expected offer was 8.7 million shares at between $10.50 and $12.50 per share. That would have raised $91.4 million to $108.8 million.

[Related: IPO-Bound Tintri's S-1 Shows A Fast-Growing Channel Company That's Looking To Pare Down Its Losses]

Other storage tech companies that have gone public in the past few years are seeing their shares trade close to their IPO price.

Hyper-converged infrastructure developer Nutanix in late September went public with an initial price of $16 per share, which climbed as high as nearly $47 but is now back in the $19 range.

All-flash storage vendor Pure Storage in October 2015 also hit the public markets at $16 a share and now sits at under $13 per share. Both Pure Storage and Nutanix have market caps north of $2.5 billion.

Nimble Storage had its IPO in mid-December 2013 with an opening price of $21 per share and a first-day close of nearly $34 per share. Share prices peaked in February 2014 at almost $53 per share before sliding to the $7 to $9 per share range for all of 2016. HPE acquired Nimble Storage early this year for $12.50 per share.

Also, the IPO plans of at least one hot storage startup, hyper-converged infrastructure vendor SimpliVity, were squashed when Hewlett-Packard Enterprise acquired it.

The delay in Tintri's IPO and the fall in its IPO price lead to several questions about a company whose technology is actually quite innovative, said John Woodall, vice president of engineering at Integrated Archive Systems, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based solution provider and Tintri channel partner.

"I wonder if someone is going to pick Tintri up," Woodall told CRN. "Tintri has some really good intellectual property. It's not a question of there being no value here."

Woodall said Tintri is strong in its granular management of storage, particularly with its granular insight into virtual machine storage, in a way few vendors are.

"Tintri has a very good niche around virtualized management," he said. "In an area where simplicity is getting more important, Tintri stands out."

However, lowering its IPO price instead of just pushing its IPO to a later date raises a red flag, Woodall said. "It doesn't leave me with a good feeling as to what the outcome will be," he said. "We'll have to wait and see what happens."