Toronto-founded PagerDuty goes public, sees stocks jump in market debut

PagerDuty NYSE

PagerDuty, a San Francisco-headquartered SaaS unicorn, with Canadian roots, began trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) yesterday, after filing an initial public offering (IPO) in March.

The company was founded in Toronto by three Canadian engineers.

The company priced its IPO at $24 a share, with a $1.8 billion USD valuation, after raising $218 million in its US offering. The company opened for trading at $36.75 USD, 59 percent above its IPO price. It was priced today at $39.20 at 9:30 am.

“It is a gratifying day, especially for the co-founders who were pulling the idea together for PagerDuty a couple of years before they even launched it, and for employees who’ve been with the company for nearly as long and who turned down safer and higher-paying jobs along the way,” PagerDuty CEO, Jennifer Tejada, told TechCrunch yesterday.

PagerDuty is a cloud computing company that produces a SaaS incident response platform for IT departments. It has served at least 11,000 organizations, including one-third of companies listed on the Fortune 500.

In 2009, three Canadian ex-Amazon engineers and University of Waterloo grads, Alex Solomon, Andrew Miklas, and Baskar Puvanathasan, set out to build software that would improve the quality of providing on-call support. The Toronto-founded company was incubated at the Y Combinator, and still has an engineering office in its home city.

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The company, which achieved unicorn status last September, received a $90 million USD Series D investment from T. Rowe Price Group Inc. and Wellington Management, making the software startup a unicorn with a private valuation of more than $1 billion USD. In 2010, PagerDuty raised a seed funding round of $1.9 million, followed by a Series A round that raised $10.7 million in January 2013. To date, the company has raised $173.6 million USD.

PagerDuty founders
PagerDuty founders left to right Alex Solomon Andrew Miklas and Baskar Puvanathasan Source PagerDuty

Solomon is the only co-founder who is still with PagerDuty, and operates as CTO of the company. He brought in Tejada to replace him as CEO in 2016.

“We were becoming quite a big company and even considering a possible IPO at some point,” Solomon told StartupDaily at the time. “I have not done that level of scale before and thought, ‘Wow, I might need some help with this.’”

Since leaving PagerDuty full-time, Miklas has worked with Y Combinator and later s28 Capital to discover and mentor new startups. He is currently an associate at Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab. Puvanathasan is still based in Toronto, acting as CEO and co-founder of BorgIQ.

“The vision doesn’t change. We intend to do exactly what we’ve been doing, which is to provide the best real-time operations platform available to companies as they undergo digital transformation to meet the growing demands of their customers,” Tejada told TechCrunch. “We think we’re [facing] an early and very large opportunity that will be available to us for a long time.”

Image courtesy PagerDuty via Twitter.

Isabelle Kirkwood

Isabelle Kirkwood

Isabelle is a Vancouver-based writer with 5+ years of experience in communications and journalism and a lifelong passion for telling stories. For over two years, she has reported on all sides of the Canadian startup ecosystem, from landmark venture deals to public policy, telling the stories of the founders putting Canadian tech on the map.

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