Violin Memory Said to File IPO With $2 Billion Valuation
Violin Memory Inc., a maker of flash memory for data centers, filed to go public last month under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, said two people familiar with the matter.
The deal is being led by JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) and Bank of America Corp. (BAC), said the people, who declined to be named because the prospectus hasn’t been disclosed to the public. While the timing and price of the offering have yet to be determined, the valuation being discussed has approached $2 billion, they said yesterday.
Violin, whose high-speed storage systems are being used in products deployed by Cisco Systems Inc., Oracle Corp. and VMware Inc., will follow a crop of technology companies to hit the public markets this year. Software maker Workday Inc. (WDAY) has jumped 86 percent since its debut on Oct. 11. ServiceNow Inc. and Palo Alto Networks Inc. are also up since their IPOs in recent months, outperforming consumer Internet companies Facebook Inc., Groupon Inc. and Zynga Inc., which have tumbled.
Like Workday, Violin Memory filed under the JOBS Act, which lets the company keep its plans confidential with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission until three weeks before the roadshow. The bill, signed into law by President Barack Obama in April, applies to companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenue.
Suzanne Chan, a spokeswoman for Mountain View, California- based Violin Memory, declined to comment. Duncan King, a spokesman for Deutsche Bank, Melissa Kitlowski, a spokeswoman for Bank of America, and Tasha Pelio, a spokeswoman for JPMorgan, all declined to comment yesterday.
Private Round
Violin Memory raised $50 million in a private funding round earlier this year, valuing the company at more than $800 million. At the time the company was choosing between JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Barclays Plc and Bank of America to lead the offering, a person familiar with the situation told Bloomberg.
Founded in 2005, Violin is led by Chief Executive Officer Don Basile. He joined the company from Fusion-io Inc. (FIO), a maker of flash-memory technology that went public in June 2011 and has since gained 59 percent. Fusion-io has a stock market value of $2.9 billion after recording an 82 percent jump in revenue in fiscal 2012 to $359.4 million.
To contact the reporter on this story: Ari Levy in San Francisco at alevy5@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
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