Thursday, April 18

Online Education Company Pluralsight Marks a Debut on Nasdaq

Online Education Company Pluralsight marked a debut on Nasdaq on Thursday with its shares trading at an opening price of $20 per share, roughly 34 percent above the $15 price at which the company had priced its initial public offering.

Interestingly, the stock marked a close at the same price it had opened.

Pluralsight is a publicly held online education company that offers a variety of video training courses for software developers, IT administrators, and creative professionals through its website. The company has raised $310 million in its initial public offering.

Pluralsight has first filed for public listing on April 16 while competing against Alphabet’s YouTube, Cornerstone OnDemand and Microsoft’s LinkedIn Learning. It had initially estimated a price share between $10 and $12 each., but finally the company announced the $15 pricing, coming in above the high end of the most recent range.

CEO Aaron Skonnard said while reporting to a prominent media platform,

Technology is moving faster today than these companies can learn it so that creates a big skills gap around the world. We make it possible for them to learn these skills quickly, keep up with that pace of change and thrive in the digital age. We maintain “army of expert authors” around the world to keep courses up to date and relevant. That’s what makes our value proposition unique.

The arrival of Pluralsight on public markets is somewhere indicative of the fact that public investors are still eager to invest in smaller technology companies.

With an implied valuation of around $1.97 billion, Pluralsight successfully raised $310.5 million where Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan acted as the lead book-running managers in the deal.

The online education firm currently offers more than 6,700 courses and has 82 percent of its billings coming from business customers.