This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
In their second day of trading Friday, shares of Utah's Fusion-io Inc. rose $1.50, or 6.6 percent, to close at $24, giving it a market capitalization of $1.86 billion.
The Cottonwood Heights-based company, which hopes to replace computer hard drives with much faster flash memory technology and claims Apple founder Steve Wozniak as chief scientist, went public on Thursday, selling 12.3 million shares at $19 each.
Fusion-io's shares, which trade under the symbol FIO on the New York Stock Exchange, closed Thursday at $22.50, an 18 percent gain over their initial offering price.
Fusion-io's largest customer is Facebook, which accounts for 47 percent of its revenue. Other customers include Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp. Overall, the company's 10 largest customers account for 91 percent of its revenue.
Flash memory has no moving parts. It can access data more quickly than the traditional hard drives that rely on spinning disks to hold information.
Fusion-io and its shareholders sold $234 million in stock through the company's IPO — $22 million more than it was hoping to raise late last month when it was anticipating selling its shares for $13 to $15 each.
Co-founder and CEO David Flynn, co-founder Rick White and Wozniak weren't the only ones smiling after the company's successful initial public offering.
New Enterprise Associates, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture capital firm that supplied Fusion-io with $38 million in funding over the past several years, saw its investment valued at around $622 million based on Friday's closing price.
NEA, which purchased its shares for $1.09 to $3.87 from March 2008 to May 2010, now holds a 33 percent ownership interest in Fusion-io, according to the company's offering prospectus. However, because of U.S. securities laws, NEA will have to wait six months before it can sell any of its stock.
Another large venture capital investor, Lightspeed Venture Partners of Menlo Park, owns 11.1 percent of the company.
For the recently completed third quarter of its 2011 fiscal year, Fusion-io said revenue surged to $67.3 million, an increase of more than 400 percent over the sales of $13.4 million the company recorded in the same period of its prior fiscal year.
During the third quarter, which ended March 31, Fusion-io also turned profitable, reporting a net income of $7 million, compared with a $6.7 million loss for the same quarter a year ago.
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