Secondaries are primary for recent IPOs

Contact: Brenon Daly

The IPO window may be slammed shut right now, but the few tech companies that have managed to make it public have found the window wide open when it comes to selling more shares. In the past week or so, QlikTech, RealPage and IntraLinks have all priced their secondary sales. All three companies only came public last summer and have had strong runs since their debuts.

Recall that QlikTech priced its IPO above the expected range, something of a rarity in the current climate. After coming public in mid-July at $10, the stock traded above $20 two months later and has held that level. Shares in the analytics company closed at $23.79 on Tuesday. Incidentally, the company didn’t sell any shares in the offering. Instead, the three main backers (Accel Partners, Jerusalem Venture Partners and Stiftelsen Industrifonden) are all lightening their holdings in the 11.5-million-share secondary.

Meanwhile, rental property software provider RealPage put in the paperwork for its follow-on offering just three months after first selling shares to the public. The company sold four million shares, raising about $98m. Another 6.35 million shares came from selling shareholders, notably Apax Partners. Although RealPage initially came public below its expected range at $11, the shares have traded at twice that level since mid-October. RealPage closed Tuesday at $27.90, giving the company a market cap of about $1.8bn.

And IntraLinks priced its 10-million-share offering at $20 each. That’s up substantially from the $13 that the on-demand document management company first sold shares to the public back in early August. IntraLinks is selling two million shares, with the remaining eight million coming from its backers. The stock closed Tuesday at $19.16.

Reality check for mobile ad networks?

-Contact Thomas Rasmussen

Mobile advertising startup Ad Infuse received an infusion of reality last week. The vendor, which has raised $18m in venture backing, had to put itself up for sale after it was unable to secure follow-on funding this year. After being shopped around since last summer, Ad Infuse sold for scraps to UK-based mobile advertiser Velti. We estimate that Velti paid less than $1m for Ad Infuse, which we understand generated just $1.3m in revenue in 2008.

The distressed sale of Ad Infuse comes on the heels of SmartReply’s tiny all-equity purchase of mSnap, as well as several deals involving other niche advertising networks this year. Where does this leave the remaining mobile ad networks that we were bullish on last year as the logical next step of growth for online ad startups?

We suspect there is more VC portfolio cleanout coming, since there are still too many mobile ad startups. That’s not to say there aren’t a few firms that haven’t had some success. For instance, three-year-old mobile ad network AdMob, which has successfully ridden the coattails of Apple’s iPhone AppStore’s rise by providing a way for iPhone developers to monetize their users through ads, is currently at an estimated $30m run-rate. (AdMob has raised nearly $50m to date from Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Northgate Capital.) And on a smaller scale, AdMarvel is just getting started with what we can best describe as a mobile version of the popular video ad startup Adap.tv. It has raised just $8m to date and is in the process of closing a $10m follow-on round, something its competitor Ad Infuse was unable to accomplish.

Much like what we anticipate will eventually happen in the online video ad space, there will soon come a time when ad giants such as Google and Yahoo will have to buy their way into the mobile sector. In a rare sign of foresight, AOL is the only media behemoth with a sizable presence in the mobile ad vertical following its $105m acquisition of Third Screen Media in 2007.