If you were standing at the corner of Broad and Wall Street last week, you might have felt a shift in the winds swirling around the IPO calendar. Technology was edging in, easing health care aside.

When the IPO curtain rose on Monday, Feb. 2, the calendar had nine health-care issues looking to make their public debuts.

By the time that the IPO show ended on Friday, Feb. 6, only one of the nine health-care issues had made it out the door. It was a train wreck. Four of the others were postponed “due to market conditions,” two were rescheduled as “day-to-day” and two more were pushed back onto future calendars.

Nexvet Biopharma (NVET) was the train wreck. On Feb. 4, it priced its IPO of 4 million shares at $10 each, DOWN from 4 million shares at $13 to $16 each. That was a price cut of 31 percent. It didn’t help. The IPO opened at $9.15 and sold as low as $8.40 before closing its opening day at $8.88, down 11.2 percent from its initial offering price.

Nexvet, based in Ireland, is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on transforming the therapeutic market for companion animals by developing and commercializing novel, species-specific biologics based on human biologics.

That was the past. Now let’s look to the future.

Tech for Doctors and Patients

Topping this week’s calendar of 11 IPOs is an offering that is reportedly on everybody’s “most wanted list.”  It is a technology company. The irony is that this is a cloud company that serves the health-care sector.

Inovalon Holdings (INOV – proposed) is a Bowie, Maryland-based technology company that combines advanced cloud-based data analytics and data-driven intervention platf…moreorms to achieve meaningful insight and improvement in clinical and quality outcomes, utilization and financial performance across the health-care landscape. The company offers proprietary datasets, advanced integration technologies, sophisticated predictive analytics and deep subject matter expertise to help improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of health care.

 

Forbes magazine, in a story posted on April 15, 2014, on its website, described Inovalon as “a fast-growing 2,500-person company whose analytics touch approximately 140 million insured Americans, 540,000 physicians, and about 220,000 clinical facilities around the country. Approximately one-half of the entire insured U.S. health-care system is touched in one way or form by the analytics of Inovalon.”

In its prospectus, Inovalon estimates the size of the market for its services at $83.8 billion. For the 12 months ended Sept. 30, 2014, Inovalon reported net income of $57.6 million on revenues of $336.2 million. The IPO is expected to be priced on Wednesday evening to trade on NASDAQ Global Select Market on Thursday morning.

(For more information, please click here: Inovalon Holdings)

Flying Out of the Box

Box (BOX) may have lit the fuse to technology IPOs. On Jan. 22, 2015, Box priced its long-awaited IPO of 12.5 million shares at $14 each, UP from $11 to $13 per share. The IPO opened at $20.20 and closed its opening day at $23.23, UP 65.9 percent from its initial offering price. The company filed for an IPO on March 24, 2014, and 10 months is a long wait in today’s IPO market.

Box closed on Friday, Feb. 6, at $18.12, still UP 29.4 percent from its IPO price.

(Note: Box’s 25-day quiet period ends on Feb. 16, 2015, and its investment bankers are expected to initiate research coverage.)

Box offers a cloud-based, mobile-optimized Enterprise Content Collaboration platform that lets organizations of all sizes easily and securely manage their content and collaborate internally and externally. Its platform is designed for users with the security, scalability and administrative controls required by IT departments.

An opening-day pop of about 66 percent catches a few eyes from privately owned competitors. And it looks as if there has been some movement from the technology sector. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s window posted a few new filings last week. One was MaxPoint.

MaxPoint Interactive (MXPT – proposed) filed for an IPO to raise $75 million on Tuesday, Feb. 3. The company provides business intelligence and marketing automation software services that enable national brands to drive local, in-store sales. National brands use the company’s MaxPoint Intelligence Platform to predict the most likely local buyers of a specific product at a particular retail location and then execute cross-channel digital marketing campaigns to reach these buyers.

That brings us back to this week, Feb. 9, 2015, and its calendar of 11 IPOs. Bankers expect to raise over $1.2 billion, but six are from the health-care sector.

(For details, please check IPOScoop.com’s IPO calendar.)

Looking into the week of Feb. 16, 201, the calendar has one health-care offering. But more names could pop onto the calendar by the time that Monday, Feb. 16, rolls around.

Stay tuned.

 

Disclosure: Neither the author nor anyone else on the IPOScoop.com staff has a position in any stocks mentioned, nor do we trade or invest in IPOs. The author and IPOScoop.com staff do not issue advice, recommendations or opinions.