The IOT IPO gets an A-OK, as Samsara stock gains after pricing at top of range

Despite rough times for recent market entries, financial chief tells MarketWatch that Internet-of-Things-focused Samsara was 'ready to be a public company'

Samsara Inc. shares rose on the their first day of trading Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange, following the cloud-based operations platform's initial public offering.

Samsara shares opened at $24.90, or 8.3% above their IPO price of $23, and finished up 7.4% at $24.70. The IPO pricing was at the high end of the company's forecast range of $20 to $23, and raised at least $805 million at a valuation approaching $11 billion.

Samsara's IPO comes at a time when shares of recently public companies are struggling. The Renaissance IPO ETF $(IPO.UK)$ is down nearly 13% in the past 12 months versus a 27% gain for the S&P 500 index and a 24% gain in the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index , but that wasn't a deterrent for the company, according to its chief financial officer.

"We're ready to be a public company," Dominic Phillips told MarketWatch in an interview. "We have the scale and the growth that's really attractive to public company investors."

Read:Samsara IPO: 5 things about the cloud-based operations company

"We're almost $500 million in annual recurring revenue, we're growing close to 70% year over year," CFO Phillips said from the NYSE in a telephone interview. "It's a great opportunity for us to raise capital that we can use to reinvest back in our business to sustain high levels of growth, and it's an opportunity for us to get new investors onto the cap table."

Annual recurring revenue, or ARR, is a metric often used by software-as-a-service companies to show how much revenue the company can expect based on subscriptions. Samsara's grew to $492.8 million as of Oct. 30, compared with $293.1 million in the year previous.

A large portion of that growth comes from large customers, those who are contributing $100,000 or more to ARR, of which Samsara added 100 in the third quarter alone. The company currently has 715 of those $100K customers, compared with 390 a year ago, and those customers are driving about 44% of Samsara's ARR, Phillips said.

Samsara offers a cloud-based platform that allows businesses to use Internet-of-Things connected devices -- hence the "IOT" ticker -- that can range from video cameras to data-collecting equipment to help run operations.

While tech companies, media outlets and retailers became early adopters of the digital-transformation wave even before COVID-19, other sectors -- ones with more physical assets like cars and trucks and nondigital equipment -- have lagged behind in that transformation. As those assets have become more connected to each other through the internet, Samsara's platform allows businesses to monitor those assets and make better operational decisions.

The company estimates a total addressable market for its technology of about $54.6 billion by the end of 2021, and $96.9 billion by the end of 2024.

"We are seeing this incredible wave of digital transformation in the world of physical operations," Phillips said. "Increasingly, our customers are looking to Samsara to provide more data and help them save money and run more efficiently, create safer operations, reduce accidents, exonerate drivers, lower insurance premiums, and then ultimately to meet their longer term sustainability goals."