CARY, NC – In a turnaround story likely to inspire business school case studies, SciQuest Inc., a company selling procurement software, has filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to raise up to $75 million in an initial public offering of stock. It plans to list on the NYSE under the symbol SQI, but did not disclose the number of shares it plans to sell.
Founded in 1995 by four entrepreneurs, SciQuest raised four rounds of venture capital and went public before in 2000.
However, the company ran into difficulties establishing its online exchange for laboratory supplies and finally brought in CEO Steve Wiehe in 2001, who began engineering a turnaround.
In 2004, private investors (California’s Trinity Ventures, Durham, NC-based Intersouth Partners and River Cities invested the funds to take it out of the public arena) acquired the company for $25.25 million and removed it voluntarily from the NASDAQ exchange.
The company said it plans to use about $35.5 million of its net proceeds to redeem all of its outstanding shares of preferred stock.
Wiehe and his team refocused SciQuest as one of the first to sell its product on a Software as a Service Model (SaaS). In 2006, as a private company, SciQuest posted its first profits. Wiehe participated in TechJournal South’s first Internet Summit (the next is coming up in Raleigh in November: www.internetsummit.com)
For the year ending in December 2009, SciQuest reported net income of $2.63 million from revenues of $36.8 million.
For the history of the company, see these previous stories on TechJournal South:
Going private: SciQuest’s turnaround, part 2
Switching to software as a service saved SciQuest
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- SciQuest: A turnaround story
- Going private: SciQuest’s turnaround, part 2
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[...] company, which recently filed for a $75 million IPO, is one of the Triangle’s major turn-around [...]
[...] (SaaS) portfolio companies recently and may soon have another—Cary, NC-based SciQuest, which is lined up to launch an initial public offering of [...]