The on-again, off-again Synacor IPO is over as the company began trading on the NASDAQ this morning.
Synacor initially targeted a price range of $10-12 per share but had to cut the price based on investor feedback. Synacor revised their price range to $5-6 per share and, ultimately, priced at the low end of that revised range. Despite those worrisome signs, Synacor’s stock has performed well this morning – it’s up 20% to $6 per share. Synacor sold 6.8M shares at $5 which raises $34M for the company and its investors.
Of course, IPO’s have the power to mint millionaires and this one is no different. Synacor’s CEO, Ron Frankel, owns 1,684,703 shares of Synacor stock. At $6 per share, that’s $10.1M.
Jordan Levy, former chair of the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation, owns 433,093 shares of Synacor stock (though some of those are owned by a partnership controlled by Mr. Levy and Ron Schreiber). At this morning’s stock price, Mr. Levy now owns over $2.5M worth of Synacor stock.
George Chamon, the Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Synacor, owns 530,745 shares after the offering which makes him worth just over $3M. Scott Bailey, Chief Operations Officer at Synacor, owns 330,556 shares making him worth nearly $2M. Finally, Bill Stuart, the company’s CFO, owns 159,640 shares of stock giving him a windfall of nearly $1M today.
This IPO is a meaningful development for the Buffalo technology community. It raises the profile of one of the area’s biggest and fastest growing tech companies and it helps raise liquidity for Synacor investors (like Rand Capital which owns nearly $6M worth of Synacor stock) and employees.