Cloud company Datadog surges 50% in U.S. market debut

(Reuters) - Shares of Datadog Inc, a data analytics and cloud monitoring company, surged nearly 50% in their market debut, after pricing its initial public offering above expectations.

Datadog's shares opened at $40.35, giving it a market capitalization of $11.69 billion. Shares rose as high as $41.44 in early trade.

The New York-based company had priced its IPO at $27 per share on Wednesday, above its initial target range of $24-$26, raising about $648 million, at a valuation of about $7.83 billion.

If underwriters exercise their option of buying an additional 3.6 million shares, the gross proceeds may go up to $745.2 million.

The provider of services for monitoring the health of cloud-based applications counts companies such as Biogen, Comcast, Deloitte, and Twitter among its customers.

It competes with industry behemoths such as Amazon.com Inc's AWS and Microsoft Corp's Azure.

Datadog is the latest in a string of listings in 2019 by so-called software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, including Zoom Video Communications. Such listings have performed well since going public as they benefit from the expansion of cloud computing.

Datadog's revenue had nearly doubled to $198.1 million in 2018 from a year earlier. In the same period, its net loss widened to $10.8 million from $2.6 million.

T. Rowe Price Associates, Dragoneer Investment Group, Index Ventures, ICONIQ Capital Management and Institutional Venture Partners are among the lead investors in Datadog.

Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs are the IPO's lead underwriters.

(Reporting by Abhishek Manikandan in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Bharath Manjesh; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)