More Tech IPOs: Criteo Files, and Rocket Fuel Is Ready to Start Trading Friday

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported that video ad startup YuMe was trading below its $9 IPO price; YUME shares climbed back above $9 last week and closed today at $11.

Here's another tech company headed for the public markets: French advertising startup Criteo has filed its public IPO documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which means the company could be trading in less than a month.

Criteo's latest funding round, completed a year ago, valued the company at $800 million.

Like Twitter - and just about every other company that has gone public this year - Criteo filed its initial documents with the SEC in private earlier this year, using cover provided by the 2012 Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act.

But, unlike Twitter, the timing of Criteo's filing isn't surprising at all, since the ad-tech world has been gabbing about it for months.

Criteo is a retargeting company, which means it helps e-commerce companies track prospects online and show them display ads. Last year, it made a profit of $1 million on sales of $354 million; in the first six months of this year, it lost $6.4 million on sales of $252.7 million.

More than half of Criteo's top-line dollars go back out the door via traffic-acquisition costs. It spent $205 million on TAC last year, and another $152 million in the first half of 2013.

Criteo, which is based in Paris, wants to list its American Depositary Shares on the Nasdaq under the "CRTO" ticker.

Criteo's filing follows disappointing public debuts for ad-tech startups this year. Marin Software and Tremor Media are trading below their IPO prices, and the general climate for ad-tech stocks has been lousy enough that Adap.TV chose to sell to AOL instead of following through on its IPO plans.

But now the conventional wisdom is that investors are once again willing to look at companies that combine technology and advertising, at least in some cases - see Facebook's triumphant return.

We should get a better sense of investors' appetite for ad tech at the end of this week, when Rocket Fuel, which helps advertisers buy "programmatic" inventory, is supposed to go public. People familiar with the company's plans said it expects to price its shares on Thursday, and head to the Nasdaq Friday morning.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Everett Collection)

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported that video ad startup YuMe was trading below its $9 IPO price; YUME shares climbed back above $9 last week and closed today at $11.

Facebook Trading at Highest Price Since Week of IPO

On an average day, over the past year, shares of Facebook have hovered in the low-to-mid 20s, at least 10 points beneath the company's debut price of $38 per share in May of last year.

But Thursday was not an average day.

Following the news of a massive earnings beat on Wednesday afternoon, shares of Facebook are trading at their highest levels since IPO, at nearly $34 per share about an hour before the market closes. That's a single-day gain of nearly 30 percent.

Probably worth noting, too, that Facebook's trading volume is at a high, with more than 300 million shares exchanging hands before market close. That's a volume number that's second only to the company's IPO date, where more than half a billion shares moved through the market.

What drove the massive gains? Facebook finally showed a drastic shift from desktop to mobile monetization in its earnings numbers, as mobile ad revenue now accounts for 41 percent of Facebook's overall ads business.

Mobile first? Perhaps not quite yet, but soon enough.

Infoblox’s Stock Drops 36.84% After Its Earnings And Forecast Disappoint

Twitter's Roadshow Video: No Frills, by Design

Twitter's IPO roadshow presentation was posted to the Web on Friday morning, as the company kicks off its tour to pitch to investment firms around the country.

The most remarkable point: It's completely unremarkable, a stark contrast to an obvious comparison - the highly produced Facebook roadshow video we saw last year.

Twitter's video consists basically of CEO Dick Costolo laying out exactly what makes Twitter tick, and walking investors through the company's ad products and user statistics. CFO Mike Gupta makes an appearance later on, explaining monetization and the company's rapid revenue growth.

But, unlike Facebook's production, Costolo and Gupta appear against a plain, static backdrop, and run through a series of slides to lay out Twitter - basically the template for any other soon-to-be-public company creating a roadshow video. Compare that to the sweeping camera angles, animated graphics and airy soundtrack seen in Facebook's pitch.

Twitter's S-1, too, was plain and understated. It lacked the founder's letter that Facebook's Zuckerberg penned, instead putting much of the focus again on exactly how Twitter works.

Make no mistake: Twitter's no-frills approach is entirely by design. Despite all the heightened attention it has received, Twitter has sought to make this a low-profile IPO process, aiming to steer clear of the massive hype that surrounded Facebook's debut on the Nasdaq exchange. Instead, the idea has been to position itself more in line with a tech company like LinkedIn, which, compared to Facebook, receives far less media attention yet delivers consistently upbeat quarterly financial results.

To be fair to Facebook, Twitter's pitch wasn't entirely without flourishes. The company ran a short video featuring three of Twitter's founders, as well as Costolo, briefly explaining the service's charm. But it was short and sweet - one minute and 40 seconds, to be exact.

Will the IPO itself, set to drop in the first week of November, actually be as low-key as Twitter wants? Like Fortune's Dan Primack, I seriously doubt that will be the case.

But it certainly won't be for lack of effort by Twitter.

Hey @DickC: How I Spent My Night Before the Twitter IPO

Okay, I was bored with all these inane price news updates on Twitter's IPO tomorrow - Is is $24? Is it $25? No, $26! - as if the fate of the Internet world depended on it.

And I was tiring of reading debates over whither the social microblogging post-offering, and the how-in-the-world-could-it-do-well-without-profits hand-wringing. (Twitter, meet Amazon!)

And I could not endure any more about the co-founders fighting as if this were a geek version of "Keeping Up With the Kardashians." (That said, co-founder Jack Dorsey is totes Kim.)

So I decided to pen a series of fictional (and hopefully funny) tweets to CEO Dick Costolo, with whom I have had many entertaining interviews, hysterical emails and enjoyable conversations over the years, because he likes a good joke.

I was riffing off the fantastic "Hey Girl"/Ryan Gosling meme on Tumblr.

Some on Twitter definitely enjoyed my tweets, some thought my account had been hacked (nope!), and some thought me drunk (no, sadly, I never imbibe). And some tsk-tskers did not like my humor at all, which is the price of doing business on my favorite Internet medium until Instagram arrived (now I love them both equally, just like my kids).

By the way, I did a similar thing around the Facebook IPO filing, in a 2012 piece titled: "Go the F**k Back to Sleep, Silicon Valley: Facebook IPO Likely to File Later Today at Earliest."

Now I need to take my own advice.

But if you are still up waiting for the IPO and you care to read them, here are the tweets, in order:

[View the story "Hey @DickC" on Storify]

Zulily Raises IPO Price Range to $18-$20 a Share

Discount women's and children's clothing site Zulily said in an SEC filling on Wednesday morning that it has increased the expected per-share price range for its IPO from $16-$18 to $18-$20. At $19 a share, the company would net about $110 million from the offering when shares start trading on the Nasdaq exchange this Friday.

Ahead Of Its Public Debut Wednesday, Wix Prices IPO At $16.50 Per Share, With Valuation Near $800M

IPO season is in full swing, with RingCentral, Chegg, FireEye, Veeva Systems and Zulily representing just a few of the names to file or begin trading in recent weeks. Of course, the main attraction this season is Twitter and its long-awaited public offering, which finally rolls into town November 6th.

Twitter isn't the only company slated to join the list of public companies tomorrow, however. Israeli-American website creation platform, Wix, will also be vying for its share of media attention tomorrow, as the company announced this afternoon that it will be setting its opening price at $16.50 per share - the high end of its expected $14.50 to $16.50 price range.

Trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol "WIX," the website creator says that it will offer 7.7 million ordinary shares as part of its public offering, with selling stockholders offering 1.9 million of those 7.7 million shares. After filing its initial paperwork back in May, Wix revealed last week that it planned to raise $119 million by offering 7.7 million shares at a price between $14.50 and $16.50.

However, the company's final filing before tomorrow's debut shows that it was able to raise slightly more than the expected $119 million figure, with the final total coming in at $127 million. With Wix pricing its IPO on the higher end of its expected price per share range and raising slightly more than its initial target, the company will likely see its valuation boost as a result.

Considering the valuation was pegged at $720 million prior to today's announcement, it wouldn't be unreasonable to see that figure fall somewhere in the $750 to $800 million range. All in all, it's a great finish to the pre-IPO process for the company, especially amidst all the hoopla surrounding its fellow IPO candidate, Twitter.

Founded in 2006, Wix set out to do for website creation what WordPress, Blogger (and later Tumblr) did for blogging and content creation beginning in the early 2000s. Riding the growing demand for "DIY"-style web design and publishing tools, and capitalizing on the maturation of web-based technologies, Wix has since become one of the largest website creation platforms on the Web.

Having raised $60 million from a laundry list of investors, as of this month, Wix employs over 400 people around the globe and is now available in over 190 countries. Today, the company boasts over 37 million registered users and continues to see strong growth in its user base, with its latest filing revealing a growth rate of 34,000 new registered users/day.

According to that same filing, Wix reported a net loss of $12 million in 2012 on revenues of $44 million, with losses and revenue growing to $18 million and $56 million, respectively, over the first nine months of 2013. On the bright side, Wix said in its October filing that it had "achieved 14 consecutive quarters of sequential growth in the accumulated number of premium subscriptions ... and 14 consecutive quarters of growth in revenues in collections."

Breaking that down, this means that Wix generated $9.9 million in revenue in 2010, which increased to $24.6 million in 2011 and $43.7 million in 2012, while collections started at $13.8 million and grew to $29.6 million in 2011 and $52.5 million in 2012, respectively. In turn, Wix generated $34.1 million in revenue during the six months ended June 3rd, 2013, with its revenue increasing to $56 million during the following three months.

While the media attention and scale of Wix's IPO tomorrow will pale in comparison to that of Twitter, Wix represents the latest in a growing list of successful exits and outcomes for Israeli-borne technology companies. According to Forbes, Wix will be the "largest U.S. IPO by an Israeli company since SodaStream International's debut in 2010 and follows Google's blockbuster acquisition of Waze earlier this year.

Israel's startup ecosystem has continued to grow in stature thanks to the recent flurry of activity, which hasn't been lost on the growing number of investors in the U.S. that are now pouring money into Israeli-borne startups. Wix, to that point, will only add more fuel to the fire, and its public offering tomorrow stands to make its investors - which include Bessemer Venture Partners, Mangrove Capital Partners, Benchmark, Insight Venture Partners and DAG Ventures - more than a few pennies.

For that reason, Twitter or no Twitter, there will still be more than a few eyeballs on the website creator's public debut tomorrow morning. If the IPO goes well, Wix could open the door for a growing roster of Israeli companies looking to hit the public markets in the U.S.

For more, find Wix's announcement here.