Quickies: Bentley sets IPO price, Altair acquires for HPC

I go away for a couple of days, and what happens? Yup. Newsy things! Here are two items of interest:

Bentley issued another update to its IPO filing, this time with prices for the shares. You can see it here. (I have not read the whole thing, nor have I diffed it to find out what else may have changed. Soon. This is what I wrote about the last amended S-1.) In the latest update, we learn that Bentley is helping current shareholders sell around 10.75 million shares at a $17 to $19/share price range. What does that mean?

• Bentley’s market cap would be between $4.4 billion and $4.7 billion, a 6x-ish multiple of 2019 revenue
• This sale is for class B shares currently held by existing stockholders. Class B shares hold 1 vote each; class A shares have 29 votes/share. Bentley family members are the primary owners of the class A stock, which will hold 57% of the voting power — so while the class B shares can be owned by anyone, the Bentley family will still, in effect, control the company
• Bentley shares are expected to begin trading on the NASDAQ market on Wednesday, September 23 under the symbol BSY. (How soon, and how exciting!)
• I believe that this means that Bentley will be required to report earnings for the fiscal third quarter, sometime in October/November. Will confirm this once the dust settles.

Meanwhile, Altair announced its second acquisition in a week, also to do with HPC. The first was Univa (my note, here); this one is Ellexus, an input/output (I/O) analysis tool, which Altair says “helps customers find and address issues quickly, improving speed accuracy and cloud readiness”. Ellexus Mistral and Breeze “complement Altair’s scheduling technology by providing per-job storage agnostic file and network I/O real-time monitoring to identify I/O latencies and bottlenecks for faster job execution times and better resource utilization”. Neither price paid nor revenue contribution was disclosed.