Bridgewater IPO finally arrives

Bridgewater has finally filed for their IPO (see “Is Bridgewater the next IPO?“, July 16-07 and “Hot tech market hasn’t gone away“, September 12-07). This is a sign that the market turmoil is finally calming down, and it can’t come too soon for many firms.

As for having just two dealers in the syndicate (CIBC and Genuity), I’m not sure that is warranted for a meaningfully-sized offering. We first saw this approach on Espial (GMP and Genuity), and here it is again. Espial (ESP:TSX) was a $25MM deal, and I’d expect Bridgewater to be at least $40MM. Surely there is enough commission on a $40MM deal ($2.4MM at 6%) to have 4 or 5 dealers around, right from the beginning. Perhaps the final prospectus will reflect a larger underwriting group.

Best of luck to management and the VCs that brought them this far: Wesley Clover (4th round), Covington Venture Fund (5th round), Eagle One Ventures Inc. (5th round), RBC Information Technology Fund (1st, 2nd, and 4th rounds), Rising Tide Fund (3rd round), VenGrowth Private Equity Partners Inc. (3rd, 4th and 5th rounds).

With VenGrowth currently in the market to raise their new IT venture fund, prospective limited partners should take note of this deal (VG’s 4th tech IPO in four years – Q9, Sandvine, Espial and Bridgewater); not to take anything away from the other people currently in fundraising mode, but these folks know what they are doing.

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Update at at Nov. 9th, 9:30am:

An amended prospectus was filed after the blog was posted, adding the rest of the underwriting syndicate. TD, RBC and GMP are co-equal in the second line. Not clear why they didn’t know who the syndicate was the day before, but a five dealer syndicate makes sense to me.

MRM