Morrisville-based MaxPoint Interactive, a technology company that boosts clients’ sales through zip code-based customer data, is going public today for nearly $75 million. MaxPoint priced its shares at $11.50 on Thursday – a little lower than it had aimed for in SEC filings.

The company expects shares to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol MXPT.

MaxPoint made 6.5 million shares available.

The IPO target price had been as high as $12.50 and a low of $10.50. A $12.50 price would have produced some $93 million.

The company is led by chairman and CEO Joe Eppesrman, a former eBay executive. The company launched in 2006.

Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Pacific Crest worked with MaxPoint on the offering.

MaxPoint goes public after a year of strong revenue growth – but at a loss.

In its SEC filings, MaxPoint reported revenues of $106.5 million and a loss of $5.4 million in 2014.

In 2013, MaxPoint reported a profit of $2.6 million on $66 million in revenue.

In 2012, MaxPoint’s revenues were $35 million; its losses totaled $5.1 million.

One consistent factor along with revenue growth has been an increasing number of customers, including many big-name clients:

  • 225 in 2012
  • 304 in 2013
  • 479 in 2014

​Epperson describes MaxPoint this way:

“We are a technology company that happens to use media, rather than media company that happens to use technology.”

Triangle entrepreneur Grace Ueng described MaxPoint’s technollogy this way after hearing Epperson talked about the company at an event in 2011:

“Joe presented an online ‘wow’ factor, real-time product visualization; demonstrating the enormous scale of the MaxPoint process whereby tens of thousands of impressions were being analyzed each second across a map of the US. Thereby, he revealed their secret sauce — a unique targeting technology that allows brand owners and retailers to find the right neighborhoods online to drive in-store sales.

“Rather than traditional zip code targeting, Joe’s team has developed a more precise “Digital Zip” strategy, which helps them deliver better results. MaxPoint can do this across the entire country in real time, as he demonstrated. “Hundreds of billions dollars in market value have been generated to bring supply to demand just in time. But what you see here is a trend that is going to emerge in the next ten years—people have the ability to bring demand to a specific point in just-in time fashion,” Joe stated. He called this new trend “real-time demand generation” and stressed his belief in the full potential of online advertising in driving sales.

“MaxPoint’s customers typically see a 10-20% lift in retail unit sales within hours of deploying their online campaign; their offering has proven to be faster and more effective than traditional promotional methods.”

What stuck with many of the attendees I spoke to later is the massive scale of MaxPoint’s cloud: cluster computing that only a few dozen companies in the world have as part of their core business. Right here in the Triangle, MaxPoint is changing the landscape of online advertising, and how demographics are viewed in the digital age.

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